Disabled Ecologies w/ Sunaura Taylor (07/08/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Sunaura Taylor about how industrial pollution and systemic abandonment produce networks of disability among people, animals, and what she calls “injured landscapes;” how one community in Arizona organized against longstanding environmental pollution from arms manufacturing; and her new book, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert.
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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
Sunaura Taylor 0:01
I was following the trails of disability that were left from the pollution, or that emerged from the pollution, the ways in which health and illness were utilized by city officials, often to cover up or to justify racist attitudes towards the community as a sort of alibi, right, that the community was just predisposed to illness. These kinds of ways in which racism and disabilities are utilized, merged together to form a kind of alibi.
[ Intro music ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:55
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I'm really excited today to be joined by my guest, Sunaura Taylor. Sunaura is a writer, artist, and crip parent. She is the author of the 2017 book, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, and is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. And today, we're talking about her brand new book, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert, which has just been released by the University of California Press.
Sunaura, welcome to the Death Panel. It is so nice to finally have you on the show.
Sunaura Taylor 1:57
Oh, thank you so much, Beatrice. I'm just really excited to be here. So excited to have an opportunity to talk about this new book and to talk with you all. This is so exciting for me.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:07
Likewise. And this book is fantastic. Can I just say, first of all, congratulations. It's so nice to see a project that has clearly been in the works for so long, together. It's a really fantastic read.
Sunaura Taylor 2:19
Thank you so much. And it really has been a very long project in the making. It's actually as old as my now nine year old daughter. So the fact that it is out in the world is kind of mind blowing to me. So it's really exciting to actually be at this stage.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:34
Absolutely. And Disabled Ecologies covers many themes that are central to our project. I was really anticipating this book. After the first time that we had your sister, Astra, on the show, way back in January of 2022, after the recording, I told her that I was a huge fan of your first book. And she told me all about this project that you were working on at the time, which became -- or is Disabled Ecologies, and I was hotly anticipating it. And I'm very excited to talk about it today.
Sunaura Taylor 3:02
Oh, that's so great. Thank you. That's great. And thanks, Astra.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 3:07
And I think the simplest way to describe the book is that through the story of a struggle in Tucson, Arizona against extraction, abandonment and pollution, Disabled Ecologies isn't just a book about disability, but a book that explores how our bodies are connected to the world around us, both in a literal pathobiological sense, how we get sick, how we die and why, but also in an embodiment sense, the ways we move through the world, how we are. And more concretely though, it is a history as well, the story of a mass disabling event, an act of social murder, not just of people and animals, but of entire ecologies. But the problem with social murder, as we've seen throughout the ongoing pandemic, and as you detail in your book, Sunaura, and as Engels struggled with himself when he coined the term in the 19th century, is how to "prove it." And as Engels wrote in the results section at the end of the 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, after he's laid out 200 plus pages of detailed data and analyses of the conditions of living and work and how the industrial revolution is killing and disabling people, he finds that the problem still remains that the data alone is not proof. And he writes,
"I have now to prove that society in England daily and hourly commits what the people's organs, with perfect correctness, characterize as social murder, that it has placed the people under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that it undermines the vital force of the people gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time. I have further to prove that society knows how injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of the people, and yet does nothing to improve these conditions. That it knows the consequences of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not mere manslaughter, but murder, I shall have proved... that a class which lives under the conditions already sketched and is so ill-provided with the most necessary means of subsistence, cannot be healthy and can reach no advanced age, is self-evident."
And your book Sunaura, Disabled Ecologies, is about that same dilemma, but in the 20th and 21st century, up against US Empire and the weapons industry. But what I really want to emphasize and what I think is so important about this project, right, is that here, the struggle that you're writing about goes far further than Engels ever touched, right, not stopping at the boundaries of the human body, but extending that lens across species, into space, and land, bodies of water.
So I'm sure longtime Death Panel listeners are already thinking of all the connections that this work has to a lot of the things that we cover on the show. But to start us off, Sunaura, can you quickly lay out the core argument that you're making in Disabled Ecologies, and just talk a little bit about what you hope the book can offer readers.
Sunaura Taylor 6:02
Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much, Beatrice, for that introduction, and also that quote. I really can't wait to talk to you just about the sections where I really am thinking about the ways in which the burden of proof is so impossibly put on to the backs of community who have experienced exploitation, and in this case, pollution, right, especially in a time when we're also all kind of called on to trust to the science, right. And so there's this really tricky sort of challenge there of like, really needing the science and then also that science, it never is enough, right.
So those themes are so kind of written throughout the whole project, and throughout my whole more personal relationship with the project as well. So on a really broad level, this book does two things, it makes the case that injury to nature is injury to people, and that we need to think about the health of the environment and health of human beings as utterly inseparable, right.
But it does this through telling the story of this really amazing early environmental justice movement in Tucson. And this project, really -- you know, I mentioned that it's like as old as my daughter, but really, this project is one of those projects that has always been with me, I always knew I would somehow do something about this topic. And the reasons for this are multifaceted. Firstly and perhaps most kind of evident is that I was raised with the understanding that my own disability was caused by defense industry pollution that I tell the story of, right. So I always knew that I wanted to return to it. But even more than all of that, the drive to want to investigate these questions was really that having this origin story really led to two kind of obsessions of mine, and that is like, what is it that disability does and what is disability? And then what is nature, and what is environmentalism, right? So these two obsessions of disability and nature really shaped the way that I think about those concepts.
Having this origin story from as a young child allowed me, even if I didn't know yet that there was like a disability rights movement or a disability -- any kind of disability movement or political way of thinking about disability, I understood that disability wasn't my own individual isolated experience, I understood that I was part of a whole community of people and of animals and nature that had been harmed. So I understood that disability was and is political, and ecological and not individual.
And then I think I also had an understanding that nature isn't something that's kind of separate from or outside of us. That it's not like we have human beings over here, and then nature over here, right? That actually, again, our health is entangled. So these two insights or frames that I grew up with, and that I thought about a lot as a child, are literally still the obsessions that I have today. And that really, this book is an investigation of those ways of thinking about disability and nature.
And then the one other thing that I'll say is that when I did, as an older person in my early 20s, when I discovered sort of critical disability perspectives, and disability art and culture, and movements, and had this other way of thinking about disability, as a site of value making and potentially a generative space, that then what I was left with was this sort of paradox, right, of disability on one hand being, again, this sort of possibility of centering other kinds of values and ways of being, and then disability as something that emerged from such intense exploitation and violence, right. And so how to hold those two realities of disability at the same time I think is kind of my lifelong question that I'm always thinking about, and this book is really a way of addressing that.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 10:07
One of the things that I was so fascinated by is that as someone whose disability has no origin story, I was really curious to hear and see your work on this in particular, because in many ways, this is about narrative building, and narrative around disability and causality is something that is so fraught and full of -- I mean, it's a morass, right?
