Upstream - [TEASER] Disabled Ecologies w/ Sunaura Taylor

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

This is a free preview of the episode "Disabled Ecologies w/ Sunaura Taylor." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you. Disability is a state, or an idea, or a process even that is often associated with human beings—somebody becomes “disabled” or is experiencing “disability.” We don’t typically attach this state of being or this process to things other than human beings, much less to, say, geological formations. When is the last time you heard somebody refer to a contaminated body of water as “being disabled?” But utilizing the language and framing of disability when thinking about the impacts of capitalism and imperialism on our bodies and our biosphere is not just a useful exercise—it’s a profound and crucial analysis.  The story that we tell in this episode is one of disabled ecologies and has its origins deep beneath the ground in Tucson, Arizona—but it stretches all across the globe, from Gaza to Yemen to Korea—from the cells in our bodies to the water that lives in aquifers many feet below the ground. And really, the story doesn’t actually originate in Arizona—it begins somewhere in Europe sometime between the 12th to 16th centuries, during the dawn of capitalism. But that’s a different story for a different time.  To tell the story and concept of disabled ecologies—a story of the web of interconnection between humans and the more-than-human world—we’ve brought on Sunaura Taylor. Sunaura is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, a critical disability scholar and activist, an artist, and the author of two books: Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, published by The New Press, and, most recently, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert, published by University of California Press.   In this episode we tell the story of Tucson, Arizona’s aquifer and how it came to be contaminated by the US military. We trace the contours of death and destruction from the water beneath Tucson’s Southside neighborhood to the bodies living above it, from the chemicals that disabled ecosystems in Arizona and to the bombs drenched in those chemicals that were dropped on people across the Global South. We explore disability politics, environmental racism, classism, and the importance of organizing. And we celebrate the wins and the successes—not yet complete—of those in Tucson, Arizona who are taking on the capitalist state machinery to fight for justice and personal, community, and ecological healing. Further resources: Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert Nature is Disappearing: The Average Size of Wildlife Populations has Fallen by a Staggering 73% Related episodes: Breaking the Chains of Empire w/ Abby Martin (Live Show) Health Communism with Beatrice Adler-Bolton Terra Viva with Vandana Shiva Cover art: Sunaura Taylor Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Hi, everyone. Della here with a quick announcement before we start the episode. You may have noticed that you haven't been seeing our posts in your Instagram feed, or that you can't share our stories or any other number of weird restrictions on the app. And this is because we've been heavily shadow banned. Ever since we started posting about Palestine, Meta has restricted our account. But now it's gotten so bad that we're generally reaching less than a quarter of the people that we used to.

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you enjoy this conversation. One of the goals of the book is to give us a language. As my attempt, my offering of a language that gets at injuries to nature and human beings as being really inseparable. And so for me, disabled ecologies is the language that I landed on. And I think one of the easiest ways for me to kind of describe how I think about disabled ecologies is really as a mapping project, right? A web is a good metaphor, right? A network is a good metaphor. But like, actually literally mapping out the injuries that emerge from these, whether they're pollutants, whether they are extractive industries, whatever they are,

mapping out these injuries that emerge from these sites of harm. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Disability is a state or an idea or a process even that is often associated with human beings.

Somebody becomes disabled or is experiencing disability. We don't typically attach the state of being or this process to things other than human beings, much less to say geological formations. When is the last time you heard somebody refer to a contaminated body of water as being disabled? But utilizing the language and framing of disability when thinking about the impacts of capitalism and imperialism on our bodies and our biosphere is not just a useful exercise,

it's a profound and crucial analysis. The story that we tell in this episode is one of disabled ecologies, and it has its origins deep beneath the ground in Tucson, Arizona, but stretches all across the globe, from Gaza to Yemen to Korea, from the cells in our bodies to the water that lives in the aquifers many feet below the ground.

And really, it doesn't actually originate in Arizona. It began somewhere in Europe during the 12th to 16th century, at the dawn of capitalism. But that's a different story for a different time. To tell the story and concept of disabled ecologies, a story of the web of interconnection between humans and the more-than-human world, we've brought on Sonora Taylor. Sonora is an assistant professor at UC Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, a critical disability scholar and activist, an artist, and the author of two books, Beasts of Burden, Animal and Disability Liberation, published by the New Press,

and most recently, Disabled Ecologies, Lessons from a Wounded Desert, published by University of California Press. In this episode, we tell the story of Tucson, Arizona's aquifer and how it came to be contaminated by the U.S. military. We trace the contours of death and destruction, from the water beneath Tucson's southside neighborhood to the bodies living above it. From the chemicals that disabled ecosystems in Arizona to the bombs drenched in those chemicals that were dropped on people across the global south.

We explore disability politics, environmental racism, classism, and the importance of organizing. And we celebrate the wins and successes, not yet complete, of those in Tucson, Arizona, who are taking on the capitalist state machinery to fight for justice and personal community and ecological healing. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Sonora Taylor. Sonora, it is wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Robbie. I'm excited to be here.

