Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert"With breath-catching insight and enveloping compassion, Sunaura Taylor shares a secret of epochal urgency: people living with injury and impairment have much to teach about how to survive, and perhaps even thrive, on an injured and impaired planet."—Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger A powerful analysis and call to action that reveals disability as one of the defining features of environmental devastation and resistance. Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Sunaura Taylor takes us with her to follow the site's disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered. What Taylor finds is a story of entanglements that reach far beyond the Sonoran Desert. These stories tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, but they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement, Disabled Ecologies is a powerful call to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires. |
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ableist accessed March activists agencies Air Force Plant Anthropocene aquifer archive Arizona Daily Star Arizona Department ATSDR bodies cancer chemicals Chiro City of Tucson Clean Environment Climate Change community members Crip decades desert disability justice Disability Studies disabled ecologies disease dumping economic ecosystems environmental justice environmental racism Force Plant 44 groundwater harm health studies Hughes Aircraft human hydrologist Ibid Image credit impacts impaired Indigenous industry injury International Airport Area interview James Lemmon Jane Kay Kafer lagoons land landscape living more-than-human National nature O’odham officials Oral History origin stories PFAS Pima County plume political pollution Project public health racial Raśl Grijalva Refer remediation responsible risk ronmental Rose Augustine San Xavier Santa Cruz River scholar social Source southside southside community southside organizers southside’s Superfund TCE contamination Three Hangars TIAA tion Tohono O’odham toxic treatment Trichloroethylene Tucson International Airport Tucson Water Tucson Weekly Tucsonans UCAB waste writes