This is really kind of the entirety of Health Communism, right, is like what does this narrative about value say about the political economy? And ultimately, like disability, as you say, is this word that means many things, and it's one of the most attentive accounts of setting up the concept of disability that I've encountered in this book.
And what I found really fascinating is the first time that I read it, I read it on my screen reader, and this book has footnotes as if it's like a law review article, so they're on the page, right, they can be large. And you've divided them up into various sections, but I got the sense that these were parts of the text that had been pulled out.
And you talk a little bit about making that decision for accessibility, but I could really kind of -- other than the numbers and the notes and the citations, right, that sort of come around those things, I could really sort of feel all of this extra material in place within the text when I was reading it in that way, where it was forcing me to read the citations with the body, right. And what emerges is this incredibly nuanced and I think important engagement with just spending time setting up a concept of disability, which opens this book. And it's fantastic.
But some of the storytelling that I think is more interesting for maybe getting into today is the actual storytelling that happens within this movement. And so you set up in the beginning of the book, the Hughes Aircraft facility in Tucson, and these lagoons and talk about the site and ecology and circumstances of this facility that is this ground zero of the origin story.
But we are talking about that from the perspective of knowing that the Hughes facility is this point of origin, right. And I think a lot of times when we talk about chronic illness or disability, any type of medicalization, we're always encountering these mythologies about causality that paint this kind of magical picture, right, of all-knowingness.
And I think your book does a really good job of just carefully and attentively dismantling that fantasy of total competency, right, of scientific modernity as all-knowing panopticon, right, but at the biological level, right, the idea that we know exactly what is going on with all of the chemicals that we put out into the world, right? I think one of the things that you really try and engage with is not just how disability is central to both the story of medicalization around environmental disasters, or how disability plays this dual role within environmental sciences, health justice, and within the movement, right, what you're really doing is also trying to tease out like a bigger picture, looking at political economy through the telling of the story. So you start it by setting up the Hughes Aircraft facility in Tucson. And I wondered if you could sort of tell briefly just the story of sort of what Hughes is, what happens in sort of what's the movement that emerges among people who are living in the path of the plume.
But I think because of the way that we tell these stories, this is why I really appreciated your book, because you tell this in a way that does not reproduce those kinds of magical thinking shortcuts that we often see when we talk about origin stories, that looks at it from the perspective of hindsight, right, where we do have a kind of knowingness. I think you do a really, really excellent job of precisely engaging with the unknown and leverage disability theory toward that end, in just a really beautiful way.
Sunaura Taylor 14:28
Well, I so -- I'm so grateful. This is so exciting for me, to actually also get to hear someone who's read it and what you're kind of pulling from it and what feels meaningful and helpful. And yeah, I'm just so grateful that you put this time and thought into thinking through it. And so many things that I want to touch on, but thinking about origins, right, I think that this is kind of like a good entryway to all sorts of different parts of the book. And one of the things that I very quickly learned, because again, you know, we had moved away when I was very little.
My family was part of a lawsuit, but I didn't know anything about the history. One of the things that was just incredibly amazing to discover was that actually there was this amazing environmental justice movement, like one of the earliest environmental justice movements in the country, at least sort of self-identifying environmental justice movements. So when I was trying to go back and learn about this, firstly, we moved back to Tucson. My partner was really excited about this, wanting to support, and so was like, yes, like let's move the family to Tucson. So we lived there for three years.
And so my investigation into this history was archival. It was also very much based in meeting people, talking to people, doing that kind of community based research. And I was really amazed actually that there were still these kinds of community meetings that were happening around the site. So that's all to say that it was really hard for me to figure out where to start, right.
So as one often does, they go to the archive, and I would start looking for moments where it was like site history, like something, right, to just give me a cue that this was where I could start looking to understand what happened. And all of them would start in the -- in the 1940s, when these defense industries started moving to Tucson, but what I would learn later is that when I would talk to people who were impacted, right, they would tell me a much longer history.
Their timeframe was much different. It was a history of colonialism, of dispossession of Tohono O'odham land, of the Mexican American community, right, the displacement and dispossession of land and kind of encroachment into community. And that the arrival of these defense industries was really just an ongoing -- like a part of that, right, and a continuation. And that also, on the other end, that there wasn't a sense of, oh, this is over, you know? That the lawsuit happened and there's remediation facilities set up to treat the groundwater, so now it's all over, right?
They had a very different understanding of the temporality of what should be included in an origin story, and then also of really understanding that these things don't end, right. And so, all of that to say, that this story does have a much longer history.
But yes, a major sort of event in the timeline is that in the 1940s, various defense contractors and electronics manufacturers moved into the south side of Tucson, about a mile away from the northeastern corner of the Tohono O'odham reservation, San Xavier. And at the time, it was a very rural area, but Hughes moved in in 1950. And there had been some contamination, some just dumping of contaminants that happened in the late '40s.
These were sites that were cleaning aircraft, manufacturing aircraft, manufacturing missiles, right, and particularly, once Hughes moved in, that was manufacturing missiles, and basically aircraft for war and cleaning that aircraft. And so all sorts of different kinds of chemicals were used in the process. And essentially, these contaminants were just kind of dumped onto the desert ground. Eventually, in maybe -- I need to double check this date, but I think it was 1960 actually, eventually, Hughes made some giant lagoons. They were getting complaints that the chemicals were running off onto people's land.
And so they eventually made these huge lagoons to dump the chemicals and the waste in, but they were unlined themselves. So then it was like another decade of the contaminants really leaking into, seeping into -- eventually into Tucson, Arizona, the groundwater. But even before they reached the groundwater, they traveled in desert washes with the rains, onto Tohono O'odham land.
There's complaints from O'odham representatives in the early '50s, about death of their cattle and a warning, right, that this contamination was going to seep into the groundwater and it was dangerous for life, human and non human life. Of course, those concerns were not heeded in any way. Hughes continued to contaminate. Eventually, finally, in 1979, the EPA had a program that was basically requesting that states figure out where there were possible sources of groundwater contamination from old industries.
And these two amazing local hydrologists, one of them who was really involved in the site after it came into the public, Jim Lemmon, did a flyover in the area and it was clear that Hughes had a contamination problem, right. At around the same time, some of the wells in the area started testing for high levels of chromium and then later for TCE, trichloroethylene, which is kind of the main contaminant that the site is known for. A variety of wells were closed. But the city officials didn't warn community or anything, they just kind of silently closed them and said that no one -- there were -- no one had any reason for concern. But they also didn't search to see who had drank the water, right. It was kind of just hushed up.
And then in 1985, an investigative journalist named Jane Kay worked with some really amazing community members, mostly women, Mexican American women educators and union organizers who kind of were already realizing, right, like already had a sense, an understanding that something was wrong in their communities, because so many of their friends and family members were experiencing disproportionate levels of illness, sometimes terminal illness.
