Against Abandonment
An interview with Sunaura Taylor
I sat down with philosopher and artist Sunaura Taylor last month to discuss her latest book, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert. For those who are unfamiliar, Taylor is a master weaver of disparate disciplines, showing us how disability is present and illuminating in animal studies, environmentalism, ethics, and political philosophy in ways that few other philosophers do. Disabled Ecologies brings this interdisciplinary work to the deserts (and aquifers) of Arizona in order to introduce us to the notion of injury environmentalism—namely, the idea that our environments are disabled by the same forces that disable us, and that a praxis of non-abandonment (of people, of animals, of earth) is at the heart of what justice for all beings must look like. Below is the conversation we had about this fascinating intersection.
Emily: Thank you for joining me today! Would you please introduce yourself.
Sunaura: My name is Sunaura Taylor. I am an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management in the Society and Environment Division. I have written two books: My first was called Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, which looked at the relationship between movements for animal liberation and disability, and at animal issues through a lens of ableism. My new book, which came out in May 2024, is Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert. It is, on a broad level, a continuation of an investigation into what critical disability studies can help us do in thinking about the more-than-human world and about our relationship to the environment. Whereas in my first book, I was looking specifically at disability studies in relationship to more-than-human animals, in this book I'm looking more broadly at ecological systems and environmental justice issues. The last thing I'll say is that my background is actually also in art practice, which is still a vital part of the way that I research and explore ideas.
Let’s start with the groundwork of the theory that you lay out in Disabled Ecologies. Could you explain what the phrase “the age of disability” means, and what it means for us that we're living through this age?
There are two different ways that I can go about answering this. The first is most present and on my mind: We are in this moment bombarded by environmental disasters. I have a lot of colleagues and friends who were impacted by the Los Angeles fires, for example. These impacts are not only, of course, on the ecological systems, but also on our health—both on people's immediate potential of being injured at the disaster’s peak but also the ongoing effects. So the air quality in L.A. right now, and for potentially years to come, is one example. On a lived experience level right now, we are seeing that the health of our environments and ecosystems is utterly inseparable from our own health and well-being. And yet infrastructure-wise we're so used to thinking about healthcare as something that's on one side, in the human realm. And on the other side, there's environmental remediation and environmental cleanup, including the work of the EPA. In fact I'm really interested in when the EPA was formed, how environmental oversight was removed from state health agencies where it largely had been to become an independent agency (a good thing in many ways of course, but also an important health framing was then lost). So we have a bureaucratic system that separates out the health of our environments from our own health.
Part of what this book tries to do is give us a language to return to the inseparability of these things, partially because I think that's a really important mode to get people engaged in climate and broader environmental issues, to really understand deeply how much deforestation or soil degradation or our air quality is impacting our physical and mental well-being. So “the age of disability” is a way of naming this increasing moment of disablement: of ecological disablement, of disablement to our fellow creatures, and of disablement to ourselves.
I say in the book, “the age of disability” doesn't have to be foreboding. If we could transform the age of disability into an age of acknowledging the vulnerability of being in a body, any kind of body, and then creating a system of care from that place, that would potentially be a beautiful age of disability to live in. Unfortunately, we are going completely in the opposite direction, towards increased levels of extraction and damage.
I try really hard in this book to not romanticize disability. There's a paradox of disability: disablement is often caused by the worst sorts of things. We're seeing mass ecological and human disablement in Gaza, for example. Disability emerges from state abandonment, corporate extraction, and racialized violence; it is too often a consequence of the cruelty of our systems. Yet as a critical disability studies scholar, I also understand that “disability” means and can be many things. Under the right conditions disability can also be a site of incredible political organizing and activism and of alternative value making, values that I think can actually interrupt some of these systems of harm. So “the age of disability” doesn’t have to name only damage; it could be an age where we take the values of disability community to help build a different world from a place of disability. But again, we are far from that.
The last thing I'll say is that “the age of disability” was in response to a conversation that has long been happening in environmental studies around the “Anthropocene,” which is the term that scholars and scientists use to describe how human beings have drastically altered our environments to the point that we're essentially in a new geologic epoch. There have been numerous scholars and activists who have responded to this idea of the Anthropocene (and the generalized sense of blame it places on all humans) by pointing out it's actually not human beings per se—it's the particular systems that comprise racial capitalism. After all, not all human beings are responsible for the tremendous ecocide that we are witnessing, right? So others recommend terms such as the “Racial Capitalocene.” What I was interested in in Disabled Ecologies is less what the cause is of “the age of disability” and more what the implication and consequences of this new epoch are. What is being created in this epoch is mass multi-species disablement. So that is “the age of disability.”
