Disability studies and the environmental humanities: toward an eco-crip theory

The signs that disability studies and environmental humanities should be considered alongside one another have been increasingly easy to see. A quick scan of recent activity includes: the Society for Disabilities Studies Conference of 2014 on the topic of Sustainability; the 2013 volume of journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment including a special section on disability and ecocriticism; panels at the 2013 American Studies Association Conference on ‘Climate Debt as Disability’; and in 2016 the Composing Disabilities Conference at George Washington University had as its theme ‘Crip Ecologies.’ But Disabilities Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-crip Theory edited by Ray and Sibara is the first substantial effort to bring together essays that explicitly seek out the intersections between environmental and ecological humanities, and the constructs surrounding disability. The book is a sprawling, ambitious, deeply exciting collection that delivers, in sum, far more than the collection of its parts.

As Stacy Alaimo notes in her excellent foreword to this collection, the separation between environmental humanities and disability studies is ‘hardly a neutral oversight’ as most environmental studies posit an ‘abled, hyperfit body’ as the ‘natural, healthy’ human body, and position this body in the center of that field’s critical thinking. As Matthew J. C. Cella puts it, ‘the work of negotiating a “habitable body” and “habitable world” go hand in hand’ (169). Disabilities studies theorists, including Alaimo, have long suggested that the body cannot be considered as separate from their environmental, social, cultural, and historical contexts. Similarly, environmental humanities examine the impact of physical landscapes, and physical and mental bodies; a section of this collection is dedicated toward exploring the alteration of the environment by the military industrial complex.

Illness and disability are often considered signs that environmental damage has occurred – evidence of lead poisoning resulting in developmental disabilities, for example – while a physically disabled body is often understood to be alienated from nature, even while cognitive and intellectual disabilities have been understood to mean more natural (and less capable) than normative body/mind. The ‘natural world’ and the disabled body/mind are thus often estranged; disability, disease, and environmental degradation are often fused. This is a tension that the essays found here both expose and strain to integrate. As Eli Clare asks in his essay ‘Notes on Natural Worlds’: ‘How do we witness, name, and resist the injustices that reshape and damage all kinds of bodies … [while making] peace with the reshaped and damaged bodies themselves, [cultivating] love and respect for them?’ (252).

The book is organized into two large sections: ‘Foundations’ (essays drawn from earlier publications) and ‘New Essays’ (written for this anthology). To list the five sections of essays found in ‘New Essays’ is to show how ambitious this collection is: ‘Corporeal Legacies of U.S. Nation-Building’ and ‘(Re)producing Toxicity’ are two essays which examine reproductive and environmental justice issues through a disability studies lens; ‘Food Justice’ and ‘Curing Crips? Narratives of Health and Space’ examine the way landscapes themselves have been seen as ‘invalid/in-valid’ or used in the pursuit of ‘cure’; and ‘Interspecies and Interage Identifications’ considers the way disabled people (particularly autistic people) are often rhetorically linked with non-humans.

While any of the essays found here could be included within the syllabus at either the graduate or undergraduate level, several essays in this collection deserve special note. Eli Clare was one of the first critical thinkers to explicitly examine notions about disabled body/mind within contemporary reflections of natural/unnatural environments. HIs work and influence on other writers, including his contribution to this collection, shows throughout. Mel Y. Chen’s essay ‘Lead’s Racial Matters,’ which initially appeared in Chen’s book Animacies (2012), is another major contribution to the field. Of the new essays, Matthew J. C. Cella’s fascinating essay ‘The Ecosomatic Paradigm in Literature: Merging Disability Studies and Ecocriticism’ deserves recognition. Alison Kafer’s excellent essay ‘Bodies of Nature: The Environmental Politics of Disability’ observes that both stairs and ramps are accommodations, although for different types of bodies, and asks the reader to consider how ‘compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindness [shape] not only the environments of our lives … .but our very understandings of the environment itself?’ (203). Julie Sadler writes of ‘War Contaminants and Environmental Justice,’ a thoughtful essay that rests easily alongside Mel Y. Chen’s work as it examines both the hypervisibility and invisibility of disabled people, and the hazards of reading disability as metaphor in the context of war-torn Iraq. Anita Mannur examines what is commonly referred to as ‘That Night’ – 3 December 1984, the night of the chemical disaster in Bhopal which resulted in the death of 20% of its population. Using two works of fiction (Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2009) and Amulya Malladi’s A Breath of Fresh Air (2003)) similarly complicates the prevalence of using images of disability to represent the nation-state.

The hardback book is printed in a font (FS Me by L. Auten) designed to be accessible to many readers, and on high-quality paper. Disabilities Studies and the Environmental Humanities is available in hardcover and ebook, and soon in a more affordable paperback volume. This collection would be appropriate for undergraduate or graduate courses in a variety of disciplines. Highly recommended.

Carolyn Ogburn
University of North Carolina – Asheville, NC, USA
[email protected]
© 2018 Carolyn Ogburn
https://doi.org//10.1080/09687599.2018.1443589