Episode 64: Disabled Groundwater
“Disability is something that is relevant to all of us, that shapes all of our realities. On a material, individual level, we will all go in and out of disability throughout our lives.
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A conversation with professor Sunaura Taylor (author, artist, UC Berkeley) about injured aquifers and reframing disability in a broader environmental context. Released December 13, 2024.
guests on the show
Dr. Sunaura Taylor
Sunaura Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Society and Environment and the director of the Disabled Ecologies Lab. Taylor is a scholar and artist who works at the intersection of disability studies,environmental humanities, animal studies, environmental justice, and art practice. Her research situates disability and ableism as central forces shaping human relationships to the more-than-human world. Concerned with relationships between altered bodily capacity, vulnerability, and systems of exploitation across species and ecological boundaries, her works crosses a range of disciplines, mediums, and audiences.
Taylor is author of Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert (UC Press, 2024). Her first book, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017), which received the 2018 American Book Award. Along with academic journals, Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets. Her artworks have been exhibited nationally and Internationally. Among other awards, she has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, two Wynn Newhouse Awards, and an Animals and Culture Grant.
TRANSCRIPT
Faith Kearns
I am really excited to talk with Dr. Sunaura Taylor today. I first learned about her work by seeing a talk that she gave on her first book, Beasts of Burden, and it was really compelling and I went and picked up the book. And it really is a reframing, at least for me, in terms of thinking about the relationship between how we treat animals and how we treat disabled people. And just an incredibly thought provoking piece of work.
So I was also incredibly excited when I learned in a fairly random way during a seminar, actually on groundwater here in Arizona, that she had a new book out called Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert, which is actually about groundwater in the Tucson, Arizona area. And of course, I've recently relocated home to Arizona, and we are working quite a bit on groundwater issues here.
Someone had presented the way that she frames groundwater issues as something that we should really look at in terms of considering the art practice that she has and some of the work that she had done trying to visualize groundwater in a really interesting way. Because, as we all know, that's this constant thing that people are saying is we just don't understand groundwater because we can't see it. It's quote, unquote invisible. It's underneath our feet, all of that stuff.
I'm just really excited to talk with somebody who has such an interesting and unique experience of the world, and therefore some really interesting ideas about what we can do differently. I don't even feel like I can really do her work justice. So I'm really just looking forward to hearing directly from her. How about you, Sam and Mallika?
Sam Sandoval
I'm really looking forward to talking with Sunaura. This comes back to what you're saying, Faith, reframing our way of thinking. Typically, we talk about a degraded ecosystem, a community, but we don't reframe that they are disabled, that we have disabled, that we have impaired. Some of these conditions, if we have a disabled environment or an environment that has been really harmed, we're going to have a disabled community and ecosystems.
This really brings me back to the conversation that we had on episode 46 with Nayamin Martinez, when she started talking about how she moved to Fresno to raise her family as part of her career, and then all of a sudden, her son starts having problems with asthma and the environment and we thought we may talk there about contamination, but the reality is that it is we have disabled the environment, and we're disabling us also. So anyway, really, really looking forward to talking with Sunaura and also to help ourselves to reframe our way of thinking. What about you, Mallika?
Mallika Nocco
Something I always do when we are going to talk to somebody on Water Talk is I google them. I think it's interesting that when I searched for Sunaura Taylor, she comes up as an artist, and I was just looking at some of the artwork on her website, and it's so beautiful and compelling that I would strongly recommend listeners to do what I did and take a look at some of this artwork. It's really amazing, and it made me even more excited to talk with her and listen to what she has to say and to learn from her. It made me feel uncomfortable in a good way and that's my favorite kind of artwork. So, yeah, I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
Faith Kearns
I mean, really a multi talented person, and I agree that her artwork is incredibly evocative. These watercolors of groundwater somehow managed to really convey what we might think of as groundwater, even though, again, we are constantly like it's invisible. People can't possibly picture it yet, she has done it. Without further ado, let's get into our conversation with Dr Sunaura Taylor.