The phrase “injury environmentalism” also comes up a lot in your book. What is the meaning of that phrase and how does that help us navigate this age of disability?
There's been a lot of work detailing the racist, eugenic, ableist history of environmentalism from Early American conservation movements through to the environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s and onwards. Disability is part of that story—too often a eugenic story. So that's one way of reading disability in environmental history. I call this thread “ableist ecologies.” But while I’m interested in this history, what I wanted to do with this project was to also tell a different environmental story—to pull out other ways disability has shaped environmental thought and organizing. “Injury environmentalism” is my name for this other thread.
The book really does two things: it looks at the philosophical and political implications of bringing disability and environmental issues together, and it tells the story of an incredible early environmental justice movement that emerged on the South side of Tucson in the mid-1980s. This is a story of a largely Mexican-American community that organized in response to defense industry and weapons manufacturing pollution. The pollution impacted the aquifer, which at the time was the sole source of potable water in the Tucson area, and the pollution caused all sorts of illnesses, cancers, and disabilities in the community who drank the groundwater. But an amazing movement emerged, the first iteration of which was called Tucsonians for a Clean Environment. They were amazing organizers—often experiencing illness and disability themselves—and I think their work is really valuable for this moment as well.
So that's one story I tell, because I think it is an example of injury environmentalism. I'm interested in disability as a lived experience, as something that people are living through and dealing with and that shapes their political imaginations.
But as I’ve said, I'm also interested in disability as a concept and the way that disability is already present but unmarked and depoliticized in environmental conversations. This unmarkedness means the concept of disability can be utilized in various ways, some of which may be profoundly ableist and eugenic, and then some of which can be liberatory. The book really names these ableist threads, but is also searching for the liberatory ones.
For example disability is often used as what Eli Clare has called a “cautionary tale,” or a signifier of violence or a warning. Disability, rather than corporations or billionaires or systems of violence, becomes representative of environmental harm. So that's another example of ableist ecologies: the ways that disability can be used as a potent symbol that isn't necessarily about making a community or society more compassionate and accessible to those who have already been harmed, but rather as a sort of fear mongering, to shore up notions of able-bodiedness, whiteness, and nationhood, to protect the able-bodied who remain. This leads us to what we are increasingly seeing as a xenophobic or fascist environmentalism. Xenophobic or fascist environmentalism is the opposite of an injury environmentalism, which aims to create a more just society and world for the vulnerable and injured people, more-than-human animals, and ecosystems that are already here.
But again I wanted to tell a different environmental story: that disability has also been a place of environmental organizing and world making. This environmental organizing comes from where people are at, whether they themselves are experiencing disability, their loved ones are, or the environments they love have been injured and they are attempting to care for them. Disability has been an instigator or a fuel for organizing and has led to particular kinds of organizing. An example of which is Tucsonians for a Clean Environment: A lot of the organizers in Tucson were dealing with illness themselves, which is a very common thread throughout environmental justice organizing. Disabled ecologies and injury environmentalism are really ideas that are rooted in and indebted to environmental justice. Environmental justice movements are movements that have been continuously interrupting a more mainstream narrative of white able-bodied settler environmentalism.
I also want to say that I'm not using the term “injury environmentalism” as a replacement term or to name a specific moment in history or group of organizers. I'm more interested in identifying an environmentalism of the injured as a thread, to show how disability has functioned in environmentalism across different historical and cultural periods.
We can look at Darwin, for example, which I’m teaching in one of my courses right now in critical animal studies. Darwin's On the Origin of Species is often associated with “survival of the fittest,” but that's actually not what Darwin was saying. Of course Darwin had his problems, but he was also interested in variation and atypicality. He saw that transformation and accidental mutations were responsible for creating this wondrous, infinite, world. So there's a way to read Darwin as actually profoundly centered in and resonant with disability values in politics.
Right—the term “mutation” or “mutant” exists in popular imagination as a very negative thing. But when you go to Darwin, you find the term “mutation” to be quite neutral. If anything, it’s a bedrock of diversity and being able to fit in with your environment in ways that might be advantageous. It’s certainly not negative.
Absolutely. And even the word “fitness,” right? We're so used to thinking about fitness as being tied to able-bodiedness, strength, and autonomy. But actually what Darwin meant by “fitness” is utterly different. Fitness is the ability to survive and reproduce in your ecosystem, your community, your environment. That can mean all sorts of different things.
And even fitness in Darwin is a two-party phenomenon, right? There is no fitness of the individual without context. But our understanding of fitness today is a hyper-individualized, ableist understanding of what a body should do, and then how far away we are from that ideal.
Yes, which is fascinating because it invokes a very American, individualized notion of independence and strength and fitness. It reminds me of the bootstrap notion, thinking that someone is more deserving of rights or a good life, for example, if they are perceived as independent and self-reliant.
