Disaster and Disability: Social Inequality and the Uneven Effects of Climate Change

Arecent class-action lawsuit brought against the city of New York by Disability Rights Advocates affirmed that residents with disabilities face disproportionate risks of catastrophic harm and death during large-scale disasters—not because of some inherent “natural” risk, but because the city fails to plan for their needs.

“Hope is not an antidote to danger; it is a goad to better and more meaningful action,” Belser writes.

Graphic designer Milton Glaser created this “It’s not warming, it’s dying” image, which has proliferated on t-shirts, buttons, and the sides of buildings, to inspire action against climate change by acknowledging the gravity of the problem.

One of the plaintiffs in the case was Melba Torres, a New York resident unable to evacuate during Superstorm Sandy in 2012 because she could not find accessible transport that could handle her power wheelchair. Torres was trapped without power on the eighth floor of her building and remained stuck in her apartment for six days. In a far-reaching settlement, the first of its kind, New York City agreed to overhaul its emergency preparedness plan, adding sixty new emergency shelters accessible to people with disabilities, creating a high-rise evacuation task force, deploying more robust accessible transportation resources in times of disaster, and hiring a disability coordinator for emergency services.

As climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather, it makes us all more vulnerable to natural disaster. While we often shorthand hurricanes and floods as “acts of God,” we are beginning to recognize erratic, deadly storms as augmented by human causes. Though then-President George W. Bush famously said of Hurricane Katrina that “the storm didn’t discriminate,” disaster almost always intensifies pre-existing social inequalities. In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon observes, “Discrimination predates disaster: in failures to maintain protective infrastructures … in failures to organize evacuation plans for those who lack private transport, all of which make the poor and racial minorities disproportionately vulnerable to catastrophe.” While disasters may start as “natural” events, they become social catastrophes. The brunt of disaster is borne by those who have the least.

When it comes to disaster, people with disabilities are often cast as perfect victims, as tragic icons of misfortune on some cosmic stage. By drawing attention to the deadly intersection of disability and disaster, I don’t mean to add to that old story. Let us consider, instead, how the structural inequalities of ableism—intertwined with racism, classism, sexism, and other forms of oppression—intensify the risk disabled people face in times of crisis and natural disaster. Structural barriers we face every day—including inaccessible infrastructure, subpar public transportation systems, endemic poverty, and limited voice in matters of city planning and civic governance—become even more life threatening in disaster situations. Shelters are often inaccessible, while evacuation plans commonly assume a normative body and a substantial bank account. Environmental justice increasingly demands that we take a hard look at whose lives we deem worth saving, whose bodies can find shelter from the storm.

Hope in an Age of Climate Change

To act for justice in an age of climate change, we must recognize and grapple with the ways that environmental harm intensifies structural violence and exacerbates systematic oppression. This is difficult work that challenges our already strained capacity for hope. It can be tempting to look away, to salve our fears with a dose of easy optimism. Whether we find ourselves on the front lines of the environmental justice struggle or scrolling faster past the news to try and stave off despair, we all yearn for a sense of renewed possibility. But hope is a difficult thing, a powerful gift, a dangerous one. Let us not talk cheaply of hope. Let us not use hope as a fantasy to paper over the presence of injustice. Hope is not an antidote to danger; it is a goad to better and more meaningful action. It is a dare.

If we treat hope like a hothouse orchid, spectacular and fragile, with an elusive...