Crip Intimacy and Aquifer Entanglements: a Conversation with Sunaura Taylor

How can disability and illness function differently in how we think about environmental justice? How can we bring disability into focus as a crucial access point for thinking about more livable futures for all? In November 2024, it was my privilege to converse with Sunaura Taylor, author of the book Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert, which came out in May 2024 from University of California Press.

In our conversation, Taylor tells the story of the Tucson aquifer, and describes a crip kinship with the expansive ecological water system flowing beneath her wheels. She describes an ethics of “living with”: challenging ableist ecologies and the logic of abandonment, arguing that people with disabilities already demonstrate “lives well lived” and are necessary knowledge makers and keepers in creating new forms of solidarity, community, and care. As she digs into the archives and speaks to members of the Indigenous and largely Mexican-American communities that have felt the shared impacts of an injured landscape, Taylor puts forth an “environmentalism of the injured,” and bridges human and nature in a call for a future focused on caring for multispecies disability.

Stream or download our conversation here.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kate Phelps: I thought we could begin where you begin, with this key word of “origins.” Could you share about that “origins” experience of returning to the Sonoran Desert after so many years, and that feeling of solidarity with the water that you express?

Sunaura Taylor: The idea of origin plays a really important role within environmental questions, like the origin of pollution and the origin of environmental disasters. It also does within disability studies: the origin of individual experiences of disabilities or the origin of ableism in society.

Within disability studies and disability communities, there has been pushback against “origin stories” of people’s individual disabilities. People push back against this public perception that people have a right to know what happened to you. There’s also this separation and focus on differences that can happen when you focus on the origin of disabilities instead of a variety of experiences and limitations to living in a discriminatory society.

But undoubtedly the most personal place where “origin” enters into this text is that I’m telling the story of pollution and weapons industry contamination on the south side of Tucson, Arizona, that occurred from the 1950s through with the 1970s—contamination that I was raised understanding was likely the origin of my disability.

My own origin story is so inseparable from the project in part because it offered me ways of thinking about two of the central concepts of the book.

One of the concepts is disability. I had from an early age an understanding that disability was not a personal, medical problem, but that disability is political. Disability could be caused by systems of harm—by military, extraction, and racism. I didn’t quite have the language for those things, but I understood that my disability was caused by something that was unjust. I also understood that disability didn’t just impact me, that disability impacted a whole community. It’s a political dynamic.

I also had early on an understanding that nature isn’t just something separate from us—that human beings are utterly entangled with nature.

These concepts shaped my childhood. So, when I first started thinking about bringing together environmental issues and questions of disability, it made sense to me to go to the origins of these two concepts. That’s ultimately what brought me back to Tucson after living away for more than three decades.

The book is trying to offer us a language for talking about human and environmental injury together, to offer us the language for thinking through injury to nature and injury to people. One of the ways that I personally felt that was that the aquifer itself that had been contaminated by the weapons industry was also harmed. This aquifer was disabled kin who I felt a sense of solidarity with.

KP: You speak to this idea of “environmentalism of the injured,” which challenges ableist ecologies. What would you like readers to take away about these relationships among humans and animals and nature, and how injury environmentalism can counter ableist logics?

ST:  So, in many ways [Tucsonians for a Clean Environment] is a success story. But the pathways for a “just” response are often situated as either legal pathways: litigation or remediation. These pathways, even in successful cases like Tucson, really don’t address the expanse of the harm done, including the future.

In the litigation, for example, it couldn’t be a class action lawsuit because there were too many different kinds of illnesses and disabilities. Many people didn’t sign onto the lawsuit because they weren’t sick, and then decades later, they became sick. The temporality of illness—of the way in which toxicity works on the body—doesn’t fit into this perfect legal temporality.

This is such a typical story. So some of the questions that I’m interested in is: what happens in a successful case when the journalists leave, when the lawyers leave, when it’s just people continuing to live with injury?

There’s something important about “living with” that is important for us in this moment of extreme environmental crises. How do we live with this? How do we fight the things that cause it, but also, how do we live in injury and disability?

Disability is a material, embodied experience that people live with. But disability is also a concept that shapes our world in profound and complicated ways—ways that are always entangled with other concepts that shape our identities, bodies, lives, and politics: race, gender, ecetera.

Disability is already everywhere, and yet it’s unmarked and depoliticized. Terms related to disability—like health, illness, independence, and weakness—are everywhere within the environmental arena, but they’re unmarked.

We talk of the health of our soils, rivers, forests. What do we mean by health? What are the politics behind health? It’s important that we mark where disability is being utilized as a concept so that we can ask if it is being utilized in service of fear-mongering eugenics, for what I call ableist ecologies.

Disability is used as a fear-mongering tool when it is used not to ask how we can make life more livable for the disabled people humans, non-humans, and environments, but to shore up and protect our resources and the borders of able-bodied individuals or communities. This is so entangled with the ways in which environmentalism can be utilized in racist, xenophobic language and policies that we’re seeing so much of now.

I want to politicize and mark disability so that we can see when is it being used in that way—and when it is being used in what I call an “environmentalism of the injured.” Not creating separation or emphasizing fear, but coming from the injured themselves. I see environmental justice as an incredible example of this—people whose modes of organizing very often emerges from experiencing racialized disability.

I relate environmentalism of the injured to resisting abandonment. It’s a politics of, not romanticizing disability, but of building a world that acknowledges that we live in vulnerable bodies and vulnerable environments. What structures of support and systems of care do we need to develop?

KP: You explore the connection between rugged individualism, the eugenicist imagination, and National Parks. I would love to hear your thoughts on how the white settler colonial project of the Wilderness exists.

Scholars have laid out this history brilliantly, so one of the things that I wanted to do was show the way in which disability is also part of that conversation.

The eugenicist logics there are one place where you see that really profoundly. What kinds of environments are being protected? What kinds of species are being protected? What are the ideas of strength and independence, and disdain for weak creatures, or for the idea of the already-polluted, weak, feminine environments of the city?

This book is not a romantic celebration of disability. Disability is so often caused by the worst systems of domination and exploitation, like what is happening in Gaza. I have no romantic notion of disablement that is perpetuated by these horrors.

I also am a disabled person who has been in community with other disabled people and understand that disability has generative possibilities, generating other kinds of values—like mutual care or interdependence or starting from a point of the most vulnerable and thinking, “What do we need to make good lives in these conditions of vulnerability?”

I see this as a paradox of disability: disability is caused so often by these horrible systems, and disability can also generate values that can fight those same systems. I think that’s ultimately what I’m trying to look at in this book is how to fold those realities at the same time.

Harriet McBryde Johnson, an amazing disability activist, says that disabled people take conditions that no one would want and make beautiful thriving lives out of them. Under what conditions can we build thriving lives? And how can we also think about how to do that for the more-than-human-world?

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Featured image: “Aquifer Losing Reach,” pen and watercolor on paper. Artwork by Sunaura Taylor, 2020.

Sunaura Taylor is an artist and writer. She is the author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017), which received the 2018 American Book Award. Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets and her artworks have been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. She works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental justice, multispecies studies, and art practice. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book is Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (University of California Press, 2024). Website. Contact.

Dr. Kate Phelps is teaching faculty in the Gender and Women’s Studies department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She teaches body politics, feminist theory, fat studies, food politics, and global health. Their central research interests include body politics, girlhood studies, digital sociology, fat studies, feminist theories, and feminist pedagogies. Her book Digital Girlhoods is coming out in January 2025 from Temple University Press. Website. Contact.