Forest Euphoria
The Abounding Queerness of Nature
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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“An antidote to the loneliness of our species.”—ROBIN WALL KIMMERER
“A master class in how to love the world.”—MARGARET RENKL
A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.
Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.
Braiding her personal story with science, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness of all the life around us. Fungal species, we learn, commonly encompass more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, a mystery that scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.
Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprises, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kaishian, a mycology curator at the New York State Museum, debuts with reverent celebration of the natural world's diversity. Highlighting "queer" animals, fungi, and plants that complicate "our ideas of what is ‘normal' versus what is ‘deviant,' " Kaishian contends that cassowaries, a type of flightless bird, upend sexual binaries because both males and females have phalluses. She explains that eels are intersex until their final year of life, when they "stop eating and structurally repurpose their digestive organs" into testes and ovaries, and that all slipper snails start out as males until one day they pile on top of one another, at which point some switch sexes depending on their position in the mound. Elsewhere, Kaishian reflects on how nature has informed her understanding of her own queerness. For instance, she describes how she was initially drawn to study fungi because she saw the ambiguity of her gender identity reflected in the numerous mating types found in most species (the Schizophyllum commune has more than 23,000 "sexes"). Fascinating tidbits abound, and the lyrical prose imbues the scientific discussions with a sense of wonder (she describes how each spring in forests east of the Mississippi River, "the understory fills with sweet lures—trillium, violets, mayflower, bloodroot—love potions for pollinators, themselves shuddering into awareness"). This will leave readers in awe of nature's many splendors.
Customer Reviews
You can feel the love
What a great book. The author’s love for the planet and all the beings on it explodes as you wander through the forests and swamps with her. Euphoria, indeed. I picked this book up after reading ‘The Barn’. So much of what she writes is hitting on the same note as Thomson’s book about how humans have botched-up this planet, though her telling is a bit more merciful. We aren’t the brightest of beings. We may be among the more ignorant and least grateful. Would that everyone appreciated the beauty of it all. I can’t pronounce most of the names of the fungi she loves, and was a bit bothered by all the Latin names, but I’ve got a lot more words for Scrabble now.