Enby Ecologies: On Being Fluid in the Field

Drills in hand, three non‐binary—enby—tree‐ring researchers traverse through the spaces of soil, spiderwebs, and sawdust of a home under the big Montana sky to sample small cores of the cabin timbers to reveal their hundreds of years of growth shown in their annual rings. These samples—which will later be used for understanding the climate and social legacy in the region—entail, like many dendrochronological collections, physical and labour‐intensive incursions into a ‘field site’. The on‐the‐ground ‘fieldwork’ that dominates environmental and life sciences cannot be separated from the embodied precarities of queer trans livelihoods in these disciplines. In this essay, three non‐binary dendrochronologists braid together a visual and reflexive autoethnography, pulling from years of personal anecdotes, photographs and illustrations to reflect on being non‐binary in field‐based disciplines within environmental geography to tend towards our lived ‘enby ecologies’. We aim to problematise dominant scientific modes in which fieldwork is carried out and move towards trans ecological interventions within renderings of the ‘field’. We argue for enby ecologies as a praxis of trans‐forming the field and cultivating more queer trans field‐based geographers. In particular, we choose dendrochronology as our ‘field site’ for enby ecologies given our deep saturations in the discipline and our shared curiosity for the storied worlds tree rings hold within their bodies. We join in the call with allied disciplines like crip, feminist and BIPOC geographies to help build more inclusive and accessible ways in which field‐based sciences can think with bodily imaginaries of space and place.