Cruising Ecotopia

What is queer ecology? For Cleo Wölfle Hazard it seems to mean, among other things, being queer and an ecologist. In Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice Wölfle Hazard offers a feminist science and technology studies (STS) perspective on the capacious theoretical framework first proposed by Catriona Sandilands in 2000. Since its inception, queer ecology has been taken up and bolstered by anthropologists, artists, and literature scholars but features surprisingly scant “hard” science perspectives. Wölfle Hazard is here to rectify this issue. He extends the term to become a “queer trans feminist ecology” that “is an unfolding praxis, mood, and orientation to solidarity and multiplicity that holds space for different kinds of thought in the field and with other‐than‐human beings” (14). Wölfle Hazard brings the promise of this queer trans feminist ecology with him on river restoration and critical physical geography projects in the Pacific Northwest. Underflows is an ambitiously interdisciplinary text that forges generative connections between social and natural science methodologies, although it retains some of the racial blind spots that its many overlapping fields share.Wölfle Hazard's transdisciplinary career—from punk river justice performance artist to social science ecologist—is evident in the pages of Underflows. The first chapter presents a Baradian assessment of community engagement strategies in field river sciences. Framing the field as a site of potent intra‐action, Wölfle Hazard involves locals in mapping and measuring watersheds under strain. By blending scientific and vernacular environmental knowledge in these projects residents are implicated in a “multispecies commons” imaginary that will, Wölfle Hazard hopes, spur policy change rather than mere individual water‐use adjustment. This collaborative science approach draws heavily from Indigenous science studies and his own experience working with the Karuk tribe on watershed restoration in the Pacific Northwest. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 delve into the applicability of queer theories of performance, embodiment, and kinship in ecological work from the riverbank to the conference talk. The fifth chapter then moves into the murky waters of both Seattle's Duwamish River estuary and José Esteban Muñoz's posthumous “brown commons.”Wölfle Hazard makes some of his biggest waves in the six titular “underflows” that punctuate the chapters. These ecopoetic interludes are set in a secondary, sans serif type and move with a fluidity characteristic of an academic who has set aside the citation manager and allowed himself to drift with the linguistic flow. Here large concepts are proffered but not lingered over, and the stage is set for the next theoretical act. They are upwellings of hyporheic emotion and undisciplined thought, the kind that Underflows advocates scientists—social and natural—allow to seep into their work.These short interstices are just one methodological suggestion Wölfle Hazard has for scientists, who are both objects of critique and an imagined audience for this text. In fine feminist STS form he writes that “in order to become more adept in centering justice, sovereignty, and adaptability, river sciences should engage with queer and trans theory” (5). Underflows suggests engaging queer and trans theory through a diversity of methods, including but not limited to participant ecology and citizen science, feminist standpoint interview protocol, Indigenous community engagement and decolonial protocol, ecopoetics, cultural production, performance art, (auto)ethnography, autohistoria, and cruising.Wölfle Hazard primarily focuses these multitudinous methods on fieldwork and the encounters with more‐than‐human worlds it generates. He insists that emotional and embodied experiences with nonhuman others—like counting salmon fry as they struggle to breathe in shrinking streambeds—structures environmental knowledge production. These emotional, often grief‐filled experiences are traditionally excised from the final academic products showcased in classrooms and at conferences. Wölfle Hazard argues that these excisions limit the kinds of questions, findings, and analysis available to the discipline. This intervention can be lovingly summed up as a classic “let scientists feel things” argument. While this isn't necessarily a radical demand in feminist science studies, Underflows’ attention to data collection and boundary regulation regimes as emotionally implicated in specific Pacific Northwest watersheds adds much‐needed substance to broader claims within the sociology of science.Bodies, not just the emotions they feel, are also key to Underflows. Wölfle Hazard thinks with Eva Hayward to “reject a binary between fragmentation and wholeness” and imagine a “trans river embodiment” or a “watershed body” more broadly. Trans studies perspectives allow Underflows to imagine a restoration ecology that does not rely on Edenic imaginaries of presettlement rivers, but rather relational landscapes that have always/already been dynamic and brimming with transformative lifeways. “We resist figuring the world as an already gravely wounded thing that humans must heal or make whole or as a dirty polluted thing that humans must purify” (104). The watershed body or a body of water is, like the trans body, not returning or righting itself with restoration projects but moving toward itself through itself—“This positioning knows itself in a sort of vertiginous joy at being unable either to run back or to continue as before; new ways, transways, transselves are required of us here” (105).Perhaps Underflows’ queerest suggestion is that ecologists take up cruising. Thinking with Muñoz, this author offers the gesture as one “rooted in a desire that includes and exceeds sex and intensifies everyday encounters such that objects ‘smolder with life and persistence’” (194). Through this capacious desire of/for their study sites and subjects, ecologists might be able to “materialize queer futures” by moving the field beyond “heterosexual encounter and pair bonding” to develop radical “new hypotheses for study and action” (194). By reorienting urban ecological encounters with cruising methodology, we can generate new knowledge for and about historically gay, queer, and trans environs. In this way Underflows seeks to validate the introduction's opening and closing dyad: “Rivers matter for queer trans lives // queer trans lives matter for rivers.”While Wölfle Hazard's invocation of utopic cruising is intriguing, his engagement with Muñoz's figuration of a “Brown commons” reveals one of the book's weak points. In his attempt to extend the Brown commons to toxic brownfields and trashed/trashy industrial waterfronts in the fifth chapter, Wölfle Hazard perhaps stretches the concept past its breaking point. These are uneasy pairings, especially for a term that is explicitly (if ambiguously) racialized. This unease is built in—with Muñoz himself including “people, places, feelings, sounds, animals, minerals, and other objects”—but for the Brown commons’ centrality, there is little discussion of race or ecology's own fraught history in its construction in Underflows. Although the text dutifully acknowledges the threat of white supremacy and cites queer of color critique, a more thorough examination of the environmental movement's entanglement with eugenics and an engagement with the contemporary experiences of Black and Brown ecologists in the field—where “ecology begins and returns”—could enrich the book's argument and bolster queer trans ecology's platform.So, what is queer about ecology? For that matter, what is ecological about being queer, trans, and/or feminist? How does one produce knowledge queerly about ecology, or vice versa? While Underflows may not answer these questions empirically, Wölfle Hazard gives keen readers the tools to seek out and experience the answers for themselves.