Disability and environmental repair

In the early 1950s, Hughes Aircraft Company and other defense and electronics industries began dumping toxic chemicals in the desert near Tucson’s southern border. For decades, the chemicals seeped into the aquifer that supplied drinking water to the city. By the time the pollution came to light in the 1980s, thousands of people had been affected. They include Sunaura Taylor, a professor, writer, and artist who was born with a disability on Tucson’s south side. In her book, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert, Taylor explores the history of the aquifer through the lens of disability. She documents the tireless work of residents from the south side’s largely Mexican American community who organized a successful environmental justice movement in response to the dumping. Along the way, she grapples with the separation between human injury and environmental harm. The following is an excerpt from an interview in which Taylor discusses the importance of resisting ableist narratives and bringing disability into environmental movements.

I was raised with the understanding that my disability could likely be traced back to the contamination in Tucson. This book is not a memoir—but my personal story is important because it offered me a way of thinking about disability and the environment together. I understood that disability wasn’t just my individual medical problem, but something profoundly political, that can impact a whole community, and that can be caused by systems of harm and exploitation. I also had a visceral understanding that nature isn’t separate from us—injury to the environment is injury to people.

City officials in Tucson knew the aquifer had been polluted for decades but didn’t investigate who received polluted water. Instead, they blamed community members’ lifestyles and diet for the disproportionate levels of serious illnesses the community was facing. These racist, ableist accusations were part of what made the community unite in response, forming an amazing group called Tucsonians for a Clean Environment.

The movement was remarkably successful. Among many other things they won a historic lawsuit against the polluters; secured state-of-the-art treatment for the aquifer; and advocated for a health clinic, which they managed to obtain, even if it didn’t last long. These organizers had an expansive vision of justice—one that was directed toward care for the land and the aquifer, and also care for people. That expansive understanding of health and care is what the book is really about.

Why should environmental remediation stop at the threshold of the human body? The idea that our health is inseparable from that of our water and forests is so basic and intuitive, yet I found in my research that it has been legislatively and institutionally severed. Thankfully, environmental justice movements—like the one on Tucson’s south side—have worked for decades to bring them together, but there’s still much to be done.

We know that people with disabilities are on the front lines of nearly every stage of ecological disaster, and that environmental harm like pollution and climate change causes disability and illness. But disability is also present beyond the human, both in the stories we tell about environmental harm and the material reality of what’s happening to our environments. What environmentalists and ecologists work toward are healthy ecosystems for healthy people. But what is health and what is a lack of health? What language can articulate what we and our ecosystems are experiencing?

We are living in a moment of mass, multispecies disablement. Whether we are ready for it or not, disability is going to be an increasing part of our environmental reality. I hope this book can give us a language and disability politics to begin grappling with this fact. It is urgent that we bring the insights and work of people who have been living with disability and illness, thinking critically about disability, into our thoughts about and responses to environmental harm.

The fields of ecofeminism, Black ecologies, and Indigenous ecologies have already shown us how social formation and power dynamics shape how we engage with nature and environmentalism. There’s been less work doing the same thing for disability. But disability is already there, and it needs to be politicized.

—Sunaura Taylor

Speculative Aquifers

Tucson’s contaminated aquifer became a central character throughout Taylor’s research for Disabled Ecologies. She drew her evolving understanding of what an aquifer is, starting with its role as part of human infrastructure and then shifting to its role in ecological systems. “We can gather bits and pieces about where the water, sediments, and contaminants are moving within an aquifer, but so much is inferred because it is inaccessible to us,” Taylor says. “Still, a huge proportion of the population depends on groundwater. Perhaps because aquifers are so hard to imagine we understand them mostly as infrastructure, which benefits those industries that exploit them.”