And they worked together basically to release this series of investigative articles. And that kind of really blew up in Tucson. And a few months later, there was an amazing group that organized, some of the same people who had worked with Jane Kay organized into Tucsonans for a Clean Environment. And I know I'm already -- this story is getting rather long, but just to say that they were remarkably successful for the time, and faced such incredible disregard and racist accusations from city officials at a time when there wasn't really a language of environmental racism yet, and also created this very expansive vision of what a just response could be. And so that's a not quite cliff notes, but not quite as long winded as I could make it, explanation of some of what happened.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 22:02
No, I really appreciate it because I think it's helpful to see it span out over the decades so quickly. In the way that you're telling the story, there is a sense of time that you can really get, of the incredible amount of time it took to act, right, and the kinds of ways that we quantify risk and damage, from a public health perspective, or from any -- from any perspective. I'm even thinking about the ways that this bleeds into -- this kind of ideology bleeds into things like disability adjusted life years, right, where disabled people, as an economic valuation of life, have our valuation per year adjusted down based on an assumption of quality of life, right, which takes the standards of the built environment, political economy, and the actual environment as a given and then deducts from the individual, right.
And what you're really showing is the kind of bureaucratic process that supersedes and kind of dominates the story, right, that this kind of angle on it, the one that when you look up the Hughes facility, right, like, you're gonna see all these stories that really foreground the role that essentially bureaucracy plays in oversight, right, remediation.
But the kind of story that you lay out in the book is very distended. It's like a story of chronic illness, right, like a long term sickness that doesn't have a beginning, middle and end that's very tidy, that isn't easy to study, or understand using existing models and existing pathways of funding, right? That there isn't a lot of incentive to try and understand. But there's a lot of blame going around and a lot of blame avoidance involved in that as well. And so, you have this I think really important way that you do situate this story that is often dominated by the colonial, statistical architecture, right, and you re-situate it into the context of land theft, dispossession, exploitation, extraction, white supremacy. And I really appreciate some of these ideas that you set up early on in the book around ableist ecologies and impaired landscapes.
The kind of framing that I'd love for you to explain here is what your framing is, why you talk about these things this way, how that's maybe a little different from the standard ways of talking and thinking about these things, and also where that lineage is as well, because there's a kind of siloing of all these different effects of this one "event," right, where it's like the event is collapsed into one thing, and it's not, right? But then the effects that need to be dealt with at the level of collective risk are individuated, siloed off, right? Vegetation, water, land, people, animals - each of these segments becomes like a separate project of remediation or just organized abandonment.
But I think it's just really important to situate, again, how the siloing of the effects and the event and the different "populations" that this affects, right, that all of these ways that we have of talking about this that are standard, right, bog standard, this is all like colonial language, right? Like we are using the language of statistics. Statistics is the language of the state. There is a kind of way that we're supposed to talk about this kind of totalizing ecosystem sabotage, right, deliberate social murder, through the lens of the state, through this kind of statistical framing.
And I really appreciate the work that you do in this book to resist that. And I think that that clearly comes through deep relationships that you have with the people who are struggling against this, who are not seeing this problem like a state.
Sunaura Taylor 26:15
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, so many places where I could choose to respond to but I think one of the central goals of the book, right, is to really reconnect, or to reaffirm, or to re-envision the relationship between human health and the health of the environment, or the nonhuman world, right. But that idea, right, that the health of humans and nonhumans is interconnected and should be treated as such, is, of course, not remotely a novel idea, right?
This is an idea that has been so shut down by centuries of colonial thinking and separation between the human over here and nature over there, right. And then all sorts of other kinds of hierarchies and separations and categorizations, right.
But so one of the things that I really do try to think with and think through is that there's a kind of unlearning of that, of that separation, that I think would be really important. And we can look very specifically at the ways in which that separation happens, for example, between like remediation on one hand and healthcare on the other hand, right, that those two things are really, really separate. But maybe to get more into the specifics of what my terminology is and why I use certain terminology, which I think would be helpful to get to some of these concepts, maybe I'll actually just start with the title, right, like Disabled Ecologies, like what is a disabled ecology?
And so, again, if I return to this place of, early on in the research, when I was really trying to understand what happened, right, I found that, for me, the easiest way to start doing that was to essentially follow the paths of disability that I was finding, right, the paths of disability in the archives, and what people were talking to me about in the legal frameworks, right. And so by that, I don't mean that I had to see the actual word disability, right, but that I was reading for disability.
I was using, utilizing disability essentially as a method. I was following the trails of disability that were left from the pollution or that emerged from the pollution. So these trails were very material, right, like actual material injuries to human beings, to human communities, to wildlife that came in contact with that contamination, to the aquifer, to the desert ecosystem, right. So there were these very material injuries, that we could also, again, see expansively, that one of the things about injury as it emerges from contamination, particularly is that it doesn't fit into a neat timeframe, right? Chemicals that you come in contact with in one era might not show their effect on a body for years or decades later, right?
So that kind of shift in temporality too, of following the paths of material injury. But then I also actually just wanted to follow the paths of disability that I was finding in the stories that were told around the site, right? So you could find sort of narratives of disability and related kinds of concepts, right, like illness, health, these related concepts, you could find these narratives in the stories told around the site.
So whether we're thinking about the legal debate, the ways in which health and illness were utilized by city officials, often to cover up or to justify racist attitudes towards the community as a sort of alibi, right, that the community was just predisposed to illness, these ways in which racism and disabilities are utilized, merged together to form a kind of alibi, right?
But also how illness and disability were experienced by people and talked about and utilized by the people themselves in their movements, which is something that I talk about quite a bit as I focus more on the ways in which they organized. So really, a disabled ecology to me, on one level, is a way of mapping, it's a way of following these trails that inherently are not going to be limited by these categories, like, oh okay, this is only -- right, these trails of pollution did not only impact human beings, right? These contaminants, and specifically, the violence that was perpetuated by Hughes and other aircraft and defense industries, it didn't stop at the threshold of the aquifer, at the threshold of the human body, or at the threshold of one community, right?
Following these trails is a way of just literally mapping out these connections, right? That these are -- that we can't separate the harm of the aquifer from the harm of the community, because they're all connected. So I think that really leads me to another main goal of the book, which is just to make the case that disability is a really important concept when we're thinking about the environment and the environmental crisis. And partially why it's an important concept is because it's already there. It wasn't somehow very random or unusual that all of these narratives of disability were there, ready to be mapped out or understood, right?
There's not something specific about this site necessarily that makes disability more prominent, right? That disability is already so present in environmental -- whatever we want to call them, environmental disasters and in the environmental arena. And that part of what I want to do with this book is to just start pulling those threads out so that we can see the centrality of how disability and again, related narratives are kind of being utilized.
And for what ends, right? Are they being utilized for eugenic ends, or are they being utilized in ways that can help create a world that will help us live with the sort of multi-species disablement that we have. So I think we can look for these narratives in popular nature writing, we can look for these narratives in the environmental movement, in academic writing.