The first few years of the pandemic could have been such a profound moment of recognizing the complete myth of individualism, and instead recognizing that we are incredibly enmeshed in and vulnerable to our environments, as Darwin showed us. As you said, to follow Darwin, there is no fitness if we're not in a generative relationship with our ecological and social systems. I didn't realize until I was a graduate student what a beautiful writer Darwin is, and actually how delightful it is to read him, how playful and imaginative he is.
One of the things that “injury environmentalism” is responding to is the tendency of ableist and ecocidal society to either exploit the environment and its inhabitants or abandon the environment and its inhabitants. Could you say more about these twin tendencies?
I tried to investigate what values emerge from an injury environmentalism by following the history of the various groups that organized in response to the Tucson contamination, including Tucsonians for a Clean Environment. So on one level this is a case study: I'm returning and looking at this history. What emerged was the idea that an injury environmentalism is committed to recognizing relationality, connections between people and their environments; but another is that it is against abandonment. There are all sorts of ways that we can see abandonment happen. For example, one of the main theoretical and organizing points of environmental justice movements has been that it is largely communities of color that have been abandoned to pollution, where industries have been able to come in and essentially dump whatever they want or spew whatever they want. Or that communities of color, like in the Tucson case, have been pushed into neighborhoods that are near polluting industries. So that’s one level of initial political, social, and economic abandonment. There are other terms for this too, like Tracy Voyle’s term “wastelanding”: where certain environments and communities are already pinpointed as destined for extraction and whatever ramifications of extraction emerge.
There are other ways that abandonment emerges. One of the things that happened in Tucson was that even once the contamination came to light, city officials sided with industry, admitting there were contaminants in the water but denying that they were causally linked to health issues on the South Side. You see this again and again in environmental justice cases. The city officials instead blamed the disproportionate health issues in this largely Mexican-American community on their culture, their diet, their “predisposition” to illness. All of this racist, ableist gaslighting, which not only tries to deflect blame away from the city and the industries themselves, but also tried to put blame onto the community and to essentially shut the community up through shame. We see this sort of shaming so often with disability, because in our culture we’re always ready to feel shame about illness or injury. We’re ready to believe that it’s our fault or that there must have been something we've done, right? It’s an internalization of ableism. So that's another level of abandonment: even after the contamination was found, the city refused to help and instead blamed the community.
Thankfully, this community and these organizers were really incredible, and they fought back. They used the energy from that to create a really powerful movement that shifted that ableist narrative. So there are various ways that I think abandonment can play out. To move to a different register, we can look at what's happening in Los Angeles after the recent fires, what was happening in Asheville, North Carolina with the hurricane. In all of these different moments, we see Naomi Klein's shock doctrine thesis play out, where not only is there an initial harm, but then investors and companies and wealthy forces come in to take advantage of and extract more capital. This makes it even harder for people to come back and live in these places. So we see different levels of state abandonment and regulatory abandonment.
The things that I wanted to explore were what happens when being against abandonment is a baseline value? I'm interested in how organizers in Tucson expressed that value and how organizers and movements at other points in time in history have expressed that value. Even now, 40 years since the contamination came to light, people who are organizing on the South Side are still insisting that “we are here, we have been made ill, we have been injured, and our environment and our water is injured.” It's a kind of fighting that demands a right to exist and thrive.
“What happens when being against abandonment is a baseline value?”
What you just said helped me see that exploitation and abandonment aren't just fixed chronological events, where first comes exploitation and then abandonment, but that there's a cycle between them that could potentially go on forever. In the case of the L.A. fires, for example, there’s the exploitation of the land, then the abandonment when it catches on fire, and then that primes for further exploitation from venture capitalists swooping in to purchase these properties “on sale”. It’s a cycle.
I completely agree. That was actually one of advantages of returning to a history that is four decades old. The actual dumping of the contamination in Tucson happened between the 1950s and the 1970s, and the organizing really happened in the 1980s and the 1990s. One of the things that looking over a long period of time showed me was that cycle.
It also showed me that we all become dependent on the very thing that's exploiting us. In the case of Tucson, Hughes Aircraft (which is now Raytheon/RTX, which is still building weapons, killing people all over the world) is Tucson's largest employer. In one sense, these were good jobs that allowed community that had largely been pushed out in all sorts of other ways to have financial stability and health insurance. Not surprisingly, there's still a reluctance among some individuals in some parts of the community to criticize that specific industry. But there are other organizers who emphasize that they are victims of war, too; the bombs just weren't dropped in Tucson.