Welcome to Water Talk. For today's episode, we are talking with Dr Sunaura Taylor. Sunaura is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management at UC Berkeley who focuses primarily on critical disability studies. She is a scholar and an artist who works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental humanities, animal studies, environmental justice and art practice. Her research situates disability and ableism as central forces shaping human relationships to the more than human world. She is also the author of two books, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert, and the award winning Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. Welcome, Sunaura, it's really an honor to have you on Water Talk today.
Sunaura Taylor
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be in conversation with you all right now.
Faith Kearns
I've given a rough outline of your career, but we would really love to hear from you in more detail about your path and what led you to where you are today.
Sunaura Taylor
Thank you so much for the question. I came to the environmental sciences through a rather unique trajectory. I have spent many years of my adult life as an artist, but have consistently, whether in my art practice or my writing or my research, been drawn to particular themes that consistently come up. And those themes are of disability, of interdependency, of care, and also of relationships between injury to human beings and injury to our broader non human world.
I was raised in a socially justice oriented family. I was actually unschooled as a kid, which is this radical form of homeschooling, where my parents just had this belief that kids are innately curious, and will if given the opportunity, follow their curiosity. I think curiosity has also been something of value that I've continued to let guide me in my trajectory. I was also born a disabled person, and so that has also really shaped my experience, my understanding of the world, and the kinds of work that I do.
I spent many years as an artist, and then at a certain point realized that a lot of what I was thinking about my art practice, I also really wanted to have a better understanding of, to research more deeply in other ways. I wanted to write about things, and that led me to decide to get a PhD. And ultimately that led to my first book, Beasts of Burden, and then that book led to the work that I've been working on for the past nine years in Disabled Ecologies. So we can get more into the details of how that all fits together, but that's a broad, sweeping view of the trajectory that led me to where I am now, really a humanities and art practice based disability studies scholar in an environmental studies department.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, that is a really fascinating set of intersections there. And we are indeed going to get more into your books, which I am so thrilled that you found your way toward writing, because they really are incredibly thought provoking, and I just learned so much through your work, and I'm just really grateful that you're doing it. So you know your award winning book, Beasts of Burden, links animal and disability rights and liberation, and your new book, Disabled Ecologies, really expands that from animals to the entire more than human world. It's really powerful and also quite personal and vulnerable. And I think it's a hard ask for such a compelling piece of work, but can you give listeners an introduction or overview of the book?
Sunaura Taylor
Yeah, so this book is, on some levels, a story that I've been telling my whole life. It is a project that I always knew that I would create. And one of the reasons for that, probably the most obvious reason for that, is the book tells the story of pollution, of weapons manufacturing, pollution that I was raised with the understanding was likely the cause of my own disability.
This pollution occurred from the late 40s through the 70s in Tucson, Arizona, on the south side of Tucson, a largely Mexican American community. We can talk more about the details of what happened, but I was raised with the understanding that this defense industry pollution was likely the cause of my own disability that I've had since birth, but I never went into this wanting to write a memoir. This book is not a memoir. It's not a personal investigation of my own journey, but my story is inseparable from the story that I tell, in part because having this story gave me ways of thinking about two of the main ideas that would ultimately shape this book.
I said a few minutes ago that there have been certain themes and stuff that I've always been obsessed with or drawn to despite my different mediums that I'm utilizing, and I would say that two of those themes are disability and nature. So from a really, really young age, I had an understanding that disability isn't an individual medical problem, that it's not a personal problem, that disability is a political issue, that disability can be caused by structures of violence, by war, by pollution, by racism, right? This was something that I understood from a really early age.
I also understood that it wasn't an individual experience, that it could impact a whole community. I also had an understanding that nature isn't separate from us, that a visceral understanding right, that when we harm nature, we are harming ourselves. And those two concepts ultimately are the crux of this book, a way of thinking politically about disability, but also an understanding that a way of thinking about or offering language for understanding the relationship between an injured nature, injured environment, injured ecologies, and then injured human beings, which I think in this moment, is something that we're seeing, increasingly, with just the level of climate crisis, pollution crisis, extinction crises that we are seeing, right, and the impacts that those injuries to the environment, to our natural world, are having on human communities and particularly vulnerable communities, right, historically excluded, marginalized, oppressed communities.
