Green European Journal: Your book Disabled Ecologies looks at a case of groundwater contamination in the southside of Tucson, Arizona, where you were born and returned to as a researcher. Could you briefly recall this history of pollution?

Sunaura Taylor: In the 1940s and 1950s a variety of defence industries moved into Tucson. They established themselves on the southside of the city, which at the time was quite rural and very close to Native land, specifically a Tohono O’odham reservation about a mile away. As soon as these industries opened, they started dumping all sorts of contaminants on the desert ground. The main one was Trichloroethylene (TCE), a solvent used to melt plastic coatings off of new aircraft and other equipment, among other things. The major polluter was Hughes Aircraft, which later became Raytheon, now RTX. They are to this day a huge, extraordinarily powerful producer of all sorts of weapon technologies.

Decades went by, and eventually the contaminants seeped into the groundwater and ended up in people’s wells, in their drinking water. Meanwhile, the area had increased in population and had become predominantly Mexican American, largely due to racist gentrification projects that were happening in other parts of Tucson. A lot of people started becoming sick, with disproportionate numbers of cancers and congenital disabilities. In 1981, the contamination came to light because some wells were tested with high rates of harmful pollutants. The city quietly closed the wells down, but it did nothing to search for the origin and assess the reach of the contamination. By the time the case came into the public spotlight, it had already been about four years since the wells were shut down. When a local investigative journalist, Jane Kay, worked with the community to start exploring these linkages, the story blew up into a large controversy.

The pollution of Tucson’s southside is a story of injustice, but it is also one of community empowerment and action.

Absolutely, and this is something that I was very surprised by. My own personal story is connected to this history: I was raised with the understanding that my own disability was caused by this pollution. But my family and I moved away from the neighbourhood when I was only a few years old, and then from Tucson when I was six. I didn’t really know anything about what had happened later. I knew that there was a lawsuit, which we were a part of. But when I came back to research this history, I discovered an amazing movement, Tucsonans for a Clean Environment (or TCE, named after the main contaminant). It was one of the earliest environmental justice movements in the United States. The group formed in 1985 after Kay’s articles came out. There was this realisation that not only had this pollution been happening for decades, but that the city hadn’t let people know and hadn’t investigated the reach of the contamination. Once it became clear that there were disproportionate rates of illnesses, city officials started blaming the community, saying that their lifestyle and diet made them predisposed to illness. These very racist, ableist accusations were part of what made the community come together in response.

The movement was remarkably successful from the beginning. It managed to secure state-of-the-art treatment for the aquifer [the body of rock and/or sediment that holds groundwater], which for a community of colour, especially in the 1980s, was extraordinarily challenging. They also advocated for a health clinic, which they managed to obtain, even if it didn’t last that long. The community had an expansive vision of justice – one that was directed towards both care for the land and the aquifer, and care for people.

It seems to be more than your biography that drives you to Tucson’s southside. What is it in this story that makes it particularly significant?

Disabled Ecologies is not a memoir or an autobiography, and it doesn’t come from a desire to tell my own story. What my story gave me, however, even as a kid, was a particular way of understanding both disability and nature. Throughout my life, I have understood disability not as an individual problem or simply my own medical problem, but as something political, something that can emerge from sites of harm and exploitation and can impact a whole community. I also understood nature as something that is not separate from human beings. Injury to the environment is injury to people.

Throughout my life, I have understood disability not as an individual problem but as something that can impact a whole community.

Later, in my 20s, when I came across the critical disability community, I discovered an understanding of disability as something generative, a site of value-making, an integral part of life. The paradox of disability is that it can be caused by profound harm and exploitation, and at the same time the values that emerge from disability can be utilised to fight those same systems of harm. Those concepts and that paradox are essentially what all of my work is about. I wanted to write a book about these ideas, but I needed to ground them somewhere. And at some point it just dawned on me that I needed to root them in Tucson. It’s the site that I have some connection to, it felt like a much more ethical thing to do than to randomly choose some other place.

On some level, this site is interesting because it’s so typical: complete disregard for human and non-human life by war industries and corporations in general, racist responses by the authorities, and inspiring movements for environmental justice are things that can be found the world over. Often these histories are told up to the point where the community receives some sort of environmental remediation or there’s a lawsuit. For me, the main questions are: How do we live with the consequences of multispecies disablement? How do we stay with injury while challenging the systemic violence that can cause it? I believe that we can learn something from communities who were injured decades ago, and have been living with injury ever since.

You describe this aftermath as an “Age of Disability”. What do you mean by that?

There is a lot of conversation around this geologic epoch that human beings have created, and whether it should be called the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or Racial Capitalocene, for example. I think a lot with that literature, but what I wanted to get to with “Age of Disability” is not necessarily what has caused this epoch but what is left by it.

