“The word disability is most often invoked in an environmental context as a harrowing consequence of environmental harm— the biological impact of toxic waste, polluted water, and chemical poisoning on the human body.
Although such analysis is vital, it sits in tension with how disability activists and critical disability perspectives have largely framed disability over the past three decades: as a political identity, and as an integral part of the human condition that is fundamentally shaped by cultural, economic and historical circumstances, one that has generative and worldmaking aspects.
As people, animals, and ecosystems across the world increasingly experience the disabling impacts of the climate crisis, mass extinction, and the chronic effects of decades-old contamination, it seems more important than ever to ask what we can learn from both of these understandings of disability together.”