Forest Euphoria Quotes

“What research questions are funded, which papers are accepted for publication, and who is invited to teach courses, speak at conferences, or otherwise conduct science over time becomes science. It's a runaway train. Studies produced by members of esteemed social classes and their institutions will amass citations faster than those from outgroups, if those works are even published. If researchers and their institutions harbor social bias or explicit disdain for certain demographics, the science they produce will often contain evidence of that bias. Eventually, no matter how flawed, these highly cited works may become canon, their authors immortalized in textbooks, and their lessons taught to future generations of scientists. And when a competing idea is introduced-perhaps one that seeks to correct the initial bias—it may be seen as an affront to science itself.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“I began to see that diversity is not only abundant in nature but is its very premise. The beings of our world are bound together by webby agreements predicated on difference.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Ignoring your intuition feels like walking face first through an invisible spider web, again and again”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Thankfully, the world is not constructed entirely around pain and exploitation. Competition alone does not explain the world’s abounding beauty and mutualistic interactions. And just as white people are not biologically superior to any other race, humans are not inherently “more evolved” than other species. As humans, we evolved within a consortium of organisms—bacteria, fungi, plants, and other animals—some of whom were thriving on this planet for millions and even billions of years prior to our emergence. The forces of evolution do not move in any predetermined direction.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Ultimately, queerness invites us all, regardless of our identities, to be more undefined, unclear, transitional, merging, interdependent, cooperative, and nonhierarchical—a very fungal way of being.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“In its common usage, the word "nature" carries a lot of baggage-it suggests a space that is distinct from the human species and our day-to-day world. The word invokes a great divide, an idea that humans are elevated and apart from the primordial muck from which we sprang. But this partitioning is a cultural choice, not a scientific fact. From a biological and evolutionary perspective, humans are nature and nature is human. The need to define these terms as separate realms is a result of our increasingly fractured relationship with other species, a wedge plunged into an imaginary crevice.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor. —Joy Harjo”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“I want us all to be philopatric snakes in an interspecies den.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“While many of today’s scientists are not homophobic and may even be queer themselves, the bedrock of so-called Western science is largely composed of the thought patterns, value systems, and priorities of eighteenth- to twentieth-century Europe.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“What if we let their ways of being creep and expand and burble through our own minds, through our families, friendships, and institutions? We are all, already, quite swampy; we are all intertwined, enmeshed, and difficult to distinguish, yet our culture often forces a commitment to a particular box or definition. But why be linear when we can be webby and dynamic?”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“But while it may feel like a distraction to discuss the way culture informs science, I believe this is precisely how we make our science better, more objective, and more ethical. By naming and examining the forces all around us, we can anticipate how they might seep into our work. If we fail to have these conversations, both on the interpersonal and institutional levels, we are likely to drag bad, biased, unethical, and inaccurate "science" into the future.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“I had experienced beautiful growth during college, I had found a vocation and a greater purpose. But since then, I had become gripped by a deep, desperate loneliness that I felt only romantic partnerships could fill. This feeling was so acute that I was willing to strike a terrible bargain. I suppressed my self-preservation and my intuition for momentary reprieves from loneliness. I entered a series of relationships with people who repeatedly and unapologetically harmed me. With my gut silent, my mind was alone at the helm generating plausible excuses for their bullshit.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Visibility is often sought by marginalized people in the struggle for basic rights and resources, but progress in this area comes with the thorns of commodification, appropriation, and gentrification.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“over seventy thousand species of Mollusca known to science, most of which are snails and slugs. Other members of Mollusca include octopuses, cuttlefish, and shellfish, all invertebrates with a range of morphological forms and traits far too variable to neatly summarize.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“them. I want us all to be philopatric snakes in an interspecies den.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“From fungi with more than two sexes to same-sex partnerships between crows to the intersex bodies of snails and eels, we find an inspiring array of diversity in our fellow species. Ultimately, queerness invites us all, regardless of our identities, to be more undefined, unclear, transitional, merging, interdependent, cooperative, and nonhierarchical—a very fungal way of being.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Climate change is not a technological problem to be dealt with by scientists or environmentalists alone—it is a multidimensional planetary epoch that requires collective reimagining.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“it is important to remember that there are, as philosopher Báyò Akómoláfé says, “postapocalyptic peoples” already among”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“when scientists were sequencing the human genome, as well as the genomes of other species, many were surprised to learn that our genomes were smaller than those of trees and salamanders.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“The binary rules in our culture—male versus female, white versus Black, straight versus queer—are used to make a hierarchy.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Queer theory asks: What has been categorized as normal, and why? How does the structure of our society—in the forms of race, gender, religion, orientation, ability, and even species—reinforce this categorization?”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Queer” is the overarching term for a whole smattering of ways of being that defy expectations of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and family structure.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Enrique Salmón, member of the Rarámuri people, describes this concept through the word “iwígara”: a belief that all life-forms are interconnected and share the same “breath” and that everything that breathes has a soul. This worldview is one in which humans are not the main character in our collective story, something many children, regardless of culture, seem”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“kincentric” ecology is the understanding that ecological networks are composed of fellow beings, not just static others.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“diversity is not only abundant in nature but is its very premise. The beings of our world are bound together by webby agreements predicated on difference. We all engage in special earthly pacts, trading energy through water, sunlight, iron, and sugar, each of us taking and contributing, each of us necessarily different. These differences are not positive or negative—they simply exist.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Being in the culvert or the forest was a chance to move amphibiously, to shape-shift, to creep, to oscillate like algae in a riffle, to be neither a boy nor a girl and have no particular identity at all.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“I felt safest when I was unwitnessed by other people. I could move outside of society’s gaze, outside the grip of cultural prescriptions and interventions.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“There is value in the in-between and uncategorized, even in a culture that rewards certainty.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“their complication of category—somewhere between earthly and demonic—needed no explanation to me, a child who found herself within the dysphoric double consciousness of an amphibious personhood. Together we could slither between the rocky contours of the world, both natural and imposed, and rest in the dark comfort of the unseen.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

“Disdain is such a pernicious emotion, whether it’s toward humans or insects.”
― Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature