Climate Change Is Ushering in an “Age of Disability”

As I write this, Los Angeles is ablaze and Accra, Ghana, is recovering from a fire; Richmond, Virginia, lost its potable water to a storm just after Asheville, North Carolina, finally got its supply back two months following Hurricane Helene. These climate disasters are having lasting impacts on, among other things, human health, dependent as it is on the health of our environment—the water we drink, the air we breathe. We are seeing whole populations, human and other, rendered disabled by chemicals and catastrophes. In her new book, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (2024), Sunaura Taylor even declares that climate change is ushering in an “Age of Disability.”

Taylor, a writer and artist, was born with her own Anthropocene-era disability on Tucson’s southside. There, toxic synthetic chemicals entered the groundwater by way of activities at Hughes Aircraft, a United States military contractor. By the 1970s, locals noticed that the water supply was killing their plants; their pets and livestock were ill; lupus, testicular cancer, brain tumors, and leukemia were popping up at high rates; and stillbirths and disabled newborns were unusually common.

In the course of writing her book, Taylor returned to Tucson to study not only the water that had disabled her, but the ways her community organized in response. There, she noted that while residents “told stories of often debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries,” they also mapped out “alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance” that we’ll need in the coming decades. This Tucsonian “vision of justice… included treatment for both human communities and landscapes.” As for herself, Taylor found that her “feelings toward this water are not of fear or anxiety or anger.” Instead, “they are of solidarity.”

A similar “vision of justice” is echoed in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Flint Is Family” (2016–22), a series of photographs gathered in a 2022 book. Scenes from the series comprise the standout contribution to “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice,” an exhibition about health and the environment that recently traveled from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to the Moody Center for the Arts in Houston.

Like Taylor, Frazier knows intimately the effects that environmental pollution can have on one’s body. As a child growing up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier contracted lupus in response to chemical emissions from the United States Steel Corporation that have caused illnesses in three generations of her family, some of them terminal. “Flint Is Family” is a group of striking portraits of dignified disabled residents of Flint, Michigan, organizing and proving themselves resourceful amid a water crisis. While the book mentions the effects of lead poisoning on children, as well as Flint’s unusually high rates of cancer, lupus, and Legionnaires’ disease, Frazier’s focus is on introducing us to people who, confronted with the emotional, bodily, and economic effects of living without access to clean water, have adapted and persevered.

One example of resourceful perseverance comes from a Flint resident named Amber, who creates her own natural shampoo after doctor-prescribed pills and cream fail to redress the infected-looking bald spot on her daughter’s head. The hair grows back in three months, and Amber begins selling her product to other Flint residents facing similar symptoms. A desire to protect their community drives her family’s entrepreneurial spirit: They buy and steward land, rather than entrusting it to systems that have failed them.

The photographs do not resort to simplified clichés of what sickened or impoverished people look like. What comes through instead is resourcefulness and resilience, persistence and creative adaptation.

Taylor’s and Frazier’s books are both primarily portraits of communities—how they come together and adapt, how they organize. This community focus is fitting, for if there is one thing both disability and ecology reveal, it is how incredibly interdependent we all are.

If, as Taylor writes, “the future is disabled,” that disabled future is already here; but, to paraphrase William Gibson, it’s just not evenly distributed—owing largely to environmental racism. Tucson’s southside is predominantly Mexican American, while Flint is majority Black. Poverty, meanwhile, is America’s fourth leading risk factor for death, per the American Medical Association: It follows only heart disease, cancer, and smoking.

FRAZIER AND TAYLOR did more than document the ways their communities are adapting: they modeled new ways to get actively involved. For Frazier’s part, after three years of photographing Flint, she found she “could no longer idly stand by and wait for the government to do its job.” This was in 2019, after all the criminal charges against city and state employees were dropped, even as residents remained saddled with hefty utility bills for undrinkable water. The artist turned to Amber, asking what could be done.

Amber told Frazier about an invention by a man named Moses West: an atmospheric water generator that could collect clean water by extracting condensation from the air. It runs on solar power and generates water perpetually. Being off-grid, it does not require the kinds of governmental infrastructure the community had rightly grown to distrust.

The catch was that this contraption weighs 26,000 pounds, and had to be shipped from Puerto Rico, where West lived: This was costly, around $50,000. So Frazier chose to offer money from sales following her recent exhibition at the gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York; the donation was matched by a grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. In Frazier’s photos, the generator’s arrival in 2019 appears triumphant.

The final “Flint Is Family” photos were shot in color. In her 2022 book, these colors burst brightly against the sequence’s black-and-white buildup, as if leaving Kansas for Oz. We see residents relishing the atmospheric water generator, the water, and one another. They are hugging and beaming and praying in front of the green rectangular apparatus, filling jugs, playing in sprinklers, drinking from the spout.