So though these are the broad ideas that shape the book. You know it really does two things. It makes the case that disability is a really vital and urgently needed part of the environmental conversation that is largely absent in a politicized way in most environmental arenas. And then it also tells this story of what happened in Tucson, one of the earliest environmental justice movements to have emerged in the country, the community organized and actually were really historically successful in a lot of ways in drawing attention to what happened to their community, and in struggling for their aquifer and struggling for the healthcare of their community. So I tell that story and really ground these broader philosophical questions of injury and disability and care in this story of Tucson environmental justice community and Tucson aquifer.
Faith Kearns
Thank you so much for that. I am just learning more about the environmental justice community in Tucson, and it is really interesting that I see it as the center point for environmental justice conversations in Arizona. And so it's been really interesting to learn about this particular history that I hadn't been aware of, and how it probably leads into the strong community that exists in Tucson today.
In the book, you write that environmentalists rarely stay with disability long enough to even ask how people in environments coexist with injury, let alone how this “living with” generates particular values, politics and modes of engagement. For listeners who aren't familiar with disability studies, can you talk about the field and how it does and maybe doesn't, intersect with environmental and ecological studies and struggles?
Sunaura Taylor
Yeah. Actually, before I do, I just want to comment on what you just said about the environmental justice movement in Tucson too. One of the things that was so, honestly, surprising to me is that my family moved away, white, upwardly mobile. We moved away when I was, like, six years old, and so I didn't grow up in the thick of the mobilizing, right? And in fact, I didn't really even know that had happened. And so it was this amazing, surprising thing to me to come back to Tucson and realize actually that there was this incredible movement that really shaped political life. In so many ways over the next generations for the Mexican American community in Tucson, but in so many other ways, much like also expanded out from that as well.
People in Tucson really, I think, there's a memory of the defense industry pollution, of the contamination, but there's oddly less of a memory of this movement, and I became really committed to telling this story, because I really want to also uplift this incredible work that these organizers did in the 80s. I think it is so valuable for us to still learn from.
But so this question about disability, right? I think a lot of the time that people hear disability and they think, oh, that's an issue that is only relevant to people who use wheelchairs or who are blind or who have some clear marker, signifier of disability. And one of the things that disability organizers and disability thinkers have shown over decades is that disability is something that is relevant to all of us, that shapes all of our realities. You know, on a material individual level, we will all go in and out of disability throughout our lives. We all experience illness. We all age into bodies that no longer can do what we want them to do. We all can experience periods of injury where our bodies or our minds are not functioning the way that they once did, or the way that we want them to.
So there's the fact that disability is actually an integral experience to having a body, right? It is just part of the experience of being alive. And I'll just say on a really broad level that one of the reasons I think disability is such a central and under-examined arena within the environmental fields, whether we're talking about environmental activism or environmental sciences, is because disability is everywhere already, and yet it's so unmarked.
I'm in this environmental studies department where, what are we all working for? We're working for healthy environments, for healthy people, right? But what does health mean? What do we mean by health when we're talking about that, and if what we are trying to achieve is health, then what do we have now? What is the language for that? When people talk about soil health or forest health or water health, community health, what are the unspoken politics that are embedded in that idea of health. And then again, what is it that we have now?
One of the things that I wanted to offer in this book is a language to describe the kinds of harms and injuries that our soil, our forests, our water, our communities are experiencing now. And for me, the language that makes the most sense is a language of disability, and partially that's because of the incredible theoretical and political work that disability scholars and activists and artists have done for decades that show us the multiple meanings that disability can have.
I think maybe the one other thing that I'll say that I think that can help ground some of this, is to actually just dive into the term disabled ecologies. Again, coming back to Tucson, there were certain things that I knew about this history that I had read in newspaper articles and stuff like that. But really, I had that moment that I think all researchers have at some point where they arrive at a new place, arrive at an archive, arrive to do their work, and they're just like, where do I start? This is huge, here in Tucson, I went to the archive, and it was just binders and binders and binders and binders filled with EPA documents, documents from lawyers, all these different things. Where do I start, not to mention getting to know the community and their stories and histories of what happened?