But one of the places that I really sit within the book is that I actually just look at the environmental sciences themselves, right? There's all of these fields that are looking at ecosystem health, that are looking at soil health, that are looking at river health, forest health, on and on, right? If these fields are already kind of thinking with health on some level, or if health is what they are trying to achieve, then what is it that we have now and that is being perpetuated with the extraction and exploitation of our environments? And to me, I think disability is a really useful frame for that. And then there's even language within environmental remediation, within environmental policy about impaired river systems or impaired waters, right.
So this language of disability is already there. And so one of the things that disability scholars, disability movements have shown us, right, is that when left depoliticized, when left unmarked, disability can be exploited and utilized for all sorts of ends, right? It's an extremely malleable concept and malleable tool.
And so part of what this book is trying to do is simply to mark it, to say, okay, disability is doing all this work already in the environmental arena. So we need to figure out what work it's doing, and for what ends. And so that kind of leads to another one of the ways that I've framed some of this, which is around the idea of impaired landscapes, really taking seriously the possibility, or what it would mean to think about our endangered environments as disabled kin, essentially.
And I know I've gone on for a while, but I'm also happy to talk about more also ableist ecologies, which I think are -- I really wanted a way to name the fear mongering around disability that happens within environmental movements and the way in which disability has so often been presented as at odds, right, with environmentalism, or as what we are working against, right. We want a healthy environment and healthy communities, right? Healthy environment for healthy communities kind of thing and where does that leave -- where does that leave disability? And so I wanted a way to think about, to not -- I don't -- this book is not -- I hope that it is not a romanticization of disability, you know, the fact that our environments are, to me, disabled kin, is not a hopeful thing.
Or I should say, it's not an empowered thing, right? It is -- I say that, and I think and I write about it with a lot of grief and anger and devastation. But I also think that what almost is more terrifying to me is then an ableist response to that disablement. And so I think that's where naming the ableist ecologies was helpful for me at least to think through what kinds of different responses are these now disabled environments, or disabled ecosystems, or disabled multi species worlds going to kind of engender and how can we help promote non-ableist, right, anti-ableist responses.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 35:58
Sunaura, there are so many threads there that I wanted to pull, but I really appreciated the way that you set that up, because -- well, and this is very much something that your first book addresses as well, you know, disability as metaphor is applied with a wide brush, right? And it's applied towards so many ends, right? And it's really important to examine what is underneath these invocations, right. And so I really appreciated the concept of ableist ecologies in particular, because you talk about it just in terms of both acknowledging the ways that disability has been invoked for a long time within environmentalism, within environmental justice movements, as a kind of spectre, a threat. You write that ableist ecologies are "ecologies that utilize the emotive and symbolic potency of injury, not to make disabled lives more livable, but to shore up and protect those who are not yet injured and not perceived as destined for injury." And I think that when you're extending that lens of disabled kin to landscape, as you're saying, this is not a romanticization, but it speaks to need, it speaks to subjection, right, forces of extraction and abandonment that are applied from the same sort of economic logic, right, about core value and injury and repair. And I think that the idea of ableist ecologies and injured landscapes is also something that could quickly be appropriated by the mainstream public health apparatus, right, as a way of -- or a kind of mainstream research frame, like you could really see the way that -- and this is, again, what happens with disability sometimes as a metaphor is that people take it up. And I think the conceptualization, right, that you're putting forward in this book is very much informed by the lived experience of the organizers who were a part of --it's Tucson for a Clean Environment?
Sunaura Taylor 38:17
Tucsonans for a Clean Environment.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:18
Yeah, so also TCE, which is such a great detail, you know, these organizers. This is, as you're saying, disability as method. The perspective that you're bringing and the narrative that you're trying to tell, and the theory that you're building around that, are based in lived experience and disability as method and also, chapter five in particular, where that quote comes from, is really important because it contextualize this idea, while also contextualizing the roots of environmentalism in eugenics and this way that disability can again be appropriated towards eugenic means that still result in the abandonment of the environment, right, which is where the use of the extension of disabled kin I think really comes in handy because again, it reinforces how what should be centered in that attention becomes kind of secondary in the way that -- it's almost like taking Marta Russell's money model of disability and breaking that open much wider than her lens was.
Sunaura Taylor 39:24
Yeah, I think for me, ableist ecologies came -- that framing came later. And it was something that I was like searching for, I was searching for that language, and I can't remember who it was, but someone said to me, like, oh, like my first book, Beasts of Burden is so much about ableism, actually. It's about the way in which ableism is so entangled with and dependent upon and inseparable from anthropocentrism, and they were like, oh, where essentially is -- like what is ableism doing here in this book, like what would it be doing? And I'm so grateful to whoever that was that said that, because I think I was so worried with, and I still am, with this framing of disabled ecologies or of environments, of using a language of disability or illness or woundedness, or whatever you want to use, of utilizing this language and taking it seriously, because you can see how it could be co-opted, right? Like you could -- oh well, it's okay if our environments are polluted, now that they're -- you know, they're disabled, and disability is an empowered identity. And I don't know, I mean, it's a bit of a leap, but you could kind of imagine how that could happen.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 40:43
Uh, not that big of a leap, though. I mean.
Sunaura Taylor 40:46
Yeah. I mean, in the same way that, right, like the idea that ecosystems are resilient, right, the way in which that has just become -- and has, for many centuries, I think, actually been kind of then used to justify ongoing extraction of the environment. And so for me, ableist ecologies became a way of saying, like the warning of ableist ecologies is -- that I want, with this book, to help offer a path towards a way of making visible or making ableist responses to environmental damage to our current environmental state, to making ableist responses something that we're aware of, so that we can try to avoid them or resist them, right? Because I think there's so many environmental movements just accidentally even just kind of -- and not so accidentally, I'm being too generous, because I do -- of course, there is this longer history of environmentalism's racist and eugenic history, right? It's a very patriarchal history. But I think, still, there's a way to me in which ableist responses to environmental harm can just be continuously kind of reproduced as common sense, within even movements, and that trying to identify those so that we can resist them feels important to me.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 42:17
This is such an important aspect of your work. And I mean, I know that, in some ways, there's nothing you can do to control for co-optation, right, this is a force that we're working with. But I think the attention to the construction of reality, right, through the kinds of logics, right, that -- because words aren't harmful just as an utterance necessarily, right? They're harmful in terms of how they shape intent and implementation and blame and proof.
And as we've been talking about, narrative building is a huge site of struggle around the organizing that's going on in Arizona, in communities that are being poisoned and not told anything about it, or told that it's not really a big deal, and that they're just contributing to their own disproportionate burden of morbidity and mortality because of their lifestyle choices, and their -- whatever the -- you know, the self -- the blame dogma, right, the individuation of socially, structurally and politically determined health, right, which is not an individual thing, but you have to translate it and individuate it somehow.