I'm wondering if you can start by maybe just introducing yourself for our listeners and telling us a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing. Sure. Absolutely. Well, I wear a few different hats. I am an assistant professor at UC Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management in the Society and Environment Division. I'm really a critical disability studies scholar and disability activist, but my background is actually as an artist in art practice. So I spent much of my young adult, many years in my 20s and 30s, largely as a painter and printmaker.

And let's see what else, I'm a disabled person. And I will say that most of my work, whether in my art practice or in my scholarship has been really curious about essentially what we can learn from disability activism, disability studies, critical disability perspectives, what those perspectives can help us better understand or teach us about the more than human world. So I've been long really interested in bringing disability studies and disability perspectives into thinking about our relationships with non-human animals, with our environments,

and how disability kind of shapes our relationships to nature really broadly. So those are kinds of the areas, the arena that I've been really curious about for a really long time, again, both like in my earlier work as a painter and in both of my books. Amazing. Yeah, thank you so much for that. And of course, we will be using for the cover art of this episode, one of your paintings of the aquifer that we'll be discussing very shortly. Wonderful. So yeah, really beautiful, beautiful work. And yeah, I guess I'd love to begin as I often do by reading an opening paragraph of the book. I love to quote your words back to you, but this book was so beautifully written

that I actually have several quotes that I'll probably wanna bring in throughout. But just to start, you write, quote, environmental destruction is a story of disablement. While past environmental movements in the United States traditionally 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. Arriving in Tucson in the summer of 2017 to research the pollution I had long understood to have caused my own disability, I recognized intimately just how utterly entangled this mass disablement of nature is with the disablement of human beings." End quote. And so, so much in that paragraph really sort of describes what we'll be getting into in the text and what you outline and unpack so beautifully in the text. And you know, when I first was introduced to your work, this connection that you make with this ability of the human and the more than human worlds felt like a very profound insight that made so much sense.

It felt wild to me that this was the first time I had thought about this profound connection. And so, you know, of course, like I mentioned, we're going to spend the time we have together exploring this connection much more deeply. But I'm wondering if you could just sort of start with setting us up with some personal context. What drove you to write this book? Why was this story significant for you? And what were you hoping to achieve with the book? Yeah. So this book is, you know, one of these projects that I think on some level I've always known I would create. On some level I've been telling some version of this story my whole life. In the passage that you read, I mention

that my own disability story is connected to this story of pollution that I tell in my new book, In Disabled Ecologies. And while I really always wanna make clear that the book is not a memoir, it's not a sort of journey of personal discovery, my own background and my own origin story of disability is really central to this project, in part because it gave me two kind you know, kind of insights into concepts that would ultimately shape this book.

You know, I often say that, you know, growing up knowing that my disability was likely caused by military pollution gave me a sense that disability was not just like my individual personal problem, right? It wasn't just a medical problem. Disability was political. From the time I was very young, I understood that disability was political, that disability could emerge from systems of harm

and violence and exploitation, you know, from war, from pollution. And I also had a visceral understanding that nature isn't separate from us, right? That human beings are part of nature and that when we injure nature we injure ourselves. And so these two kinds of understandings of both of disability and of nature are ultimately what this book is about. And when I realized, you know, that I wanted this book, this is my second book, that I wanted to write

a book that was really bringing disability into the environmental arena, thinking about disability and the climate crisis, that I kind of had no choice but to return to Tucson, to the place that these ideas had originated in me. What I was so surprised to find is that, and this is one of the amazing things about research and particularly about, you know, actually research that's really embedded in community and community organizing, is that I came to Tucson and realized there's this whole amazing environmental justice movement that had formed around this pollution, right? And that's part of what I tell the story of. So growing up with this story has undoubtedly shaped the reasons why I am not only like, identify as a politicized disabled person, as a disability activist, as a critical disability studies scholar, but also why I'm so invested and curious

about what disability can help us think through in terms of, as you say, the more than human world. I'll also add that I was really lucky that I grew up in a family that was very politically engaged, thought a lot about how to live justly in the world. And from a very young age, animal rights, animal justice, thinking about animal activism was a part of my sibling than my and my parents' kind of conversation. That wasn't sort of a separate sort of untouched arena. Like thinking about justice for other creatures was part of our conversation. And

that too is something that I am fundamentally still very committed to, is to really take seriously what is happening to our fellow creatures and think about how that is really inseparable from what is happening to us. So those are some of the reasons, some of the sort of personal frames that ultimately kind of led, honestly not only to this book, but just to all of the various work that I've created.

I feel like there's certain questions that in all of the various work that I've created, you know, I feel like there's certain questions that in all of my work I'm continuously coming back to and reframing and thinking about again. And so this latest book is a sort of a continuation of a conversation that I've been thinking about for a long time. Yeah, thank you so much for that.