This creates a really complicated dynamic in terms of exploitation and abandonment. Hughes Aircraft abandoned these people: people were fired when they would complain about dumping the pollution; people were fired when they'd ask for gloves. But Hughes Aircraft was also the entity paying salaries and health benefits to their employees! This all makes environmental organizing, and maybe organizing in general, extremely challenging. People are so tied up with and dependent on the very same systems that are harming them.
You said in your book that the people who were disabled by the defense industry pollution were described as “unusually sensitive” or vulnerable to things that are “harmless” to so-called “normal” people. I can't help but see a parallel to the rhetoric and ideology we see around Covid today (and saw fairly early on in the pandemic as well). This rhetoric is especially pointed with respect to Long Covid, with ideas like “Covid is only dangerous for vulnerable groups”, “for most people, it's just a cold,” and so on. Can we think of Covid and the pandemic as another site of exploitation/abandonment that can follow the same lines of your analysis?
Totally. The logic of “sensitivity” or “particularly vulnerable groups” is one that we see again and again. We see it in the chemical industry regulatory system, for example. Up until very recently, toxicity doses for chemicals were modeled on a middle-aged, able-bodied white man of average weight. So many of the chemicals we use all the time haven't even been tested on women, kids, infants, or fetuses, let alone for their impacts on other creatures. Those who falls outside of the standard by which these contaminants are measured are deemed a “sensitive” or “vulnerable” group. So “sensitivity” is structurally built into the way that we regulate our chemicals.
“Sensitivity” is also used rhetorically—“it's just the sensitive groups” or “it's just the vulnerable groups”—as if these lives are less mournable. It’s very eugenic and something we saw very early on in the pandemic. It’s a fantasy, though, because who is this category of “vulnerable”? Who is this category of “sensitive”? The logic of sensitivity gives some people a false understanding of their own safety at the expense of others. It's ultimately a harmful thing for everyone.
“The logic of sensitivity gives some people a false understanding of their own safety at the expense of others.”
Whereas if we had our baseline be the most sensitive, what would that look like? Again, my focus has largely been in contamination and pollution. What if we said, “no, we don't want chemicals out there that would harm a fetus” or “we don't want contaminants that will harm the animals in our oceans”? What if that was the baseline, instead of a fantasy of a normative, typical, healthy human body, which is implicitly gendered and raced?
One of the through-lines in your book is the power and potential of the disabled imagination. “The future is disabled” can be a warning, but it can also be a liberatory prediction. How can disabled imagination help us as we move deeper into an ongoing pandemic, deeper into rising fascism and climate emergency?
I wish that I had a response that somehow lived up to what's needed in this moment. Our political environment has shifted so much even since my book came out last May. There's a different level of violence, abandonment, and exploitation—that this administration is already in one week willing to put people through. It's hard not to immediately worry, how are we going to survive? When our Medicaid is cut, our healthcare is cut, how are disabled people, poor people, trans people, undocumented people going to survive? How do we insist that we are here, we're not going anywhere, and we're not going to be abandoned?
I think disabled communities, like so many communities that have had at times to live through unimaginable forms of abandonment, have come up with strategies of supporting each other through mutual care and mutual aid. In this moment, we're going to need those strategies more than ever.
Honestly though, I feel really pessimistic, in part because we’re simultaneously dealing with the rapid escalation of the climate and extinction crisis. I see a lot of what the Trump administration is doing as our worst fears around ableist eco-fascism coming true, and that’s terrifying. That’s not really the note I wanted to end on, but that’s where I am.
I wonder if it would help to think about how disabled people manage terminal illness? That’s a very pessimistic vision of the end. And yet, we always find ways to support one another, even in the presence of our own premature death. So I understand why you ended on that note.
Yes. It's important to be real, and sometimes that means acknowledging how bleak things are so that we can figure out what we need in this moment. But I'm also a believer in possibility and the beauty and imagination of people, and I know there are many people out there right now who are doing everything they can to push back against this, which we all need to be doing. That gives me hope. My book is a celebration of organizers who spent decades fighting and in many ways won. I'm taking solace in them, and feel a real sense of responsibility to not let the hard work of all of the organizers that have come before us be undone.
I always go back to an idea from Harriet McBryde Johnson: disabled people take conditions that people would never ask for and make beautiful, thriving lives out of them. I think that's what we can hope for for ourselves, our fellow creatures, our planet, and our ecosystems. I have to remind myself in this moment of that sentiment, that there will always be disabled people living thriving lives and disabled creatures living thriving lives. They might not last that long. But there are moments of beauty and joy. And thank goodness for that.
Thank you to Sunaura for this wonderful conversation. I view Disabled Ecologies as essential reading for anyone interested in environmentalism, disability, and liberation, and I strongly recommend it to all!
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