But it’s not all rainbows and sunshine post-generator. The machine gets vandalized anonymously, though it is quickly repaired. Still, the instance seems to affirm suspicions that the water crisis was more intentional than simply neglect or ineptitude, more than lack of funds or inevitable environmental degradation. “It crossed my mind that they want us to die off and then redevelop,” says a Flint resident named Melvin. Certainly, making land unlivable is a tried-and-true tactic of dispossession, as Taylor details in Disabled Ecologies, referring to the colonization of the Americas. Still, Melvin dwells less on intent than he does on taking power back into his own hands: “My advice to Black people in Flint is, don’t move away, let’s build it up and let’s buy property.”

We’ll need the kinds of creative and communal adaptation Melvin describes in order to survive and care for one another amid this mass multispecies disablement, especially under a federal administration that appears unlikely to help. “Flint Is Family”is successful as an art project for the way it makes this resiliency visible in a climate where, for many people, survival is assumed, struggle is left outside the frame, and water is taken for granted.

TWO OTHER RECENT artworks stand out as modeling how we might adapt, tending to our health and to our environment too. The first is Ekene Ijeoma’s Black Forest (2022–), a project that will see the planting of 40,000 trees in Black neighborhoods across the United States. The trees bear tags that read “Black Forest: a living monument and archive for Black lives lost to Covid-19” alongside a QR code that links to a crowd-sourced archive. The trees foster the health of Black neighborhoods and residents by helping mitigate warming temperatures, offering shade, and cleaning the air.

Ijeoma was inspired in part by the Neighborhood Tree Corps, founded by activist Hattie Carthan, who became known as “Bed-Stuy’s Tree Lady.” In the 1960s, Carthan planted more than 1,500 trees throughout Brooklyn, many thriving today. Black Forest also responds to 2020 reports that Black people were twice as likely to die from Covid as white people; living in tree-lined rather than redlined neighborhoods benefits the respiratory system.

In making Black Forest an art project rather than merely an environmental action—labor likely to go unnoticed—Ijeoma draws attention not only to how environmental racism distributes vegetation unevenly, but to the human hand behind the intervention, showing that ordinary people can intervene, too. The sleekly designed Black Forest tags call attention to this, as do the community events during which the trees are planted, on both public land and volunteered private property. “For some people, this will be the first time they’ve planted a tree,” Ijeoma told the Art Newspaper. “That alone is a profound experience”—a reminder of the agency we have over our environment.

That agency was present too in Asad Raza’s 2022 exhibition “Diversion,” which saw the artist reroute Frankfurt’s Main River to flow through Kunsthalle Portikus, located on a small island in the river. The water streamed into one of the museum’s galleries, where it was passed through a very fine coffee filter and boiled before an attendant added minerals. This simple intervention made the water drinkable; museum visitors were invited to partake, and thereby reconnect to their environs.

OF COURSE, THE IDEA of agency may seem paltry when you consider that 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions can be traced back to just 100 companies. But as Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein argues, “the pessimism of some who believe in climate change is just as detrimental as those who deny it outright.” Here, environmentalism might take a cue from disability politics, which centers accommodating and caring for people in whatever their state rather than finding a cure.

Instead, the mainstream environmental movement has had a thorny relationship to disability justice. As Taylor details in Disabled Ecologies, environmentalists have a habit of enlisting disabled people to monger fear or as a cautionary tale: Better protect your environment and your health, so you don’t end up disabled. One side effect is stigma perpetuated, with disability framed as a personal tragedy and not a political failure.

Taylor suggests the two movements team up—and shows they weren’t always so separate. She writes that for over a century in the United States, environmental protection and human health were grouped under the same governmental branch, until 1970, when Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

He got a lot of reputational points for the EPA, and for pouring money into the National Cancer Institute as well. But the moves in the end benefited corporations: separating the two endeavors saw a decrease in environmental cancer studies, and in researching the chemicals that cause disease. Paradoxically, Taylor notes, all this happened on the heels of Rachel Carson’s bestsellers, particularly Silent Spring (1962), which had placed the health effects of synthetic chemicals on the mainstream mind.

So still today, in the US, chemicals are innocent until proven toxic. Whether testing forever chemicals or microplastics, you and I are the lab rats. This uncontrolled pollution that puts profit over people is the enemy, not disability.

The coming decades, Taylor suggests, might look something like the revenge fantasy in Audre Lorde’s 1980 book Cancer Journals, where an army of single-breasted women gathers at the Capitol Building to protest chemical contamination, their bodies the evidence. The changing climate, Taylor writes, is starting to resemble “something impaired, precarious, dependent, filled with loss and struggle, requiring assistance, accommodation, and creative forms of care.” And so disabled people—experts in all these things—“should be sought out as leaders in climate adaptation conversations.”

Charles Darwin noted something similar. In The Origin of Species, his focus was not only on “the survival of the fittest,” Taylor reminds us, “but on variation as the driver of life.” For Darwin, it was not exactly the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent—to say nothing of the wealthiest. Rather, it is the ones who are most adaptable. If you want to know more about creative adaptation, Taylor suggests, ask a disabled person.