Nature-intimacy, naturalist studies, place-based skills
for LGBTQIA+, Two-Spirit, & non-binary people and allies.
“Queer Nature’s work is vital to healing our disconnected culture. I wish I could learn from So and Pinar every day. I fully believe in the work they are doing and have been touched by the heart, integrity and grace they bring to everything they do.”
“Queer Nature has changed, shaped, and supported my life in deeply, profound ways. It has given me a space for my queer soul searching, which has given me health, passion, and purpose. I am in deep gratitude to P & S for the work they birth 2gether.”
Welcome! Thank you for visiting our page and taking interest in Queer Nature.
Queer Nature is a project characterized by nature-based education & critical naturalist studies in Northwestern U.S. and Intermountain West. We dream into what queer ‘ancestral futurism’ and other alternatives to modernity could look like through mentorship in place-based skills with awareness of post-industrial/globalized/ecocidal contexts. Place-based skills include naturalist studies/interpretation, handcrafts, “survival skills,” and recognition of colonial and Indigenous histories of land and are framed in a container that emphasizes listening and relationship building with ecological systems and their inhabitants. We design and facilitate nature-based workshops and occasionally multi-day immersions mainly for LGBTQ2+ people (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Two-Spirit) and QT BI & POC (queer and trans Black and Indigenous folks and people of color). We carry the story and hope that these spaces create or revive narratives of belonging for folks who have often been made to feel that they biologically, socially, or culturally don’t belong—and inspire others to create similar spaces around the globe!
Other than offering a range of place-based skills and studies in affinity-based learning spaces, another unique aspect of Queer Nature is that we blend a rites-of-passage/transformational framework with studies of place characterized by detailed field observation influenced by the natural sciences. We support scientific movements and projects that center community involvement, local and Indigenous expertise, and that acknowledge the social and political realities of knowledge production. These understandings make it clear that creating community at the intersections of personal growth, environmental activism, and ecological fluency is a necessary step in our communities, where movements often center on either non-human conservation or human social justice, and rarely both. Based on our experience in nature-based or ‘wilderness’ based transformational spaces, we see a strong need to dream into spaces that center listening to the other-than-human world in ways that lead to stewardship of non-human life (since many contemporary rites-of passage frameworks are quite human-centric).
We teach public classes locally when possible and also work as guest or adjunct instructors at various educational organizations such as Colorado College, CU Boulder’s INVST Community Studies Program, and Weaving Earth.
Central to our mission is to fund most or all of the tuition for our students at our programs. Thank you to grantors patagonia, the north face, and rei as well as many individual donors and patrons, for continuing to make this possible.
Photography by Pinar and So Sinopoulos-Lloyd unless otherwise noted.