And ableism is a tool of translating harm at a population level, right, harm at an ecology level, to an individuated phenomenon. And so, it's so important to call out, because this is a political tool of repression, oppression, extraction. It's an alibi, as you said. I really, really appreciated the way that you framed that. And I'd love to talk about a little bit some of the stories that are told. This is a story that doesn't have -- it's not all bad news, right? There are moments where the organizers in Arizona are able to push back against these narratives that foreclose on them getting the resources within the state architecture. We're not talking about a solution that was adequate. We're not talking about people's needs being met, in a total sense. We're still talking about a healthcare system that is what it is in the United States.
This is not to romanticize the sort of wins. But it is to say that this is a very powerful and important example of a narrative being seized towards a truth that is actually built by those in struggle, right, those who are impacted and those who are in solidarity with them, right. And it's built around not just necessarily a vision of individual human beings that have illness as a result of these incidents, but it's built in, as you're saying, this larger, longer way within the movement. And I'd love if you could just talk about some of the narratives that organizers were able to reframe, and how the role of the origin story as a contested space became a site of struggle just within this instance. Because I think there's just so much relevancy to struggles that people are engaged in right now.
I'm thinking of the episode we just did with Jiya Pandya, about the 40th anniversary of the Bhopal Gas disaster, right. This was a very common theme in that conversation, which was also around disability ecology, sacrifice and political economy. And I think the stories that are told here, I'd love for us to just sort of get into some of those narratives and some of the counter narratives that were able to be built against them.
Sunaura Taylor 46:04
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I was really aware of, again, kind of early on was just the way in which the origin story continuously haunted all the research that I was doing. Again, whether we're talking about the archive, whether we're talking about the way that people narrate their stories, the way or the way in which the bureaucracies or the state officials are responsible parties, like the polluters narrated the stories, origin stories were so important, right. And my own origin story was, of course, part of this as well. And I think that part of why I found this interesting, right, because, of course, origin stories are everywhere. They're like how we make sense of the world, and are always political and are always utilized for specific means, right.
But for me, I think I became so interested and aware of them, because within disability culture at the time and disability community that I was a part of in my 20s and early 30s, as a disability cultural maker, artist and activist, there was a sense of like -- that we don't talk about origin stories, that it's like -- that that puts all the political emphasis in the wrong spot, right? That if we talk about origin, it makes this sensational, kind of super crip narrative that then detracts from the ableism that is all around us and the ways in which disabled people are prevented from living, right, sometimes quite literally.
So there was a sense -- and I'm not saying this is like every disability scholar said this or every -- but there was -- in the circles that I was kind of navigating, I definitely think that there was a sort of like -- it was -- it felt, because of also this question, right, that I talk about in the book of like, well, what happened to you? This sort of invasive wanting to know of this dramatic past, right, that then erases the actual lived reality of discrimination in the present.
And so I was really struck by that as a sort of way of politicizing origin stories in contrast to how I understood often environmental justice movements utilizing origin stories, which was a way of almost doing the opposite, like an origin story was not a way of saying, oh, look what happened to me, I have this individual trauma, right, or I have this individual experience. It was way of saying, look at what happened to our community, right. It was a way of collectivizing, I think, actually. And in Tucson, these stories were utilized from the beginning as evidence essentially, right, as evidence that something had happened.
And in fact, I had -- there was -- I read one quote in an oral history of someone who said, like, oh, for once, they would love to go to a doctor and have them ask, like what happened to you, right? Because then that would be an opening to talk about what happened to the community, right. And so I was really struck by just the different ways in which origin stories are utilized. But even, on one level, they seem kind of at odds or opposite, but actually, I think that what both kinds of utilizations are working towards, of like politicizing disability and collectivizing disability, actually has a lot more in common than was kind of maybe sometimes presented. Because there's been like a very -- a lack of sort of -- a lack of research into the relationship between environmental justice movements on one hand and disability movements on the other And I think origin stories are a way for me in this book to make the case that actually these movements have far less different perspectives on disability than -- sometimes the differences are what is centered in academic research. And I actually think that there's a lot more solidarity there.
So I'm exploring origin stories of how they're actually being utilized by community members. So in Tucson, right, people literally went door to door collecting origin stories, like, when did you first notice symptoms? When did you first notice that your family member or friends were becoming ill? Where did you live? Where were you -- where were you going to school, right? And that these stories became the grounds, like sharing experiences of disability and illness became, and particularly, right, racialized experiences of illness and disability, that were in dialogue with a long standing white supremacist and colonial kind of government structure, right, city structure, that was responding in these very sort of racist and ableist ways that we've been talking about. So but the community utilized their origin stories to form these -- to form a really powerful movement. But then very quickly, right, what happens is that then the polluters, the EPA, the bureaucracies that are set up to respond to these dynamics, these histories, then immediately, were like, well, you know, essentially, can you prove it?
The burden of the proof is on the communities, and which brings us back to the very beginning of the conversation, right? There was never enough science to prove in a way that would -- that could prove absolutely, right, that everybody's illnesses and disabilities and conditions were caused by contamination, because it's an impossible thing to prove. So it's this marker of -- this sort of marker that then is actually impossible to reach, right. And in a case like this where it was actually chemical soup, essentially, but there were -- a toxic soup, there were all these different heavy metals and chemicals, but one contaminant became kind of the prominent contaminant of concern. And so then it was always, whenever health studies, whenever ATSDR or other kind of public health officials came in to study this, it was always like, oh, well, you can't prove that TCE causes this huge variety of conditions that the community was experiencing, right. But the studies themselves were fundamentally flawed, because it was never just TCE. And also, our science is not capable of figuring these kinds of dynamics out. Sorry, I'm getting myself lost, but --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 52:51
Well, I was nodding so hard that I knocked my glasses into my microphone, so [Sunaura laughing].
Sunaura Taylor 52:58
I guess the other thing that I'll say, right, is that then -- then there's this other way in which origin stories are utilized, and that is by the polluters themselves, right, or by those who are sort of, I don't want to say justify what the polluters did, but kind of like -- yeah, are kind of there to essentially clean up their mess, right, the EPA or like city officials -- that the origin story that polluters are able to tell, right, on one level is like a greenwashing success story, right. It's like, oh, we didn't know back then what we know now, and now we are doing a better job.
That is essentially the narrative that the polluters kind of grasped on to really early on. So it's this very short narrative that's essentially like, you know, in the 1940s, everyone was disposing chemicals this way, we didn't know what it would do. And isn't it great that we all learned better, and look at all these great remediation facilities that we've set up.
When actually, this origin story I found, this was like an archivist's like -- this was such a fun moment, because I actually found a document that Hughes tried to keep out of the hands of the EPA in the mid 1980s, where their contractors, their representatives, basically narrated this origin story. So this origin story was -- because they had been, they -- Hughes basically had their own scientists investigate. And then of course, they found out that yes, Hughes was responsible for the contamination and all this stuff, and they tried to keep those documents out of the hands of the EPA, but then the response was to narrate this kind of story, and that that story is still the story that's being told essentially.
