Dr. Sunaura Taylor’s book, Disabled Ecologies, offers many unique perspectives.
A few years ago, I read a great book by the well-known ecologist Paul Ehrlich called “Healing the Earth: Strategies for Solving the Environmental Crisis.” At the time, I never thought of the word “healing” to describe the significant negative impact humans are having on our wonderful Earth, nor did I ever think of the Earth as a wounded or disabled organism. More recently, I came across a great book by physician Warren Hahn called “Homo Ecophagus: A Radical Diagnosis for Saving the Earth” and was fascinated by the praise it received from various well-known researchers and his unique perspective as a physician (basically a differential diagnosis). It is a doctor’s perspective on what we are doing to the Earth and how we, as physicians, can change our behavior. In my interview with Dr. Hahn, he argued that humanity has evolved cultures and adaptations that have now become malignant.
Article continues after ad
Photo credit: Anna Shvets/Pexels.
Intrigued by these two excellent books, I was excited to discover the highly acclaimed new book “Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert” by Dr. Sunaura Taylor of the University of California, Berkeley. Both the words “disabled” and “wounded” appear in this book. Given Dr. Sunaura’s own disability, her views on the health of the planet and the treatment of other animals in her previous book “Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation” are worthy of careful consideration. As an activist for disability rights and animal protection, Dr. Sunaura has fused both movements into one, and with the publication of “Disabled Ecologies,” she has advanced both fields with a unique and very important perspective on the endless and constant anthropogenic (human-caused) damage to our fragile and wounded planet. About her beautifully written and thoughtful new book, Dr. Sunaura had this to say:
Marc Bekoff: What prompted you to write Disabled Ecologies?
Sunaura Taylor: There are a few books I’ve always decided I’m going to write someday. I may never know what that book will ultimately be, but somehow, a part of it is always there, ready to come out at any moment. For me, Disabled Ecologies is exactly that book. There are two reasons for that. The most obvious reason is that the book talks about defense industry pollution. I understood from my childhood that it was likely the cause of my disability. I’ve always wanted to go back to this history and find out more about what happened, but the reason I wanted to write about it is because this story fundamentally shaped my perception of two personal obsessions: nature and disability.
As I conducted research for this book, my own experiences and connections to the place became somewhat more complicated, but the central lessons I learned from hearing about the contamination as a child – that the damage is political, collective, and ecological, and that environmental damage is inseparable from human damage – became more central and important.1
Article continues after ad
MB: Who do you hope to reach with your book?
ST: One misconception about disability is that it is something that only concerns or interests those with obvious disabilities, such as wheelchairs or visual impairments. But disability is a life experience and a political issue that affects everyone. If we live long enough, we will all age and become disabled. We will develop and recover from disabilities and illnesses throughout our lives. But disability and the taken-for-granted normalcy of able-bodied people shape our world in profound and far-reaching ways. And, of course, environmental destruction affects us all. At this point, there is no one who is not affected by the disempowerment of nature. There is no one who is not affected by environmental injustice (though some people are significantly more likely than others to be directly affected by environmental injustice). Because these issues affect everyone, this book is for everyone.
MB: What are the main topics you are looking at?
ST: Disabled Ecologies argues that in this time of extreme environmental crisis that we face, disability is a very important concept to understand. The second purpose of the book is to tell the story of pollution and groundwater contamination south of Tucson in the 1980s. It’s the story of a primarily Mexican-American community that faced the impacts of pollution from the Hughes Aircraft defense industry and years of racist accusations that the pollution was their fault. This is the first time this history has been told in book form, and I’m so excited to share this story with you because they were a very successful early environmental justice movement.
The big conclusion I drew from this talk is that we need to think of the health of our communities as absolutely inseparable from the health of our environments. We’re seeing environmental disasters happening that are major public health crises. But we’re so used to thinking of health as something that affects humans, and environmental remediation as something separate. Disabled Ecologies argues that in fact our health is completely intertwined with the health of nature, and that our responses to these problems need to be intertwined as well.
Article continues after ad
MB: How is your book different from other books that deal with similar general themes?
ST: Disability ecology follows a long line of other related and intertwined interventions, including feminist ecology, queer ecology, Black ecology, and Indigenous ecology. These interventions place social formations and power relations at the center of how we think about, experience, and engage with nature and environmental protection. What I bring to this discussion is the idea that disability is an urgent and essential part of environmental issues. There is a small but growing effort to bring disability into the environmental discussion, but it is still a very new field. One of the goals of this book is to further sow the seeds for this field to grow. In this era of disability, a time of growing ecological damage from climate crisis and extinction, it is more important than ever to ask what it takes for multiple species with disabilities to coexist, and a critical perspective on disability is essential to do so.
MB: Do you hope that your book will encourage people to learn more about critical disability studies and the importance of multispecies justice?
ST: I’m excited to see how Disabled Ecologies reframes the debate about disability and environmental studies, and I look forward to seeing what comes out of it. Whether we want to talk about it or not, whether we’re ready or not, disability is going to be an increasingly big part of our environmental reality. I hope that this book helps give us the language and the politics to address this fact.
Must-Read Environmental Articles
Source: University of California Press/Reprinted with permission.