And so we recently actually had our first live show with the terrific Abby Martin from The Empire Files, and we discussed her upcoming documentary which explores the environmental impacts of the US military, which is, of course, the largest institutional source of carbon emissions on the planet. But this statistic doesn't even convey the full scope of things, right? Like the toxicity of the US military is almost incomprehensible. There are so many facets to it, like for example, the impact of the production of weapons by

subcontractors, right? Like it's challenging and bewildering to even begin to conceive of the whole spread of this destruction. And so again, I wanna share another passage from the text here because it just, it's so relevant and it made my jaw like really drop when I read this and it really tied so much together. And of course, then I'll ask you to sort of unpack this,

but one more passage from the book quote in December 2016 a community of poor rural farmers in Yemen was working together to dig a communal well Living in a war zone the farmers had little access to water sources But they knew if they could tap into the aquifer They would have enough to sustain themselves, their families, their neighbors, and their fields. They pooled their resources and began to dig. On the day their drill hit water, a cluster of bombs was dropped overhead, killing 31

of them. These bombs were built on Tucson's south side, Raytheon in what was originally known as Air Force 44, the same patch of desert that had been occupied by Hughes Aircraft and its TCE lagoons. So there's a lot in that paragraph and we'll get into some of those details in a sec, but I just want to say you're so skillful in this book at how you trace these like wide-ranging Ecologies and weave them together all the way from Tucson, Arizona to Korea to Yemen But of course the the book ultimately focuses in on one locality within this broader

Ecosystem and that's Tucson and it's all tied together ecosystem and that's Tucson and it's all tied together by the military industrial complex of course and the imperatives of capitalism which it upholds and which you talk about as well. So I'm gonna ask you very soon to tell us about the Air Force, about Hughes, about TCE, what TCE is and all of that but I'd love to start with maybe the aquifer. I really saw the aquifer as one of the central characters in your book. And the aquifer painting that you did is featured

as the cover image here, one of them in the book. There's a few. So I'm wondering if you can tell us actually what an aquifer is to begin with. Because I think a lot of us kind of have a vague understanding. But I think that the way that you described aquifers and got into the details in the book was really fascinating. And then maybe specifically the aquifer in Tucson,

if you could describe it as well. Yeah, absolutely. So I love talking about aquifers. I really fell in love with Tucson's aquifer. I would love, actually, to sit with the first part of your question and your comments just about the sort of bewildering power and expanse of the U.S. military in weapons manufacturing. It has been just utterly harrowing the past year, knowing that this same facility, what was Hughes Aircraft, then bought out, became

Raytheon in the 90s, and actually they just changed their name to RTX, they have seen just gargantuan profits over the past year from Israel's bombardment of Gaza. I think their stocks have gone up something like 80%. There was just recently a protest partially led by Jewish voices for peace outside the Wall Street stock exchange, you know, kind of really bringing attention specifically to the profits that have been created for Raytheon, for Lockheed Martin, for these industries. It's hard to even comprehend, right? But the little bit that we know just about

the carbon emissions from this particular war, and even just in the first few months of it, I think the carbon emissions from the war on Gaza were more than the annual carbon emissions from 20 of the most climate vulnerable nations. So this is this moment of extraordinary environmental urgency. We have these hurricanes, we have wildfires, all these signs. There's so many things Stephen mentioned. This recent study that came out that 73% of our

wildlife has disappeared in the past 50 years, right? We are in this horrendous crisis, and yet what we are doing is spending money and funds on arming genocide. The environmental consequences of this are so profound, and it's hard to even get to the point of being able to have that conversation because the immediate consequences on human beings suffering through this are just so unbearable. So it has been just even after spending nine years working on this book researching this particular facility, this particular weapons manufacturer, it has just been so heartbreaking to see this continuation, right, and this this

new level of this continuation. So and it's so hard, I think with the word bewildering that you used keeps, it really sticks with me because it's so hard to even grapple with the extent of the environmental impact of the US military and to even figure out how to respond to it because you can't with other industries, you can say, look, they're devastating the water. Look, they're polluting the river or there's air pollution. With weapons manufacturers, it's like they only exist to destroy, right? They deal in death and disablement. And so how do you even begin to kind of expose these things

because that is actually their very purpose is to destroy, right? So one of the things that I talk about in the book is also the limitations of my own project and my own ability to follow some of the things that I talk about in the book is also the limitations of my own project and my own ability to follow some of the threads of this disabled ecology that I'm telling the story of and I think there's just so much work that needs to be done to bring attention to and to really

analyze and critique the the extent of the environmental destruction of the US military. So I know I've kind of gone on about that, but it feels so profoundly wrong on every level in this moment. And so I just wanted to sit with it. This was a clip from our Patreon episode with Sonora Taylor. You can listen to the full episode by becoming an Upstream Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month, usually two or three, our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes, early access to select episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers depending on

which tier you subscribe to. You'll also be helping keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at patreon.com forward slash Upstream podcast or at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you.