And it's not -- this isn't unique to Tucson also. I think of so many of these decades old contaminated sites. That is the kind of story that we hear, right? Oh, well, we didn't -- we didn't know what we know now. And so a lot of that chapter is also like just showing what a load of -- just what a lie that all is too. So when is telling an origin story powerful? When is not telling an origin story powerful, right? Who has the power to just like not even have to tell an origin story?
Those kinds of questions became really important. And then I think it also -- one of the things that I do emphasize in the book is that I think that this way of thinking about origin stories within disability studies and disability communities has really drastically changed, right, and that there's an awareness over the past 10-15 years that origin stories have to be central to disability studies, because so much disability emerges from, again, just sites of extreme violence and exploitation, so colonialism or racial capitalism. These mass disabling structures and systems. And so to not address origins means to not address those realities.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 56:12
I just so appreciate everything that you just laid out. And it's interesting, because I feel like right now we're seeing struggles around origin stories playing out that were just sort of popping to mind. We recently did an episode talking about water in Gaza, and the many ways that the "water crisis" or "humanitarian crisis," the way those terms flatten a very long and complicated political history and a story of deliberate abandonment and sabotage and of disease and public health, right, and of struggle in Gaza. And it gives you a material sense of what the settler colonial enclosure and occupation behaves like, right. And that tells you something about how these things are constructed.
And I think it also shows opportunities for building solidarity, for supporting other movements, supporting each other, because we're seeing these struggles over origin stories also around COVID, around Long COVID In particular, right? We're seeing the struggle of the origin story around the issue of student debt too, right, even, which is what Astra does so much work on. And these ways that the origin story of debt itself, right, plays such a huge role in our political economy, and the chapter that you have on the origin story, chapter three, which is called "What happened to you and can you prove it," right, these are the kinds of -- the origin stories that many people have of diagnosis, misdiagnosis, these kinds of long, descriptive medicalization sagas that become our origin stories, right.
And you're really, again and again, looking at like, where is power distributed? Where are resources being distributed? Where is deliberate harm being done? And who is running cover for that? And who is structuring that avoidance of accountability? What are the state, legal, political and economic armatures that come into play, right, that also drive what the "health outcome" is for not just a bunch of people, but animals and plants and the ground itself and an aquifer, right.
And the way that I think it forces you to analyze and think about what the siloing of all these things accomplishes is really helpful to think through right now in particular, right? We're seeing the attempted siloing of solidarity between folks doing pro Palestine encampments and protests who are masking, right, who were trying to build coalition imperfectly, right, not universally, right, but there is solidarity there, right? Like, it's not universal, but this is what disability as a method can teach us, right, is we don't need a fucking totalizing hole to move forward.
Sunaura Taylor 59:25
Yeah, yeah. I love all of that so much. And I think one of the things that can -- and not to generalize about academics, but I think that can be very frustrating for me in -- about academic work is that I think that there's often a lot of emphasis also on -- and for good reason -- but of places of rupture, or places of conflict between movements, sort of like, oh, this movement, these activists did this thing in a way that's more liberatory than these other activists, or what these activists are saying is in conflict with these other activists, in a way that also just doesn't take into consideration, a lot of the times, I think, just how difficult organizing and activism is, right?
And one of the things that I really wanted from the beginning of working on this project, and same with Beasts of Burden, was to not emphasize the like, these movements are in conflict with each other and let me show you how they could come together. Like that's, I really, I feel -- I felt very strongly with both books that what would be a more generative role for me to work on would be to see what different sorts of power structures are these movements utilizing or fighting against, and where are they actually working towards maybe similar ends, but through different means, you know?
And I think for both a book that's looking at the relationship between disability and animal liberation or a book that's looking at the relationship between disability and environmental movements, that I wanted to center the sort of generative places of where movements are overlapping, and not in a way that is like to disregard their differences or, or anything, but to just kind of highlight or build those kinds of connections.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:01:20
Yeah, no. I mean, it's -- a lot of the way that we try and engage with history on this show is not to necessarily kind of provide definitive accounts, but to learn from people who have faced similar forces of subjection, right, who have fought structures of power that have similarities to the ones that we're fighting, right, that have lineages and connections and ways of just taking lived experience as expertise, which, again, brings us back to disability as method, right? Because what we're talking about here, in the book, you talk about how, for the people who are living with the bodily effects, right, who are living with the diseases, the sequelae, whatever you want to call them, right? The way that they're being studied, right, the way that that's operationalized, and the kind of narrative around remediation.
You talk about the way that these are all treated very separately, right. That this is a way of also kind of compartmentalizing accountability and maintaining this narrative, again, of the containment of the event, right. And a lot of this, in many ways, is built on assumptions that are just left to stand unchallenged, which is where, I think, the construction of embodied expertise becomes so important, right? Because data doesn't speak for itself. It has to be made to speak, right. And oftentimes, for example, in the conversation around COVID, you have study versus study in a kind of ring match, right? But that means we're playing in Vinay Prasad's court, and we're fighting study versus study until the end of time, having methods debates, and our people are still fucking dying of COVID, right.
So taking these lessons, looking to history, moving forward with intent, and these kinds of awarenesses of the assumptions and a commitment to not taking these assumptions for granted, right, like the inherent devaluation of this area of land as a sacrifice zone, as land that should be made available to become an airport or an arms manufacturer or whatever, you know, but that this land itself is stolen land in the first place, right. And that stolen land then poisons the land that the indigenous people are enclosed in and sequestered to, right?
And there's a whole process of looking at the state through the production of debility and impairment, and through the poisoning of the ecology and what that produces in terms of like "population health," right, or species diversity, right. And so then, you see then this locale becoming again, a site of scientific knowledge production. And so what I really appreciate is you tell the story and you're centering and showing the development of how embodied expertise comes to be in many ways, putting it in equal parallel to these other narratives and types of expertise that are then employed, that tell very different stories from the one that for the people who are dealing and living through the "disease process," right, that is supposed to be so focal here, their experience, their quality of life, what it's like, what resources they have, their care, right, that that all becomes decentered in these other accounts, but the embodied expertise is where that's allowed to be, right. It's where that resides.
And I appreciate the fact that essentially, this book, I think, shows you a way of thinking with lived experience and lived experience of disease and environmental related disease, that does gesture at a model to learn from also of how to assert that these self evident experiences of illness and disability, that these can too have the kind of power that is necessary, right, to try and push the conversation past the methods arena.
Sunaura Taylor 1:05:45
Mhm. Yeah. And I think hearing you talk also makes me realize too that like how -- how different the community's understanding of remediation, or just response was compared to the polluters or the city officials, who had these very narrow, technocratic visions of remediation being something that ended at their property line for Hughes, or ended at the threshold of the human body, right, for the EPA.
But then for people on the south side, remediation was something that should include not just treatment of the aquifer, right, but treatment of the community, right? That injury and illness are partially what is left, what people are still living with, what people will still say they are living with in the community, right? And so where is -- why does remediation end at the threshold of the human bodies? Why is that not part of the Superfund program, as we understand it, and of course, there's lots of reasons for that.
