Sunaura Taylor’s first book, Beasts of Burden (2017), was praised for its novel exploration of the links between disability studies and animal rights. Taylor, who uses a wheelchair and has limited arm mobility, sympathized with the plight of factory-farmed animals from an early age. “If animal and disability oppression are entangled,” she wrote, “might not that mean their paths of liberation are entangled as well?”
In her new book, Disabled Ecologies, Taylor finds both overlap and tension between disability studies and environmental justice. She grew up with the understanding that her own disability came from contaminated groundwater on the south side of Tucson, where her family had moved when her mother was pregnant with her. Military contractors—particularly Hughes Aircraft, which later merged with Raytheon, now called RTX—had dumped toxic waste into unlined lagoons; the area was eventually designated as a Superfund site. In the ’70s and ’80s, the community noticed patterns of disproportionate illness and disability; they organized, forming Tucsonans for a Clean Environment—one of the earliest environmental justice groups in the country.
Taylor’s family left Arizona when she was five, but in 2018 she returned to Tucson to investigate what happened there and get to know the community activists. She found that “while they told stories of often debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, they also clearly mapped out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance.” In a remarkably fertile inquiry, Taylor takes insights from disability studies and environmental justice and arrives at new revelations that enrich both movements—while also applying far beyond them, to our whole impaired and magnificent planet.
I spoke with Taylor recently by Zoom from her office in Berkeley, where she is an assistant professor of environmental studies. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
—Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow: To start, can you talk about your personal experience and how it drew you to write this book?
Sunaura Taylor: I didn’t go into this wanting to write a memoir—the book is not a memoir—but my personal story is so important to the project because it offered me, growing up, a way of thinking about disability and the environment together. I understood that disability wasn’t just my own individual medical problem, but something profoundly political that can impact a whole community and can be caused by systems of harm and exploitation—war and pollution and environmental racism.
I also had an understanding that nature isn’t separate from us, something out there, but that humans are part of nature—inseparable from it. I had a deep, visceral understanding that injury to the environment is injury to people. These insights are the kinds of things that would later shape my perspectives on disability and the environment. I wanted my next project to make the case for the importance of bringing disability into the environmental conversation. It made sense to me to return to Tucson and root my exploration in the place and history that had shaped me both physically and intellectually.
RT-D: Toward the beginning of the book, you have a striking line on the aquifer water that you’ve always understood to be the cause of your disability: “My feelings toward this water are not of fear or anxiety or anger. They are of solidarity.” Can you say more about that response?
ST: Hughes’s pollution contaminated the aquifer on Tucson’s south side and thus the community’s drinking water. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I fell in love with the aquifer while I was researching this book, trying to gain a better understanding of what an aquifer is.
The book’s central concept of disabled ecologies links injuries to ecosystems and wildlife and what we think of as nature, to the injury of human beings—not only in cases like this that have to do with pollution, but also with the broader climate crisis, the injurious effects of heat waves, fires, and hurricanes for example. So disabled ecologies can be understood as a kind of mapping project, a way of mapping injuries across human and more-than-human entities, to expose the limitations of thinking about human health and environmental health as two separate issues.
In that sense, we were not injured by the aquifer. We were injured by these extremely powerful corporations, by this massive defense industry, and by government policies that allow these kinds of violences to continue to occur. And that’s where the sense of solidarity and kinship comes from.
In my research, I found many accounts of wildlife drinking from where the runoff from the pollution-filled lagoons had traveled through the desert washes or had seeped out, and animals would get very sick and die. Early reports from Hughes employees show that they were really disturbed by this, and it spurred some of them to act, to complain. Decades later community organizers would fight for years for the health of both their community and the health of the aquifer. “Look what they did to our aquifer!” was a common refrain I’d hear in the community. I was moved by these expressions of solidarity people were already making.
RT-D: In your first book, you draw connections between animal rights and disability studies. The second book seems like an extension of the first one in some ways. Is that right?
ST: Beasts of Burden is exactly as you say—it brings together disability liberation and animal liberation. I was particularly drawn to this because of my own commitments to both movements, but also because of the way disability rights and animal rights have been pitted against each other for a whole variety of reasons. We could look to the long histories of disabled people being animalized or to the way mainstream animal rights movements have long framed veganism, not as a liberation movement but as a lifestyle choice connected to health and physical fitness.
The ways that animal liberation has traditionally been argued for in Western philosophical traditions has really caused a lot of damage. These arguments have often relied on the philosophical exploitation of disabled people—particularly intellectually disabled people—to make their case. This whole framing covered up and distracted from much more important dynamics: speciesism and ableism are entangled, and the movements fighting them actually have a lot to offer each other.
