Presentation short abstract

A photo-essay on queer, migrant, toxic labour in a peri-urban landscape transformed into a carbon offset plantation. It traces how knotweed, Sitka spruce and chemical policing expose extractive ecologies and contested rights to remain.

Presentation long abstract

I live on a peri-urban edge: isolated lanes and hedges, yet fifteen minutes from a supermarket. Say ‘countryside’ and judgement follows – either privileged retreat or neglected backwater. Each year I enter these fields wearing a coverall and respirator, spraying Roundup on knotweed, nettles and burrs; injecting stems marked for elimination. This season the surrounding land was sold to an absentee investor for a spruce plantation to generate airline carbon credits. Sheep have gone; in their place, enclosure 2.0: high fences exclude deer and rabbits reclassified as pests; native vegetation slated for ploughing; soil turned to erase so-called weeds. Long-standing coexistence becomes contamination.

This photo/video essay with spoken reflection traces how carbon finance reorganises peri-urban life through purity, extraction and exclusion. As a queer, migrant, disabled resident, I am neither neutral nor outside: I police with chemicals while my body is governed by conditional permission. The work draws on queer and political ecology (Haraway, Puar, Seymour) to attend to contamination, entanglement and misfit as sites of knowledge. Knotweed I must eradicate and Sitka I must welcome expose the same calculus of admissibility: life valued for utility, not relation. The peri-urban setting matters: it unsettles rural/urban and rich/poor binaries, showing how speculative climate fixes fold everyday landscapes and bodies into green extractivism.

Rather than asking how to remove invasives, this work asks what their persistence, and the toxic labours arrayed against them, makes thinkable. It proposes invasive futures as sites of relation and responsibility, practising life together beyond metrics of permission.