But the movement had such an expansive, capacious understanding of what remediation could include. And I think that it was one that was shaped by their experiences as people of color living with illness and disability. And that included a vision of justice for the treatment of the human communities, but also of the landscapes, right, that acknowledged longer histories and potential futures of injuries. And that was the opposite of a politics of abandonment, it was like we are here, we are still injured, right. And that fought back against the systems that perpetuated and caused this harm in the first place. And that's such ann expansive, right, vision of what remediation could include.
And yet, I don't think, and I say this with absolute admiration and respect for Tucsonans for a Clean Environment, I don't think that their vision was so uniquely different than a lot of communities that have organized in similar fashions, right? That the idea, again, that human health is over here, and that environmental remediation is in some other realm, and then the power structures and systems of racial capitalism that then perpetuate these dynamics, that those are all part of what communities who have experienced environmental harm are often kind of encompassing into an expansive vision of remediation, right.
And I'm not trying to universalize, but I'm just saying on one level, one of the reasons why I chose to center this book in Tucson is of course because of my own personal connection, but also, this is like a decade's old site, right? Like these kinds of dynamics are happening all the time, right? Like this site is one of countless sites around the country from this era, but also new sites, right? Like there's constantly -- and so I want to have a balance here of not being like, oh, this site is like any other site, right? Because, of course, on an individual and experiential level, it's absolutely not, but that the experience of and the challenges of -- essentially of living with injury and living with these -- and that being something that is remaining in people's lives is, I think, not a unique dynamic to Tucson, as is also the expansive vision of justice that they put forward, that I think is really pretty radical and amazing.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:07:10
Absolutely. And actually, would you be down to maybe lay out for folks, because I think the contrast between the vision of remediation, the kind of demand and the articulation and what the folks who want treatment want, to sort of lay that out, parallel to what the mediation was that was offered, would just be such a wonderful example, if you're down to sort of lay those out in tandem, because I think that what this gets at is something that we talk about all the time on the show, is the myth of the benevolent state and the assumption that there are programs in place to catch people and to prevent tragedies from happening outside of the lone bad actor, and this narrative of we didn't know what we know now, you know, all these kinds of causal stories, right, that change the entire context and dynamic of what this is as a phenomenon into an event, right? Metering it in time yet, it's ongoing.
And this -- I would just love if you wouldn't mind just telling these two versions of remediation, the demands and then the delivery, the implementation, because I think listeners, especially who are folks who are in the Long COVID community, doing a lot of thinking around NIH spending around treatment and research and things like that, would definitely really appreciate hearing that they're not the first people to go through this struggle, not in a way to be like, you're not special, as you're saying, but in a way to be like, you're not alone.
Sunaura Taylor 1:11:15
Yeah, exactly. That's such a good way of saying it, right. Because I don't want to be like, oh, yeah, this wasn't like -- I mean, this was such a special movement, it was so amazing. I was just so blown away when I returned to Tucson and was like, oh my gosh, this is like the home of one of the earliest environmental justice movements in the 80s. This is so -- I mean, of course, we can think about environmental justice as going back way farther than that, but in terms of movements that identified as such, and that was so exciting to learn from them.
And I think I didn't realize that this would be so central to the book, but part of what became a motivating factor to keep working on this book over eight or nine years, or whatever it was, was I want to tell the story of this community, because in Tucson, people remember TCE contamination, they don't remember this -- they don't remember Tucsonans for a Clean Environment, right? They don't remember the other TCE, and that's what they should be remembering. I think. Like, to me, the movement is so worth remembering and learning from. And partially it's because it's like, yeah, there's so many other movements, all over, that have worked towards similar things. And like, yeah, they're not alone. So okay, so I'll say that there's kind of -- there's so many different narratives of what the remediation should be.
So I'll start with Hughes, Hughes Aircraft Company. So once they could no longer place blame on everyone else, because early on, it was just all about blaming, it was like the little mom and pop laundry facility down the street was the cause of the contamination, or like they were just blaming everybody else. And finally, when they could no longer just totally do that, they made the case that they're -- that they were responsible only for the pollution that was on their property. And so actually, the hydrologists who were studying this at the same time jokingly called this the Los Reales fault line, because that was the road that their property line stopped at. So it was like, yeah, it made no hydrogeological sense.
But essentially, that is what's actually written into the records of decision, that the Air Force is responsible, because, of course, the Air Force kind of came in and rescued Hughes, and that they're responsible only for the contamination plume that is south of Los Reales Road. The city of Tucson helps facilitate the remediation through the EPA of the contamination north of that, that emerged from a variety of other industries, aircraft industries as well. And so the EPA's model of remediation really was essentially, to treat the contaminated water and to remediate the contaminated soil, right, and to, at first, try to get the responsible parties to -- and I hate that term, but it's so embedded in my brain from reading all the archives -- to get the polluters to pay. But because it's the Air Force, that never actually ends up really happening. So the EPA, and specifically I should say the Superfund program has a vision of remediation that really is limited to a certain temporality, a certain understanding of when the contamination first began, how long it will -- how long it will stay in the environment, and then very localized ideas of either treating the groundwater or containing the groundwater.
And actually because the organizers were so successful on one level in Tucson, they were actually really able to get what at the time was really state of the art, and still is, water remediation facilities, which is very rare for a community of color. The fact that the contaminated groundwater wasn't just -- or the contamination wasn't just contained is like a success in and of itself. And partially, that's because, like Tucson in general, relied solely on groundwater at the time.
So they had a vested interest in trying to treat the groundwater. So, within that frame, there's no addressing of the racism that led to the contamination in the first place. There's no addressing of the colonialism, of the militarism, of the environmental exploitation that led to the contamination in the first place, right? Those aren't the questions that are asked or addressed. So the community on the other hand, right, within three months of forming Tucsonans for a Clean Environment, they were calling for the firing of city officials who had basically made the claim that no one received dangerous levels of contaminants, or if the community was sick, it was basically essentially their own fault. So they called for the resignation of city officials. They called for health studies to be done.
They organized for a lawsuit against the industries. They called for treatment of the aquifer, again, state of the art environmental treatment for the groundwater, but also for aquifer protection, for stronger aquifer and groundwater protection laws, for the remediation facilities to not cause more economic harm in terms of where they were being built in the communities and stuff like that, a reckoning with this history as a representative of Tucson's long, long history of dispossession of the Mexican American community.
And they also called for a health clinic to -- because there was a sense really early on, right, that legal successes wouldn't be enough, right. And that actually, that healthcare was going to be a long, long remaining issue. Oh, and then they also called for an acknowledgement that injuries might not be appearing yet, right, that they might appear in the future. So it's not so much that any one of these in isolation is that unique. But when we think about them all together in this expansive vision of what was being called for, you know, really challenged ideas of, again, like these categories that we kind of take for granted, or timescales that we kind of take for granted.