I’ve always been really interested in how we can utilize the insights of disability movements and disability studies to help us better understand how we are relating to and understanding the more-than-human world. To me, disability is a lived experience, but it’s also a political and conceptual frame that has a lot of power in the world. And the concepts of disability, ablebodiedness, and ableism impact the way that we think about nonhuman animals, the way that we treat nonhuman animals, but also the way that we interact with and treat our environments and understand nature. Disabled Ecologies is an extension of these ideas—a further exploration of disability beyond the human. How does disability shape our understanding of nature? How is ableism entangled with anthropocentrism and environmental catastrophe?
RT-D: I’m writing a book about nuclear power. During the heyday of the antinuclear movement, one of the greatest fears was that radiation from fallout and nuclear plants would cause heritable genetic diseases and disorders. On the one hand, I understand this fear—people felt like they were at the mercy of a military-industrial complex that could harm them and their children and grandchildren. But as you point out, this kind of fear can be intertwined with a stigmatization of genetic difference and disability. And that’s a thorny area to navigate. How do you think about that tension?
ST: I think of it as a paradox of disability. Disability can emerge from exploitative, horrendous things, but there’s also this reality that I have experienced—and I know countless others have too—of leading thriving lives in the disability community and as disabled and sick people. There are ways of experiencing the world—values and politics—that emerge from disability that are valuable, that shouldn’t just be desired away in some eugenic vision of utopia.
One of my favorite books in disability studies is Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip. It looks at different visions of “a good future,” from radical feminist utopias to much more conservative images, and finds that what they all have in common is an erasure of disability—a good world is a world where no one is sick and no one becomes disabled.
That, for me, is not a good world. A eugenicist world is not a good world. Partially, of course, because it’s a fantasy—there will always be disability. Disability is an integral phenomenon in nature. The capacity to heal requires the capacity to be injured. And we all age. We all go in and out of vulnerability. It’s a fundamental, if sometimes unpleasant, aspect of reality.
But that doesn’t mean that I want to support systems that perpetually create disablement and profit off of it. It doesn’t mean I’m celebrating disablement. Look at what is happening in Gaza, this utterly horrific mass killing and also mass disablement of people—there is nothing celebratory here. It is horror. So the way that I’ve come to think about these things is that there’s nothing wrong, of course, with wanting your community to be healthy, with not wanting to be poisoned and get sick. That is not an ableist position or an antidisability position. That is an anti-injustice position. The challenge to me becomes, how we respond to those human beings, those animals, those environments that do become disabled, that are forced to live with the aftermath of injury? Do we respond with eugenics and ableism or with a politics of disability justice and liberation?
Another scholar who’s been really helpful to me in thinking through this question is Nirmala Erevelles. In her 2011 book Disability and Difference in Global Contexts, Erevelles asks, “Under what conditions might we welcome disability?” And she suggests that for disability perspectives to be generative, they must first address the conditions—racial capitalism, colonialism, war—that cause so much disablement.
RT-D: You write about the early environmental movement, the conservation movement. A lot of people are aware that it was overwhelmingly white and in some cases racist, but maybe less salient to some people is how ablebodiedness was so integral to it. Early Sierra Club members were all about hiking and rock climbing. That’s the prevailing image of what it means to love nature. Your book describes how the connection with nature can take a different form.
ST: Throughout the book I’m interested in what it means to be a disabled person engaging with the genre of nature writing—a genre that historically excluded disabled people. Here I’m indebted again to Kafer, who laid out the ways in which a lot of environmental writing, environmental philosophy, and as you say the environmental movement, often fall back on these tropes of the rugged individual experiencing and connecting to nature through physical feats and aloneness—things that are associated with ablebodiedness, as well as whiteness and class status.
So, what does a crip engagement with nature look like? There is the intimacy born out of shared experience of injury—my own disablement being connected to the disablement of Tucson’s aquifer, for example. But I was also thinking more broadly: How do disabled people connect to nature, celebrate, and enjoy nature? I turned to disabled people who were writing about their connection to nature and renarrativizing these stories. There are of course a lot of different ways that disabled people do this, but one throughline I found is a valuing by disabled people of what is not even necessarily considered nature by a society that likes to distinguish between the built environment and what’s “natural.” As disabled author Naomi Ortiz describes, experiencing nature for those with mobility impairments often means celebrating the edges, the thresholds, the parking lots of nature parks, for example. Nature is of course everywhere, and this kind of connection is built on an understanding that nature is not something that you necessarily have to go to. We can appreciate and care for the nature we are already in. This is of course similar to an environmental justice position—that nature is where we live, work, and play.
