“The age of disability”

We keep needing new metaphors to help us awaken to our times and to our leadings, to. maintain the sense of urgency and to renew our capacity for service, for compassion, for grief, and for love.

I have been reading Naomi Klein’s remarkable recent book Doppleganger, and through it was introduced to a valuable essay by Sunaura Taylor, “Age of disability” in Orion. Here is the quote that caught my attention:

…for many ecosystems, creatures, and people on this planet, the coming decades of environmental crises will stretch not only toward death or health, but also something else—something impaired, precarious, dependent, filled with loss and struggle, requiring assistance, accommodation, and creative forms of care.

As a disabled person I recognize this as disability. Although past environmental movements in this country often focused on the protection of landscapes understood as pristine, untouched, and wild, today those fighting for the environment work with an understanding that nature has been altered and damaged in profound and serious ways. What we live with in the present and will for decades to come, even under the best-case scenarios, is mass ecological disablement of the more than human world, a disablement that is utterly entangled with the disablement of human beings. Given this, it seems vital to consider what forms of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability will require.

Find it here.