But I very quickly realized that the way for me to make sense of what happened in Tucson was to follow the trails of disability. And by that, I literally mean to essentially map out the trails of injury that emerged from this toxic soup that Hughes Aircraft now, Raytheon now RTX, that these weapons manufacturers dumped onto the Tucson desert, and to follow the trails of injury that emerged from that. There were material injuries to human beings, to trees, to water systems, cancers, birth, congenital disabilities, the various ways that it harmed and killed and entered wildlife, injured people's pets, injured riparian ecosystems, right? These are material injuries.
I could also map out the ways in which disability was absolutely integral, if depoliticized, in the way that the narratives that were told around the story, whether we were looking at the story as it was told by city officials who used extremely ableist, racist, gaslighting arguments against the community, saying that, yes, they had disproportionate levels of illnesses, but it wasn't because of the pollution they were drinking. It was because they were already predisposed to illness. It was because of their culture and lifestyle, right, these ableist and of course, deeply racist ways of utilizing the shame and insecurity that we are all supposed to feel internally about disability and illness, that maybe it is our own fault, that maybe we did something, and trying to utilize that against the community to not only deflect blame, but to shut them up essentially. And luckily, that didn't work. Instead, they utilized their story of disability to expose the racism, to expose the long, long history of dispossession, to expose the impacts of these industries, right? So there's that there.
We could also look to the ways in which narratives of disability and health and illness were utilized by both sides of the legal debate. We could look at the way that they were utilized in public health training, in the journal articles that were written about it, right? So essentially, disabled ecologies became a way of mapping. It's a way of mapping injury, but also of exposing how disability and related concepts shape how we tell environmental stories.
The reason I think it's so important to mark those is because disability can be used for extremely eugenic, exploitative, racist purposes, and it can also be a place from which people tell their own stories and develop radical organizing politics too, right? It can be all sorts of different things, but unless we politicize it and actually see it as a central category that's worthy of investigation and analysis, then we won't be able to examine when it's being utilized for very exploitative, eugenic purposes versus when it's when it's doing something else.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, thank you so much for that. That is, it's just such a rich work. I really encourage people to read and engage with this book and also with Beasts of Burden. I have been trying to read a lot of disability scholarship. And, for those of us, particularly, I'm 50 at this point, and went through my training during a time when I thought about things like population size, well there were all these concepts that have now been exposed as being quite racist, of having eugenic origins. And overall, your book and the work of a lot of people who I really deeply appreciate for just helping me bend my own learning are just really reorienting.
I would say Disabled Ecologies is similar for me anyway, in terms of just being this reorientation to many, many concepts that may or may not have been around a long time, including things like just when we talk about environmental health, or you know what any of those kinds of things mean.
I was really intrigued by how you talked about environmental justice, which you referred to as “a refusal to abandon those who have been harmed,” which I had never heard that definition before, but I really am trying to rearrange my own thinking to accommodate that idea. So in this case, you're talking really about groundwater contamination, and what you've just talked about is these trails of disability that it left. And given that we're on Water Talk,with groundwater, I was wondering if you could just talk with us about the groundwater in particular, and maybe the way that water contamination might be different than soil or any other medium. I was just intrigued by the way you described the spread of this contamination via water.
Sunaura Taylor
Yeah, absolutely you know this book, I think this always happens when you write a book or dive into some research or art project. It comes with so many surprises. And one of the surprises for me was the deep love and awe that I would discover in aquifers, in learning about aquifers, in thinking about groundwater, which is something honestly that I had never really thought about. When we moved back to Tucson so that I could do this research, I was really interested in finding these trails of injury and trying to think about how this pollution had impacted the more than human world, how the pollution had impacted non-human animals, or ecosystems.
And it was so interesting, because I was actually often told even by environmental scientists, oh, well, there were no paths of exposure, so this pollution didn't really impact the ecosystem. That was actually like something that I was told quite often, because this pollution went into the groundwater, and then that groundwater was sucked up by the wells. And so there were multiple things that were going on there.
