This chapter intervenes in ongoing queer ecocritical debates about reproductive futurity by turning to Henry David Thoreau’s engagement with nurse insects and trees. It demonstrates how Thoreau dislocates biological reproduction in both space and time, urging us to attend to a broader range of participants – and a broader range of contributing actions – in our account of the reproductive process. Arguing that such a complex, multispecies understanding of reproduction distinguishes Thoreau from both contemporary environmentalists, whose rhetoric often relies on normative logics of reproductivity, and queer theorists, who often critique such logics, the chapter theorizes an environmental ethic informed by the extant queerness of reproduction itself. In contrast to the contemporary activist organization “Conceivable Future,” which helps women decide whether to have children in a time of climate catastrophe, such a reading of Thoreau offers possibilities for solidarity and social change that customary definitions of reproduction have rendered inconceivable.

This chapter offers an overview of the conceptual framework of queer ecology – which interrogates the relationship between the categories of “queerness” and “nature.” In the first section, Seymour traces this framework’s history and deployment by academics, artists, and activists, and also attends to its oversights. She argues that queer ecology has made foundational, though sometimes underrecognized, contributions to the larger nonhuman turn in the humanities. The second section turns to primary sources, using queer ecology and the related framework of trans ecology to read two works of contemporary US literature, Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) and Oliver Baez Bendorf’s poetry collection The Spectral Wilderness (2015). Seymour shows how Abbey’s novel tries, unsuccessfully, to oppose the transformativity of nature to the transformativity of sex and gender; meanwhile, Bendorf’s poetry offers an alternative to this line of thought by drawing innovative parallels between the category of the vegetal and the transgender human body.