Queer Ecology Canada
The Queer Ecology Canada offers hikes, workshops, and speaking engagements that connect communities to land and to one another. Based in so-called Canada, we have facilitated programming across Turtle Island, supporting people in building relationships with the lands they inhabit.
Our work is guided by three core pillars:
Buffet-Style
Take what you need and leave what you don’t. Come as you are and engage in ways that feel right for you. Everyone arrives with a different intention, capacity, and purpose, and that diversity is welcomed.
Consent-Based
Our programs are rooted in consent in all its forms. We create space to seek consent from the land we are on and to pause long enough to listen for a response. We also extend consent inward, checking in with ourselves and with each other throughout our time together.
Not Distance-Based
Our programming centers the journey rather than the destination. As part of ongoing decolonial practice, we resist productivity-driven and capitalistic frameworks that prioritize outcomes over process. We move slowly. We change our minds. We focus on being in relationship rather than “arriving.”
What is Queer Ecology?
Queer Ecology centers beings, relationships, and ways of knowing that exist beyond normative structures. It understands that norms, of gender, sexuality, species, and land use, are constructed and enforced through colonial, scientific, and social systems, and that these norms shift over time. Because of this, Queer Ecology is not a fixed framework, but an ongoing practice of questioning, unlearning, remembering, and reimagining. It draws from Indigenous knowledge systems, embodied experience, and ancestral relationships to land, recognizing that colonialism attempted to discipline both ecosystems and bodies into rigid categories.
At its heart, Queer Ecology recognizes the inherent nuance, multiplicity, and interconnectedness of the world around us.
It invites us to see queerness not only as an identity, but as a way of relating, to land, to each other, and to ourselves. It makes space for contradiction, transition, kinship beyond blood, and forms of belonging that resist extraction and control. Through this lens, ecology becomes not just the study of environments, but a practice of liberation, where difference is not an exception to nature, but one of its most essential truths.
Queer Ecology Hikes
Queer Ecology Hikes began in summer 2023 as spaces to explore the connections between queer theory and ecology through embodied practice.
These hikes are activity-based, meaning they prioritize connection over distance. The goal is not how far we travel, but how deeply we relate, to place, to ourselves, and to each other.
Hikes are typically two hours long and have taken place in Ottawa, Peterborough, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Toronto, Montreal, and beyond. They are often co-facilitated with incredible collaborators such as:
Sardonyx (drag artist)
Des Mathews (death doula)
Nyx (artist)
Patricia Wilson (community organizer)
Why these hikes matter:
They offer low-barrier access to outdoor spaces.
They affirm that being outside is enough, no performance required.
They deepen relationship to place.
They create meaningful connections, with many participants leaving with new friendships and ongoing community ties.
Book a hike, your organization, school, or group can book a guided 2 hour Queer Ecology Hike
Workshops
The Queer Ecology World also facilitates collaborative art-making workshops, including bookbinding and other co-creation sessions.
These gatherings invite participants to make art together as a form of relationship-building. Recently, workshops have been hosted in collaboration with The 519 in Toronto.
These sessions intentionally blur the boundary between “indoor” and “outdoor,” asking whether that separation truly exists. Through collective making, we explore how ecology lives within us, and how creative practice can be a form of land connection.