Jay Sibara (editor) - Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Towards an Eco-Crip Theory

Stacy Alaimo

While we might wish that all our ethical and political commitments would align and become so beautifully articulated as to be inseparable and synergistic, it is nonetheless often the case that historically rooted discursive and ideological formations mean that ethics, politics, and scholarship take place within more messy, vexed, and contradictory terrains.Elizabeth A. Wheeler, in her essay in this collection, notes the devastating, even genocidal history of comparing people with disabilities to animals, which makes alliances between disability rights and animal rights as well as disability studies and animal studies terribly overburdened. And yet the work of Sunaura Taylor, Temple Grandin, Dawn Prince-Hughes, and others intrepidly fosters multispecies relations. In the pages that follow, Anthony J. Nocella II advocates for a philosophy of eco-ability, which brings together disability theory, animal advocacy, and ecology. The account of his own protests against dolphin captivity provides a striking example.

Projects that seek to connect disability studies with animal studies and environmentalism are often fraught, as such alignments are hardly natural but must instead be constructed and reconstructed through multiple positions, critiques, and rearticulations. It could even be the case that the conflicts arise not just from a lack of attention or a lack of dialogue but from more obdurate differences based in constitutive exclusions and overdetermined histories. Critiquing the values of stability and integrity in Aldo Leopolds Sand Country Almanac, a classic in environmental studies, with its influential concept of the land ethic, Kim Q. Hall writes that the devaluation of impurity and changing bodies and places... has informed heteronormativity, classism, racism, ableism, and sexism. Even if we shift our attention from canonical texts of environmental ethics to more contemporary environmental justice paradigms, we find that they are propelled by the ideal of natural, healthy bodies. Valerie Ann Johnson notes in her reprinted essay, Those of us in the environmental justice community are not immune to our societys standards of health, beauty, and normality. Indeed illness and disability may be evidence that environmental injustice has occurred. Jina Kim, in Cripping East Los Angeles, writes, While studies of environmental racism invariably reference disability to denote environmental harm, few if any address the phenomenon from a critical disability perspective.

Examining the physical and the conceptual in/accessibility of environments, environmentalism, and environmental studies is one starting point for cripping environmental studies and forging alliances between the fields. Starting from the other direction, disability studies could be enriched by attending to multispecies perspectives and ecological systems. Sarah Gibbons, for example, suggests an alliance between the environmental value of biodiversity and the concept of neurodiversity in her essay discussing the disconnect... between the concern that environmentalists express for rising diagnoses of autism and the struggle for equal rights for those with autism. Biodiversity, which remains rather problematic as a scientific category, is nonetheless invaluable during this era of the Sixth Great Extinction. Biodiversity stresses the value of each species but also insists that diversity is crucial for the workings of broader ecological systems. Siobhan Senier argues in her essay on blind Indians that for the most thoughtful scholars in environmental humanities, disability studies, and indigenous studies, systems are critically important. Senier explains that sustainability science and indigenous ecological knowledge enable us to understand these systems, insisting, however, that indigenous knowledge is utterly intertwined with indigenous sovereignty and not a free-floating commodity, ready to be lifted by settler colonials when they feel in crisis. Indigenous thought, environmental studies, and disability studies converge within epistemologies that are immersed, entangled, embodied, and political. Similarly posthumanisms, new materialisms, and ecomaterialisms may help crip the environmental humanities and extend disability studies beyond the anthropocentric as they traverse human/nonhuman divides, emphasize interactive material agencies, and encourage us to consider the human as part of assemblages with nonhuman species, as well as with technologies, substances, and prosthetics. Wheelers beautiful essay, Moving Together Side by Side: Human-Animal Comparisons in Picture Books, which concludes this collection, calls for a prosthetic community, a cluster of living beings, ideas, resources, and objects that enable disabled childrens full inclusion.

Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities takes on the difficult challenge of working within both of these fields, putting forth multiple ways of critiquing, accessing, and recasting natural and cultural worlds. Many of the essays within this wide-ranging volume grapple with volatile conflicts and contradictions that are not readily resolved. Indeed, the epistemologies, ontologies, politics, and trajectories of disability studies and the environmental humanities often diverge. But it is precisely these bold attemptsthat refuse ready answersthat make this volume so significant, positioning it as an invaluable point of departure for further scholarship. Referencing Jack Halberstams model of unlearning, or negative forms of knowing, Jasbir Puar states that disability studies is already successful in this vein, undoing conventional ways of knowing and knowledge of the body, of capacities, of human and species variation. But she proposes something wilder: an overwhelming of modes of knowing such that what constitutes knowing itself becomes confused, disoriented, dissembled.an individually economically quantifiable toxic condition. While I disagree that toxicity itself is not a problem, the way toxicity leaks and disperses in metaphorical and discursive directions remains an issue for many intersectional political struggles. Natasha Simpson analyzes the intersectional quandaries in the food justice movement. The food justice movement is rightfully meant to center the experiences of poor communities of color; however, it also often centers specific notions of health, which can limit its relevance and impact for people with disabilitiesparticularly those with multiple oppressed identities. These essays challenge us to unlearn fundamental conceptions of toxicity and health, calling us to imagine how other key terms could be recast as part of new political movements attuned, simultaneously, to disability, environmentalism, and environmental justice.