Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. It's Earth Day weekend. Let's talk about penguins. During the past decade the intricate patterns of community and family created by these adorable little tuxedo birds, has been the subject of multiple documentaries streaming series of blockbuster animation. Getting the public's love penguin seems like a great way to encourage conservation. Adore the penguins, save their habitats, but then some in America's right wing movements begin to claim that penguins are evidence of a natural order of monogamy and heteronormativity. One mum, one dad, one precious egg to protect.

Apparently they'd never met Skipper and Ping, Ronnie and Reggie or Elmer and Lima are all bonded, loving, same sex, penguin couples. Elmer and Lima even became the proud parents of a fostered hatchling in February, at a Zoo in Syracuse New York. Much for heterosexuality as the only natural order. For more on [unintelligible 00:01:02] ecology, I spoke with Nicole Seymour, an Associate Professor of English and Graduate Advisor of environmental studies at Cal State Fullerton. She's author of several books including, Strange Natures, Futurity Empathy, and The Queer Ecological Imagination. We talked a bit about what queer ecology is.

Nicole Seymour: It basically just refers to a way of thinking that sees connections between environmental issues and issues of gender and sexuality, but more specifically Queer Ecology allows us to see that strict norms around gender and sexuality can be quite harmful to the non-human world, not just to humans. An example I always give to my students is, we look at the recent rise in mega truck purchases in the US. Consumer reports has found a huge leap in truck weight and size over the past 20 years. Those types of trucks are often an expression of traditional heterosexual masculinity. We can also say white masculinity and those vehicles kill pedestrians in a much higher rates than other vehicles.

Of course, are killing the planet with their massive fossil fuel consumption. It's almost the literal definition of toxic masculinity. That's a place I often start with people as an example.

Melissa Harris-Perry: An optimist prime as the idealized savior. Is this enormous truck who turns into the evil-fighting machine?

Nicole Seymour: Yes. When it's actually causing the evil in the first place, but whatever.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I like little optimist prime here and there to be clear on [unintelligible 00:02:38] Walk me through the politics around calling something natural or say, or also the politics of calling something unnatural.

Nicole Seymour: I think I got into queer ecology because I was always bothered by the fact that, let's just say certain side of the political spectrum has tended to call gay people or transgender people unnatural. When the side has not otherwise seemed to care very much about nature at all. I always thought that was a funny contradiction there, and actually started researching this in graduate school. I found many studies that show how LGBTQ+ folks are actually more environmentally concerned and active than straight folks. I found all sorts of interesting examples of how such folks have cared for or connected to the land.

Everything from rural lesbian communes in the 1970s to drag queens, there's a person named Pattie Gonia get it, who draw attention to environmental issues. I think what we've seen or what I've tried to show actually over the past couple of decades is that queer people actually connect to nature and the natural in a lot of ways that we just haven't recognized because of that association of queerness and the unnatural. There's a whole world of queer environmentalism out there that we just haven't paid attention to very much.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We had a bit of a conversation in the course that I'm teaching about. Something that you mentioned in your first response that, this does harm both to humans and to the non-human living world. Help us to understand that with maybe a grounded example, what is something that we may be even just use in our discourse or frame in our understanding that does harm in both ways?

Nicole Seymour: One good example is how there's been a lot of heterosexual bias in science historically. The assumption that heterosexuality is always the default has led scientists in the past to really downplay evidence of homosexual and believe it or not, there's transsexual behavior amongst non-human animals. There's a fish called the Parrotfish that can change to from male to female. What that means is we've just had this really incomplete and biased view of the natural world. Until recently we've assumed that animals only engage in heterosexual rape productive behavior when that's simply not the case.

Maybe that's not a direct physical harm, but it means that we haven't really grasped the deep diversity of our world and we've imposed a lot of ideals on animals than non-human world that are really inappropriate actually limit our full understanding.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I was thinking about this in terms of race and the ways that Black, people from South America have often been defined as animalistic or they're like animals. By saying that you are like an animal, it means you are less worthy of any good thing. Less worthy of self-determination, less worthy of being part of the body politic, so that it is both degrading to the human, but also degrading to animals.

Nicole Seymour: There's a great book by a bird watcher, a scientist [unintelligible 00:05:53] and he's African American. She actually talks a lot about queer ecology in that book as well, but he talks about issues of race and he actually embraces. He says black birds are your birds. He says this to blackbirders. He says black birds, just like black people have been maligned, ignored. There's also that statistic you've probably heard about black dogs or adopted much less often from animal shelters. I think his approach is really interesting rather than denying the connection to the animal and saying, "I'm a human, I have nothing to do with animals."

