Wild, Queer Kinship

I grew up on the outskirts of Milan, where the wild did not take the form of forests or soaring ridgelines but appeared instead in flickers: a line of poplars along a highway, a bird of prey circling above warehouses, a sudden glimpse of green in the margins of industrial estates.

My parents sometimes brought me to Piedicavallo, a small Alpine village tucked into the Biellese Alps of northern Italy, where our extended family shared a stone cabin that felt both uncanny and comforting. Its wooden walls creaked at night, and the damp air carried the smell of moss and old timber, but something in that atmosphere felt spacious in a way the city never did. Water from the village fountain tasted sharply of minerals, and the valley’s quiet was punctuated by the distant calls of red deer echoing between slopes. I did not understand these impressions at the time. I only sensed that my body recognized a way of paying attention that did not fit easily into the suburban routines waiting for me at home.

As I moved into adolescence, those patterns of attention retreated beneath the pressures of school, long commutes, and the ongoing effort of appearing legible to others. Over time, I came to understand that this effort was never merely social. For me, appearing legible often meant masking parts of myself that felt too intense or too diffuse. I am non-binary, bisexual, polyamorous, and neurodivergent, although it took me until my mid-twenties to find the words that matched what I had long been living.

Before I could articulate any of this, I had already learned to read atmospheres with precision because my well-being depended on it. I tracked shifts in tone and gesture. I adjusted to group dynamics before I knew exactly what they required.

I also found myself attending, almost automatically, to the rhythms of other animals in the city: the way a pigeon angled its wings to rising wind, how a dog tensed before lying down, how the air thickened before summer storms. These perceptions did not arise from mysticism or pathology but from a form of relational literacy cultivated in the gaps between social expectations. Over time, I realized that the same skills helped me tune into ecological worlds long before I had the theoretical language to describe them.

Learning the Wild Otherwise

In my mid-twenties, I began spending long periods in Degioz, a village in Valsavarenche, in the Aosta Valley of the northwestern Italian Alps. I returned there for months at a time each year, with intervals abroad for study and research. The valley’s steep sides and limited road access created a feeling of being held within a narrow corridor of stone and fir. Living there did not make me more authentic or bring me closer to some imagined essence of nature. What it did offer was a different understanding. It illuminated the fact that the way I related to the world had long operated slightly askew from normative expectations.

Mornings in the valley often unfolded quietly except for the river. Once the fog lifted, I sometimes saw chamois moving across the scree in small groups, adjusting their steps to one another with subtle shifts of weight and timing. In late summer, I occasionally watched a bearded vulture circle above the ridgeline, its vast wings tracing arcs that marked the sky in slow, deliberate patterns. These encounters often startled me, though not for sentimental reasons. They drew my attention to the many ways life unfolds without reference to human scripts.

People often visit national parks in search of a wilderness experience that promises clarity or moral renewal. What emerged for me in Valsavarenche, however, had little to do with purity or escape. The wild revealed itself instead as a dense fabric of relations, composed of beings who respond to one another through ongoing adjustment and negotiation.

As I spent more time in the valley, I recognized that the relational skills I had cultivated through queer and neurodivergent life were deeply aligned with the ecological dynamics around me. These affinities were not symbolic parallels or simple metaphors. They were resonances between different ways of perceiving and co-inhabiting complexity. Reading queer ecology helped me name these intuitions.

Queer Ecology and Odd Kin

Timothy Morton argues that life cannot be understood as a collection of neatly separate beings, but must be thought through what they call a mesh of interdependence, intimacy, and relation. Organisms are shaped through symbiosis, microbial exchange, environmental pressure, and evolutionary improvisation. No being exists as a fully sealed unit.

What drew me to Morton’s work was not simply the claim that everything is connected. Many ecological frameworks already make that point. In “Queer Ecology,” Morton extends this ecological thought toward sexuality, embodiment, and the instability of supposedly natural categories. I draw on that insight to think about queer life and ecological relation together: not as a simple analogy, but as a shared challenge to fixed identities, sealed boundaries, and normative scripts. Queerness names the ways living beings do not always fit the social and conceptual boxes built to contain them. It points to variability, permeability, and unexpected affiliation not as exceptions to ecological order but as part of its texture. Encountering Morton’s work felt like hearing a clear articulation of something I had sensed long before.