Racial capitalism, settler colonialism, war industries, and the climate and extinction crises are all mass-disabling structures and events. Extinction is often thought about in terms of the death of species. But what happens if we start looking at the intermediate stages before disappearance? Illness, disease, injury: experienced at all levels, by individual animals, animal communities, the ecosystems and multispecies networks they are a part of. My argument is that even nonliving entities like the groundwater are experiencing or dealing with something akin to disability. That’s not just a metaphor, but a material reality.

This sounds harrowing, but I am a little hopeful too, because environmental and disability justice communities show us that there are ways of living thriving lives with disability, while also fighting the very forces that are perpetuating violence and harm.

So an Age of Disability is quite literally naming a material reality. It’s also about the fact that disability and illness will increasingly become powerful signifiers. These concepts can either be exploited for fear-mongering and exclusion or, if we demand it, used to promote anti-ableist responses to ecological harm. My book is trying to help us envision the latter.

Environmental and disability justice communities show us that there are ways of living thriving lives with disability, while also fighting the very forces that are perpetuating violence and harm.

By talking about injury as a generalised condition, don’t we risk losing sight of responsibilities? Aren’t we blurring the lines between victims and perpetrators?

That’s a broader challenge in the climate conversation too. Whether you are a billionaire or an inhabitant of a small island that is under existential threat from sea level rise, you are going to be impacted by climate change. Yet there’s no comparison between the two situations. Pointing out that no one is immune to the impacts of certain dynamics, such as chemical contaminants or a changing climate, is not the same thing as saying that everybody is experiencing that equally.

But I could see the risk there. The challenge is to always centre those who are most impacted, and a disability lens is helpful with that, too. One of the deep challenges of capitalism is that it can co-opt language and ideas so easily. I’m thinking of language around climate adaptation, for example. How that kind of language can then be utilised as an argument that “Oh well ecosystems will adapt,” or that we don’t have to worry about structural change, because technology will save us by adapting to the impacts of climate change. I think this is a challenge for all of us, to always stay one step ahead of the way that our own ideas are being twisted.

The ethics of care and mutual solidarity of the southside’s community stands in contrast with an ethics of abandonment. The latter is embodied by billionaires dreaming of leaving our damaged Earth, but also by the creation of sacrifice zones of extraction and pollution.

Abandonment is an ableist response to injury – consider the communities who have lived for decades with the effects of environmental racism, and no just response. Or those communities that have experienced extreme weather events, have lost everything, and yet are left on their own to rebuild. Or the millions of people who are climate refugees, who have nowhere to go. Abandonment comes from billionaires and corporations, of course, it comes from neoliberal policies. Fascist-xenophobic responses to injury and vulnerability clearly discard and villainise those who are most harmed by structural violence and climate change. But we can see a fear of or disdain for disability even at times in more progressive perspectives, utilising stereotypes and fearmongering over disability in ways that do not actually help, support, or bring justice to those already harmed.

Of course, there are very legitimate and understandable reasons why people fear illness, disability, and injury. To me, the challenge should be how to challenge the structures and systems perpetuating harm while working to create an anti-ableist world that is liveable for those who are already injured.

As disability activist Harriet McBryde Johnson puts it, people take conditions that nobody would want and make liveable lives out of them. This could be true of many different kinds of communities who have experienced harm – refugees who have faced discrimination, or communities who have been impacted by climate disasters, for example. They have no other choice than to figure out how to live their lives, and so they come together and do just that.

The environmental movement sometimes regards the climate crisis as a binary between a healthy planet and complete extinction, some sort of climate apocalypse. What you seem to suggest with the “Age of Disability” is that we should prepare for something in between those two extremes.

Yes, there’s too often this apocalyptic idea of an end of nature or the death of the planet on one side, and on the other the idea of saving the planet by returning to a state of pristine, undamaged nature. Of course, I am among those who hope that we can save the planet, but I don’t have a fantasy that we will ever return to some unharmed state of nature. Even if we somehow stopped all fossil fuel emissions now, we would be living with the consequences of what has happened to our ecosystems for generations. Over the past few years, we have crossed several planetary boundaries from which there is no going back. So the sense that there is no simple return has become more widespread. My work tries to add to that conversation.

But I also want to avoid the narrative that we are all fucked and the inevitable future is a sort of macho, survival-of-the-fittest resource grab. This message often entails giving up on the fight against polluting industries and other structures of power and oppression, while also perpetuating the idea that the vulnerable, the poor, sick and disabled just won’t have a place in the future. I refuse that future. I want to envision a future where care and interdependence have become our survival tools.

You mentioned climate adaptation earlier. Is it a useful concept to think of the challenge ahead?

When done well, adaptation can be a great tool that does not have to signal that we are going to be any less fierce in our fight against corporate destruction of the planet. It just signals that we are being real, that adaptation (something disabled people are experts in) is necessary.