Engaging with the genre of nature writing was also interesting to me because the central character, if you will, that I was writing about was an aquifer. An aquifer is not an environment anyone can go to, no matter how physically robust one is, although sadly that doesn’t make them any less exploitable than any other natural “resource.” Relating to an aquifer is an act of imagination. Crip engagement offers new ways of building connection so that we can realize and think through our responsibilities towards nature.
RT-D: You have a fascinating section about origin stories—the different roles they play and the ways they’ve been perceived in the disability and environmental justice movements. Why is the question “What happened to you?” not always welcomed by disabled people?
ST: The disability community that I was raised in politically in my twenties and thirties had a resistance to the focus on origin stories because they can distract from the political dynamics that impact disabled people. A sensational story about what happened to you individually distracts from the structural barriers and discrimination and inequities disabled people face living in an ableist society.
Disability studies in that era—I think it’s changing now—was also resistant to those kinds of stories because of the ways it separates people. The movement was about building connection across people whose differences made it challenging to define them as a group but who were all nonetheless oppressed by ableism. The category of disability is a cultural and historical category. It doesn’t necessarily make sense that you’d have blind people in solidarity with people with mental illness or in solidarity with people in wheelchairs or chronic illness. But forging the group identity as a political force was something that disability community and disability studies did.
I would say that, in general, in environmental justice communities it’s the opposite. Origin stories are useful to politicize illness and disability. They are a way of saying, not look at what happened to me, but look at what happened to us. Origin stories become a way of exposing systemic racism and corporate malfeasance, for example. Many community members I found would say, if only people would ask what happened to us. The question can be an opening to point to evidence of systemic harm and injustice.
I also explore how polluters themselves utilize origin stories—and often they do not tell one at all. So I look at the different work that origin stories do. When is it powerful to tell an origin story, and when is it powerful to not tell one? And how can movements use both choices to work toward common ends—to politicize disability, to push back against individualizing disability, and to show disability’s connections to social inequities?
RT-D: Are the conversations that you’re trying to encourage between disability and environmental justice movements starting to happen?
ST: I would never suggest that the environmental justice and disability communities have never been in conversation. For one thing, they are often the same community—people for whom these issues were never separate.
But very little has been written about the relationships between these two movements, and a lot of what exists focuses on the tensions or points of departure between them. So one of the things that I wanted to do is explore the points of connection that are already there and pull out those threads.
In terms of the broader environmental movement and disability, in the eight years or so since I started researching for this book, the disability movement has increasingly been grappling with questions of the environment, questions of climate change—no doubt in part because we are seeing again and again the disproportionate death of disabled people during extreme weather events—for example, because emergency and disaster services are too often not trained to evacuate disabled people. The effort to address these things has been deepening in the disability community and disability studies.
But we need more people doing this work because the scale of the problem is just so extraordinary. Working with my students here at UC Berkeley in the Disabled Ecologies Lab gives me hope because they are bringing disability studies and a lived experience of disability to all of these various arenas: climate mitigation, forestry, river ecology, environmental justice.
RT-D: For most of my life, I found it hard to accept that we wouldn’t “solve” climate change in my lifetime or maybe ever, or “save” the planet. But now I’m not sure it’s helpful to think about it in those terms. I think the world will always be imperfect, to say the least, and we can grieve but we can still find joy and connection. A critical disabilities perspective seems to suggest something similar.
ST: Absolutely. Disabled Ecologies has an element of hope, because of this disability paradox we discussed earlier. We see a lot of work right now that says, basically, nature is dead. It’s the end of everything. But I think something else is happening and will only increase, which is the ongoing mass disablement of nature. And death is undeniably a part of that. This disablement, to be clear, is not something that I want to romanticize or that I want to have happen. I say it with so much grief and anger that we could let this happen. But I also know that disabled people can live good lives, that disabled people are experts in adapting, in caring, in acknowledging and celebrating vulnerability and interdependence.
And I reiterate this a hundred times in the book—that living with injury has to be connected to a resistance to the systems that are continuing to cause harm. It can’t just be an acceptance that this is what we have now, so let’s just keep extracting and hoarding and whoever has the most and the best survival skills will survive. No. I know that it is also possible, when we’re attentive to challenging the ableist responses to environmental harm, that disabled beings can live good lives. And that, for me, is hopeful.
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