Donna Haraway offers another lens, urging us to think of kinship as something made rather than simply inherited. Her call to make “odd kin” asks us to take seriously forms of relation that do not follow familiar models of family, sameness, or chosen affinity. Odd kin are the unexpected companions with whom we become entangled through shared space, vulnerability, labor, and survival. These relations do not arise from resemblance or ideological agreement alone. They emerge because lives are materially bound up with one another, whether or not they fit recognized norms of belonging. Haraway’s point is not that all relations are easy or harmonious, but that we are already shaped by dependencies and obligations that exceed the boundaries of the human, the familial, and the familiar.

This perspective clarified something I witnessed regularly in Valsavarenche. One morning, I watched a small group of chamois traverse a slope of loose stone. When one hesitated at a gap, the others adjusted their movement with subtle timing, creating a choreography shaped by vulnerability and mutual responsiveness. Their coordination did not rest on hierarchy or sameness. It emerged from attentiveness to collective movement. I recognized this pattern immediately because it resembled familiar practices in queer communities, particularly within polyamorous relationships, where stability grows through open communication, negotiated boundaries, and a willingness to adjust pace according to shared needs. These are techniques learned through experience, refined through care, and grounded in everyday relational work.

Such skills matter not only in interpersonal life but also in how we respond to ecological crisis.

Resilience Beyond Autonomy

Environmental governance often defines resilience through autonomy, strength, or the ability to withstand disruption while maintaining form. Queer, disabled, and neurodivergent communities have long relied on different strategies, grounded in interdependence, improvisation, and shared responsiveness. These approaches do not romanticize precarity. They emerge from the realities of navigating structural constraints. They show that resilience grows through networks of support, adaptable forms of care, and the capacity to continue living even when stability remains fragile or incomplete.

Ecological systems move through similar dynamics. Species shift their ranges, forests regenerate with altered compositions after storms, and weather patterns reorganize as climates change. Transformation is not an interruption of ecological order but one of its conditions. Acknowledging this does not require celebrating uncertainty, especially when uncertainty intensifies vulnerability for marginalized communities. It requires recognizing that life persists through relation rather than autonomy, and that many of the capacities needed to navigate this moment already exist in communities that have long been pushed to the margins of environmental decision-making.

Wild Kinship

Walking in the high meadows above Degioz, I often sensed my own boundaries loosening and tightening in relation to wind, light, and the movements around me. A bearded vulture’s shadow brushed my skin before I identified its source. The brief whistle of a marmot shifted my attention in an instant. These moments were not gestures of transcendence. They clarified that perception emerges through exchange and that the world is made of encounters in which no being stands fully apart.

Wildness, in this sense, does not mean untouched by humans. It names a mode of relation in which difference remains active rather than subdued. It appears wherever beings meet without fully controlling the terms of encounter, and where living together depends less on mastery than on adjustment, attentiveness, and response.

Queer ecology offers language for this kind of relation, and odd kin-making offers a way to practice it. Together, they point toward ecological futures shaped not by fantasies of purity or restoration but by the ongoing work of learning how to live in entangled and uneven worlds.

If the crises we face call for new forms of belonging, we might begin by recognizing the kinships already here: red deer glimpsed between trees in Piedicavallo, chamois adjusting their pace on unstable stone, a bearded vulture turning slowly above a ridge, a person whose rhythms diverge from ours, and the versions of ourselves that emerge as we learn to perceive differently. These relations have always been part of the world. The task is to meet them with care.

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Featured image: Bearded vultures fly over Gran Paradiso. Photo by Eleonora Vecchi, 2020.

Andrea Natan Feltrin, Ph.D., is an environmental humanities scholar working across multispecies justice, queer ecology, rewilding, and disability studies. Their research explores ecological relation, queer kinship, and other-than-human futures. They are the author of an upcoming monograph on multispecies ethics and have published widely across environmental humanities venues. Contact.