There was an assumption, firstly, that industrial landscapes, and I think the imagery of the desert had to do with this too, right, that this separation between the idea of nature and human made structures, right? The separation in this idea that, well, this was an industrial area, so there's no nature there, when, of course, we know that there was wildlife that came and drank from the pollution that would move through the desert washes, because water doesn't stay still, as you all know on Water Talk, water moves, but also just the land there, the soil there. The contamination at these locations of the site of dumping, I needed to reframe that actual industrial landscape as a landscape, as nature that was impacted.
But even doing that, I realized that I was still missing the biggest site of nature, if we could just call it that for now, which is the aquifer. I think that in my imagination, I of course understood that the vast majority of people rely on groundwater. But I think in my imagination, it was more in the category of infrastructure than nature, right? I didn't imagine an aquifer the way that I imagine a river, or the way that I imagine the ocean, right? It was infrastructural. And what was so fascinating when people responded to me in this way, even environmental scientists, that there were no paths of exposure, is that they were essentially doing that to the aquifer too, not actually seeing the aquifer as an ecosystem, right, as more infrastructure.
So once I made that conceptual shift and was like, what is an aquifer? An aquifer isn't infrastructure. It is not something that just exists for us to measure and parcel out so that we can figure out how much it's worth. An aquifer is, as I would learn, so much more than that and such such a fascinating entanglement of water systems, of water below the earth, of water above the earth, of water systems, right? It's this incredible entanglement across geographies, but also across time, right? That there was this moment where I was like this groundwater that these defense industries poisoned, polluted within 10 years had existed for 10s of 1000s of years, right?
This is ancient, fossilized groundwater that sits beneath what we consider to be an area that's in need of water, right? So there's something so magical to me, the more that I learned just about aquifers and I think that expansiveness, that aquifers are, well there's this question of whether an aquifer is an aquifer, or is it aquifers? You know, when does one aquifer begin? When does one aquifer end? What is the separation between an above ground water system of rivers or of snow melt to water table levels to groundwater levels, right?
And then just the relationship between groundwater and our profoundly extractive, exploitative industries that treat groundwater, not as an ecosystem, but again, as essentially a tank that can be siphoned out for profit. So I think there's a few things that are a little bit distinct about aquifers that I fell in love with that make them distinct from, say, soil, or from forests, and I think part of it is we are a very visually obsessed species, and particularly, I think there's lots of work that's also just examined the way in which Western science and Western culture in particular, also has such an emphasis on the visual.
I think part of it is that we can't see aquifers, even those people who render aquifers in scientific maps and stuff like that. They are essentially speculative, because there's no way of really, truly understanding what's happening at different levels of an aquifer.
Aquifers are also places you do not go. I think there's something fascinating there about having to use our imaginations to understand something that is infrastructurally part of our daily lives, and yet, it's as hard to imagine on some levels as outer space. I think that that is something that I found really fascinating, thinking about thinking about aquifers.
Sam Sandoval
I think it is really refreshing a lot of the conversation. And the way that you describe the aquifers, for me, that was amazing, so refreshing. Less of a technical, more personal beyond concept, way of describing it. Also you describe pretty well in Disabled Ecologies, the communities, largely Mexican American, that live above these contaminated aquifers in Tucson.
One of the things that you mentioned, that you explained pretty well, is the role of marginalized groups in orienting the struggle for justice and the way that they refuse the separation of environmental and human health. And to me that is, if there is a way that we can provide first hand experience, or the outcome of this is through this linkage. So why is this important? Why is it important to refuse the separation of environmental and human health?
Sunaura Taylor
I think if there's one thing that I feel like is the argument or goal of the book, it is that, to really urge us to think beyond these separations, right? I really also want to emphasize that this is in no way a novel thing to be saying. I think what this book is trying to do is to also expose all of the different ways, all sorts of different communities throughout history and in different places, all oppressed communities, marginalized communities, have recognized this deeply, and one of the reasons why they've recognized this deeply is because capitalism and colonialism have also recognized this.
