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"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
"Disabled Ecologies is a vital work of scholarship and a rousing call for solidarity between ourselves and the natural environments from which we are inseparable."—Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
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.
"Disabled Ecologies is a vital work of scholarship and a rousing call for solidarity between ourselves and the natural environments from which we are inseparable."—Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
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.
Price: $22.95
Pages: 368
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date:
05 August 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520424692
Format: Paperback
"A well-crafted narrative that focuses on people while drawing important conclusions about the way our relationship to the natural world is hampered by an exploitative mindset and a reluctance to face consequences."
"Disabled Ecologies ultimately urges readers to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment and assistance this age of disability requires."
"In a remarkably fertile inquiry, Taylor takes insights from disability studies and environmental justice and arrives at new revelations that enrich both movements—while also applying far beyond them, to our whole impaired and magnificent planet."
"Disabled Ecologies introduces a new term to the theoretical lexicon. . . . Applying the category of disability to the environment allows Taylor to recognize how human experience is entangled with the nonhuman, which in turn reveals the histories of environmental activism led by disabled activists. A frame of thinking like ‘disabled ecologies’ will be important as climate change promises a future where environmental disability is all around us."
"Disability, animality, and ecology are astutely interconnected and co-produced by existing power relations perpetuated by the capitalist system. Taylor’s analysis makes it clear that the forces of destruction often hide behind the ideology of economic growth."
"Forming an instructive theoretical basis for an ‘environmentalism of the injured,’ Disabled Ecologies is a beautifully written, captivating feat of archival work. Utilizing the networks of disability created by the U.S. military industrial complex, the book proposes ways we might leverage our interconnectedness on local and global levels to resist."
"Disabled Ecologies ultimately urges readers to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment and assistance this age of disability requires."
"In a remarkably fertile inquiry, Taylor takes insights from disability studies and environmental justice and arrives at new revelations that enrich both movements—while also applying far beyond them, to our whole impaired and magnificent planet."
"Disabled Ecologies introduces a new term to the theoretical lexicon. . . . Applying the category of disability to the environment allows Taylor to recognize how human experience is entangled with the nonhuman, which in turn reveals the histories of environmental activism led by disabled activists. A frame of thinking like ‘disabled ecologies’ will be important as climate change promises a future where environmental disability is all around us."
"Disability, animality, and ecology are astutely interconnected and co-produced by existing power relations perpetuated by the capitalist system. Taylor’s analysis makes it clear that the forces of destruction often hide behind the ideology of economic growth."
"Forming an instructive theoretical basis for an ‘environmentalism of the injured,’ Disabled Ecologies is a beautifully written, captivating feat of archival work. Utilizing the networks of disability created by the U.S. military industrial complex, the book proposes ways we might leverage our interconnectedness on local and global levels to resist."
Sunaura Taylor is Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the American Book Award–winning Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Keyword: Origins
Introduction: Age of Disability
Keyword: Ecology
1. Desert Solidarity
Keyword: Aquifer
2. Impaired Landscapes
INTERLUDE: SPECULATIVE AQUIFERS
Keyword: Disability
3. What Happened to You? (And Can You Prove It?)
Keyword: Treatment
4. Treating Disabled Ecologies
Keyword: Environmentalism
5. Environmentalism of the Injured
Conclusion: Living with Injury
Timeline
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Keyword: Origins
Introduction: Age of Disability
Keyword: Ecology
1. Desert Solidarity
Keyword: Aquifer
2. Impaired Landscapes
INTERLUDE: SPECULATIVE AQUIFERS
Keyword: Disability
3. What Happened to You? (And Can You Prove It?)
Keyword: Treatment
4. Treating Disabled Ecologies
Keyword: Environmentalism
5. Environmentalism of the Injured
Conclusion: Living with Injury
Timeline
Bibliography
Index