He actually has this really interesting progressive way of embracing, not the racist animalistic thing you're talking about, but embracing these connections to animals and saying animals are oppressed in many of the ways that humans are. Seeing a connection there.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Imagine the world for me a bit, and talk to me about what Earth Day would be if we queered it?

Nicole Seymour: I think it would be very colorful. Very fun, very playful. I talk in my work a lot about how so much environmental discourse and activism is about gloom and doom. It's very depressing usually whenever there's a news report about, the latest IPCC [laughs] report, you want to turn off the TV just because it's so grim. I think what I've tried to do in my work a lot is to show that there's, through drag or camp and humor those are actually maybe the best ways to do environmentalism. To draw attention to environmental problems because those modes are more accessible, more fun. They don't make us want to change the channel. My vision of Earth Day is lots of laughter rather than [laughs] of grimness and depression. Definitely some drag in there as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: If we do focus on human animals [unintelligible 00:07:53] are there ways that queer identities are either policed out of, or discriminated out of the spaces that we often think of as the most traditional earth day kinds of spaces, wilderness, camping, engagement in the out of doors? I'm wondering not only in our expectations, our language in our discourse but in lived experience if queer communities find it more challenging to engage in these, maybe mainline traditional aspects of environmental experience.

Nicole Seymour: I think a lot of the mainstream environmental movement has pitched itself as being very family friendly. You see a lot of images of, "We have to save the planet for our children, very wholesome, very white, and a lot of queer people and people of color just don't relate to those kinds of appeals. Which is not to say, queer people don't have children for example, but I think there is a mainstream normative vision of the family that gets propagated through a lot of environmental activism. I think there's just a lot queer people and people of color just don't feel like they belong in that mainstream movement.

The good news is there's a lot of non-mainstream versions of environmentalism there's a group called Out for Sustainability and their logo is that they try to mobilize the LGBTQ+ community for environmental and social action. They really see those connections that we were talking about before. We also, something that I think is really important to think about is, there's a lot of research that shows that queer and trans people, especially those of color are more vulnerable to climate disasters. Things like food and insecurity, because they already suffer higher rates of poverty, homelessness, mental illness, and other sorts of compounding factors.

I think that's another reason why it's such a shame that a lot of mainstream environmental movements don't feel inclusive to queer people and people of color considering that they're the most vulnerable to environmental problems. I think this queer ecological perspective we're talking about is really crucial if we want to move toward a future of environmental justice.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can we talk about penguins for a second?

Nicole Seymour: [laughs] Absolutely.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I like a good penguin documentary as much as anyone else, and even a good penguin binge-able short series about mating for life and rejecting the eggs and all of that. How does understanding of and obsession with penguins contribute to this discourse you've been talking about here around family and natural normativity?

Nicole Seymour: It goes both ways. Interestingly, the penguin, it's a complicated example. Much of the penguins, which was very popular many years ago, that was really used by conservative groups to show, "See how important it is to mate for life," and so forth. "Penguins do it. They should be our inspiration." There's also these gay penguin stories. There was a children's book, actually, I think it's called And Tango Makes Three or something like that. I think, there at the Brooklyn zoo, there was a male penguin couple who nursed and raised this baby penguin. Then you get the far opposite end of the spectrum of LGBTQ+ folks saying, "See, we're natural because the penguins are gay too."

I'm personally a little more sympathetic to the latter example. I think it's really interesting just to see how much nature is used for political purposes. We don't allow nature to just be its own thing. We have to harness it for whatever our platform is. I think sometimes it'd be nice to just leave the penguins alone and let them be gay or not gay, whatever they want to be. Penguins should be able to be whatever they want to be.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love it. I keep chickens. I've been watching two of my chickens who are mommy and daughter raising the new baby chick, and I'm like, "See intergenerational chicken families. It's all happening here." I recognize that I'm anthropomorphizing my poultry and, nonetheless, I was thinking about the penguins in that moment. Last piece here, what does environmental justice mean for you?

Nicole Seymour: I think it means that everyone has the right to health and safety wherever they are. I think the original definition from the People of Color Summit in the 1990s was the right to health and safety wherever you work, play, pray, and live. I think we just really have to ensure that's an intersectional vision that it's, of course, it's about race and class. As that example I was giving earlier shows sexuality and gender are also big piece of this, and certain people because of their minority status in terms of their sexuality or gender are more vulnerable. I think we just have to make sure that that's a comprehensive vision of equality.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Nicole Seymour, thank you so much for joining us.

Nicole Seymour: Thank you.

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