Unnatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology

Abstract

In the opening of her 1997 memoir North Enough, Jan Zita Grover describes moving to the north woods of Minnesota from San Francisco: "I did not move to Minnesota for the north woods," she writes. "I had only the vaguest idea of what the term meant when I first saw them in early spring, the birch, aspen, and tamarack skinned of their needles and leaves. I thought they looked diseased. 2 Given that Grover had been a front-line AIDS worker in the 1980s in a city violently decimated by the disease, it is hardly surprising that she saw sickness everywhere. "I moved there," she writes, "to try to leave behind -or at least, at a remoter distancethe plague that had consumed my life for the past six years." 3 Of course, Grover was not able to leave her plague behind; she was still "heavy with mourning, thick with sorrow." 4 Although she moved to the north woods with the hope of finding some sort of healing in the natural landscape, a "geographic cure" as she put it, she soon realized that it was not possible.The idea that one might find natural wholeness in this hard, boreal landscape was shattered at the sight of its large, multiple clear-cuts and the thin "idiot strips" of trees along the highways that foolishly attempt to conceal the scars to the landscape caused by the softwood pulp and paper industry. The post-contact history of the north woods reveals a region repeatedly marked by human greed and error: Farming was next to impossible on the thin, acid soil, and attempts to drain the ever-present swampland in the 1920s resulted only in crippling debt.Logging, the only commercial option left for the region, proceeded virtually without restraint: No paradise found, here. As Grover writes, "the Upper Midwest is a mosaic of such local disasters, once-intact, living systems plundered in ignorance, greed, and unbounded hopefulness." 5 Exactly in their ecological defilement, however, these wounded landscapes ended up teaching her. "Instead of ready-made solutions," Grover writes that the north woods: offered me an unanticipated challenge, a spiritual discipline: to appreciate them, I needed to learn how to see their scars, defacement, and artificiality, and then beyond those to their strengths -their historicity, the difficult beauties that underlay their deformity. 6 In this landscape, she came to understand that her challenge was not to leave AIDS behind, but to recognize and accept the impact it had had. In fact, the lasting resonances of AIDS allowed her to meet the challenge of coming to love the north woods not in spite, but because, of their wounds: "In learning how to love the north woods, not as they are fancied but as they are, I discovered the lessons that AIDS had taught me and became grateful for them." 7 Grover's metaphoric connection between "AIDS and other clear-cuts" is both painful and beautiful. She describes, for example, changing the dressing on a dying friend's leg macerated by Kaposi's Sarcoma: "It did not look like a leg. It looked like freshly-turned soil, dark and ruptured." 8 But Grover finds i...

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