There's been a long understanding by colonial forces, for example, that if you destroy land, you are hurting people, right? That is just part of our colonial history. We see it now in all sorts of ways, in Gaza as well, the destruction of people's water, the destruction of land, is a tool of colonialism. And so on one level, our whole extractive, brutal system has been built on that understanding, and yet there has also been this denial within our western systems of the relationship between the health of the environment and the health of people. Those exist in these separate categories if we even think about the way that our universities are structured, right?
There's humanities on one side and then the environmental sciences on the other side. I have one chapter that really looks at the EPA, the way in which, at one point when this contamination in Tucson was being first discovered, environmental regulations and policies were actually coming out of health departments. There hadn't been this split yet where there was the EPA on one side that on some level had some idea of health as supposedly one of the reasons why environmental protection is important, but also completely leaves out health at the same time too, right?
Grounding it in the example of Tucson, the Superfund program stops at the threshold of the human body. Why is there no remediation for the communities themselves that were harmed. There is no fighting to get the industries to pay for the health care of the communities, or fighting to get the industries to pay for the remediation of the soil or water somehow stops at the threshold of the community and the human body. But those communities who are living with the impacts of pollution or climate change or whatever it is, wildfires, right? People know on a visceral level that these are forces that are also entering human beings, that, again, there is no separation.
So in Tucson, people would often talk about how there are multiple things that need to be cared for. There's the aquifer that needs to be cared for, but also the community needs to be cared for, right? I will also just say that even within the environmental arena, I think that sometimes there can be, and partially for good reason because there's been a long, long history within environmentalism of ignoring the communities who are most harmed, of centering the the idea of the wilderness, of the pristine wild, of charismatic creatures and megafauna versus addressing human beings who are being impacted by pollution. But there is sometimes this narrative that gets created by pitting people against nature, pitting people against animals, right?
I think actually the communities who are on the front lines realize what a false dynamic that is, at least in Tucson, who were fighting for the health of their aquifer, also the health, honestly, of their pets who are also drinking this water, the health of their trees, of their rivers, of the wildlife.
I think it's such an important change in the frame, because also I think it could be really helpful in terms of when we think about communicating science, right? People care about health. People care about the health of their communities. Obviously, we don't have universal health care, so it's not like that's the way to immediately get things done. But I do think that the more health can be a part of these environmental conversations, and the more that people think, yes, protecting that forest is actually really directly relevant to me. Protecting this aquifer is directly relevant to the health of my community, the health of the people I love. I think that that is a really important tool that we have, and it's also just the reality. I think that we need to be seeing those connections increasingly.
Mallika Nocco
Thank you so much for that perspective. We always like to end our episodes by asking our guests if there's anything more that you would like people to know about your work and how our community of Water Talk listeners and all of us, how can we support your efforts?
Sunaura Taylor
I think, as we were mentioning before we started recording, that we're recording a few days after the election. I think there's a lot of fear, a lot of anger, a lot of grief and so on and just a lot of reflection on what happened and also what we need to do. I think for me, I'm going through multiple stages of grief and mourning and anger, but I think one of the things that I'm just really trying to hold on to is that there's so much loss if we're thinking environmentally, if we're thinking about water, if we're thinking about our communities, about other species, and we're going to see so much loss in the next few years. And that one of the things that I really wanted to do in this book is to show this third path or third perspective that I think is too often not made present or visible.
I think there's either this desire for cure, essentially we will save nature, and this hope that we can just fix it. And then on this other level, this very apocalyptic, Doomsday thing, the death of nature, everything's done. I think for me as a disabled person, as someone in disabled community, in all sorts of different communities that have long lived with injury and struggle in the face of harm and damage that we need to find ways of living in that injury, while also resisting those forces that are still perpetually causing it. I think that's just something that I'm holding on to right now. Knowing that we are going to be witness to a lot of loss, and also how to continue to struggle for the injured and disabled communities and environments that we all are part of. I think that that's just some of what I'm struggling with right now and thinking about.
Faith Kearns
Thank you so much, Sunaura. I think you'll have a lot of solidarity when it comes to us and the listeners as we try to figure out how we're moving forward. So thank you so much for your time and for joining us on Water Talk. We really appreciate it.