And I attended a lot of these meetings. There's still these quarterly EPA meetings that happen around the site. And they're hosted by the EPA to check in on the ongoing process of remediation. And it's kind of the one place where people, community can come together, and voice concerns. And so community often does. People will often come and they will try to share their story of experiencing illness, or like the loss of a loved one, or just the devastation on the community, right. And they're often pushed to the sidelines, because that's not what the EPA, that's not what the Superfund program is there to address, right. And I thought that that was really this tragic thing, that there's this one place where people can come together and voice concerns, but it's all about the remediation of the environment, it's not about a remediation, or it's not about both the aquifer and the people, right. But actually, when I looked back on the history of the Superfund program, there was -- initially the idea was that there should be a fund for human -- for communities who are impacted. And of course, that ambitious idea of what it could be was quickly stomped out and taken out of -- taken out of the program.
But like, I think, for me, that was one of these moments where I'm like, oh, the common sense feeling, for lack of an easier way of phrasing it, that people who were impacted feel that like, yes, environmental remediation should also include the human community, like that's actually how the framers of Superfund originally thought about it too, on some level. Maybe not as radically as people on the south side, but to some extent, it was part of that. So these very different kinds of ways of thinking about response and remediation. And I think bringing this site into a broader conversation in terms of what's -- however many, four decades later, this sort of separation is still so prevalent. I think it would be -- it would be my -- I hope that one of the things that my project is doing is adding to the movements, the bodies of work, the research, that's kind of trying to -- and including your podcast, right, including Death Panel -- that's making the case that like, no health is not just an issue that only impacts human beings, right. And environmental remediation isn't an issue that's just over there, right. But that these things really need to be thought about and untangled together.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:20:28
Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is what the sort of core lesson that the book has to offer is I think a place to sort of anchor a political horizon or a way of thinking, of recognizing how the state formation, the extractive political economy of US empire, how this is upheld by this siloing, right. This is how -- it's not like it's a justification, but this is like a medium, right? This is like a material from which the state itself is made, right. And so when we think about the horizon of demands and people start coming in with feasibility arguments and cost-benefit analysis, right, like cost-benefit analysis is how they got that equipment, right, which is that there's this government procedure of deciding, we've decided to translate value through economy, right.
And this is about deliberate choices that we've made as a political legal system, right, that prioritizes things that are productive of debility, not just in the United States, but all over the world. So what I really just appreciated about this book is the time that you can sit with the process of the storytelling of what happened at Hughes, what happened on the south side, the centering and the telling of the story of the organizers themselves, which is so important, and you do with a lot of care.
And I think, again, the kind of vision that we see, when we're talking about like transit accessibility, and I say, oh yeah, Section 504, of the Rehabilitation Act initially was interpreted as a broad mandate that transit was accessible, and the MTA board was like, we're not fucking doing that. And eventually the Reagan administration was like, it's no longer a mandate, it's actually just a try your best kind of recommendation, right. And so, this is the kind of jockeying, the legal jockeying that we're seeing around abortion in the United States, around access to pharmaceuticals, around the cost of who's gonna pay for something like Medicare for All, right? We couldn't possibly eliminate debt, right.
And so when we start to see how these separate silos are actually imbricated into these various pathways of extraction, your book, I think, offers disability as a methodology for examining and mapping these pathways of extraction within not just the US state formation, but within the broad approach to ecology that is the dominant global way of thinking through it, right. This is not just like a model of greenwashing that's specific to the United States, right. This is something that has been reproduced.
Sunaura Taylor 1:23:43
Absolutely, yeah. I so appreciate all of that. And on one level, what I hope with this book is simply that it kind of opens up more of a conversation around what disability is doing, what work disability is doing in these kinds of -- well, explicitly for me, in the environmental arena, right, but also within these kinds of logics that's siloing things off from each other, right, or within these ways in which health becomes an alibi for all sorts of different kinds of violent, extractivist and racist projects, right. But again, one of the things that I find most helpful or generative about disability is the really -- on some level, really simple idea that disability and health and illness are political, right?
And it's like surprising and amazing how often they are just that weird magic of individuating and naturalizing illness and disability happens and when it's -- when we leave these things depoliticized, then we can't -- then it's so hard to recognize that. And so this is all just kind of a long way of saying that on a really basic level, I hope that this book can just help start politicizing the way in which disability and health and illness function in an environmental context, right. And when I say environmental, I kind of mean everything, because environmental context is like everything, but we can't separate it from all these other kinds of dynamics that are happening. So, yeah, there's just so much, so much room. And so, for me, writing this was kind of felt -- and I think probably every author feels this about their book, but I felt so overwhelmed, because I was like, I can't write, and I can't research all the things that I feel like could be in here.
There's so many paths. Like the whole conclusion is essentially paths, trails that I don't go down, you know? I really hope that more -- that there can be more disabled scholars, more people with critical disability perspectives and analysis, who are coming into -- to do all sorts of environmental work, whether we're talking about climate adaptation, or forestry or soil health, or whatever it is, biodiversity loss, because I think people who have that perspective can then help politicize where it is already in these fields and maybe is being unaddressed or where the -- or where these sort of ableist ecologies are being perpetuated, right?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:26:34
Yes, absolutely. And I really so much have also just appreciated getting the chance to talk to you at length about this project, which I've been waiting for -- for a couple of years, and was really excited for this. And it's always good when something lives up to your hype and your expectations. But it really does feel cool to just -- there are so many people doing work right now. I'm just thinking of even some recent episodes we've been having with other emerging Disability Studies scholars, who are just doing cool work right now, like Jiya that I shouted out earlier about Bhopal, Micah Khater that we had on the show as well recently, who's a historian who's awesome.
Sunaura Taylor 1:27:16
Micah, who's also at UC Berkeley.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:27:17
Yes. Yeah, exactly. And there's like a whole, I think, wonderful group of people who are thinking through these political economies and instrumentations of disability within all sorts of modes of extraction, that we haven't necessarily all been thinking together explicitly, right. But there are so many people who are coming at this from different angles, even without disability studies. I'm thinking about Kathryn Olivarius' Necropolis, right, which is also telling a story of state abandonment and cost-benefit analysis before that was ever formalized, way before that was a formalized concept. But these are the logics of the state and disability is part of that logic, right. And this book, I think, is a wonderful project. And thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about it. And also for all of the work that went into this and all the care.
Sunaura Taylor 1:28:16
Oh, well, thank you so much. And I just -- working on a book for so long is also kind of terrifying, because you're like, is this going to be relevant in a decade when it's finally done. And I think at a certain point, you kind of have to let that go and just be like it is what it is. But I've been really happy so far by the welcome that it's received, and that Death Panel has been part of that. So thank you so much.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:28:44
Again, Sunaura's book is Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert. And patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. We couldn't do any of this without you. To support the show and get access to the second weekly bonus episode, and entire back catalogue of bonus episodes, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_.
Patrons, we'll catch you Monday in the patron feed. For everyone else, we'll catch you later next week.
As always, Medicare for All now. Solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.
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