But climate adaptation can also be very corporate, unimaginative, and non-transformative, so it is essential to emphasise that adaptation has to include broader social justice reforms, such as housing, health care, public transport, economic transformation, support for those most harmed. A lot of progressive movements do understand that, including many fighting for a robust Green New Deal in the US – they are looking at how all these dynamics fit together. But I’m not sure how often adaptation studies as a field and adaptation projects that are implemented really centre these broader transformations. Again, I think that there’s a lot of potential, but that like so many other things there’s a sort of corporate stranglehold on the implementation of these ideas.

If disability could be brought more into the climate conversation, it would expose all the different issues that adaptation should be incorporating.

I would also add that seeing these entanglements through the lens of disability is useful, because disabled people are a community with extraordinarily varying needs, who are also some of the poorest and most disenfranchised communities. If disability could be brought more into the climate conversation, it would expose all these different issues that adaptation should be incorporating. I’m not a climate or adaptation expert, but I know from my colleagues in the field – and honestly just from the profoundly inadequate response to disability during disasters – that the conversation around disability in adaptation is still extremely thin. This urgently needs to change.

A recurring argument against intersectional approaches is that they might divide the climate movement or dilute its message. Especially younger generations are seen as more likely to mobilise around single issues rather than broader political agendas.

I would push back against this idea. I think the opposite is true. Younger generations understand that issues are connected. I teach young people and what I see is the opposite of single-issue thinking. I am skewed, of course, because I teach folks who are already interested in social justice issues. But the intersectional analysis that my students are capable of is really amazing. They don’t have patience for single-issue thinking.

How I think about this is that historically, promoting divisions has been the tactic adopted by corporations and conservative movements to gain strength and momentum. There are plenty of examples of corporations or governments funding infighting among groups so that they won’t see the reasons to work with each other. If this separation benefits those who are causing harm, then clearly what they are afraid of is people building coalition and solidarity. I am convinced that we need to build alliances, and see our issues as connected.

My sister, Astra Taylor, just co-authored an amazing book on solidarity. In my work, I am making the case for intersectional approaches. For example, in my first book and articles I’ve written with Astra, I argue that animal rights movements should be more attentive to a broader intersectional analysis and situate their demands within the framework of left-leaning politics. And Disabled Ecologies is fundamentally about seeing human wellbeing as inseparable from the wellbeing of our fellow creatures and ecosystems – challenging the exploitative systems that injure all of us, not to flatten our experiences, but to show the profound and violent reach of these systems that we need to fight against.

When sites of contamination are discovered, the official narrative is usually that “we didn’t know better back then”. Have we learned anything from cases like the pollution of Tucson’s aquifer?

There have been lots of successes, and celebrating them is important, because each success – each piece of environmental legislation, each regulation – is so difficult to achieve. Yet I don’t think we have learned much. We are still stuck with the narrative that if we have the right science, if we get the information out enough, rational people will do the right thing. The request of Tucson’s harmed community – and more recently of the youth climate movement – to trust the science is profoundly important because those in power aren’t taking scientific evidence seriously.

We are still stuck with the narrative that if we have the right science, if we get the information out enough, rational people will do the right thing.

But the problem is that one can always request more science (as the polluters always do), move the goalpost further, and say that we need more information before being able to prove that a chemical or climate change is dangerous, for example. What we are seeing even more intensely now than in the 1980s is that we have incredible science and arguments for why we should change course, but the power and wealth of multinational corporations have only gotten stronger. This is ultimately where my pessimism comes from in this question – the power inequality has gotten worse, and no amount of science is going to convince those people to change, because it’s not about evidence, it’s about power and profit. It’s in their benefit to not change anything, to keep extracting.

Disabled Ecologies starts in Tucson and ends up in Yemen. What’s the thread that connects those two places?

The idea of disabled ecologies is on some level a mapping project. As I learned about the contamination in Tucson, I found that the easiest way to understand this history was to essentially follow the trails of disability – how the pollution produced by weapons manufacturers entered the human community, endangered non-human animals, and injured ecosystems. But there were also other trails that I could follow, whether they were conceptual or material. One of those trails, perhaps the most obvious one, is the fact that the same defence industry that was polluting the groundwater in Tucson was also building missiles to be used all over the world. I recount the episode of a bomb that was dumped on a group of people in Yemen while they were trying to dig a well. That bomb was made at Raytheon, on the southside of Tucson.

Defence industries are extreme examples because they essentially profit off of disablement and death. You can see that trail of injury in Gaza right now: How many of the weapons that are being used against Palestinians are built in Tucson?

The same industry that harmed people 40 years ago in Tucson is still harming people across the world. But in these trails of injury that cross expanses of time and place, I also see a reason for solidarity and connection.