I have been in the throes of moving and unpacking for the last 6 weeks (give or take), so reading has been slow and distracted. Even getting through this 6 hour audiobook took 2 weeks, and I was certainly distracted through most of it. So definitely take this review with a grain of salt.
The book seems to be broken down in the sections that match a set of anecdotes from the author’s life with thematically similar creatures in nature that highlight queerness, diversity in sexes and mating, and social status. For example, she discusses her childhood as a weird kid – playing in the swampy culverts and befriending slimy creatures in comparison to how the colonization of North American has treated swamps at large. The adults in her school did not know what to do with a young female presenting student – she discusses different relationships to gender as she grew up – who liked frogs and snakes and grossing out the teachers. So they tried to force her to conform and be normal. That which is not useful to capitalism is only important if it can be made useful. The swamps were especially egregious as they provided safe havens for indigenous peoples and slaves, so they were converted to something more useful and more easily controlled – farmland. This is the kind of pairing that we get throughout the book.
A few highlights that stuck with me:
She discusses national and cultural symbols, and how deeply rooted they tend to be within a culture. On one hand – when the real versions of those symbols are eradicated it is often in connection to larger genocide being perpetrated (e.g. American bison and Armenian mulberries), on the other some symbols tell an even stronger story then maybe they were intended to (the Bald Eagle). The selection of the Bald Eagle as the American national bird is extremely telling. It looks noble, bold, striking. In actuality it’s a scavenger. Nothing against scavengers in nature, they fill an important niche. But the narrative divide between selecting a bird that is supposed to portray a sense of independence and strength only for that bird to be most commonly found chowing down at the dump is a little too on the nose for the state of the USA today.
John Deere is primarily/hugely responsible for the destruction of the American prairie and the rise of monoculture agriculture across the American Midwest. I have only recently started to come across info on the American prairie and it’s near total eradication, and it feels weird to know that one guy’s technological advancement made the destruction of the prairie possible.
Going into this book, I thought I was going to be getting something that was less memoir and more queer nature facts. But, it was mostly memoir. Overall, I liked it, although I probably would have liked it better to read a physical copy and actually focus on it.
