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6: Bodies of Nature: The Environmental Politics of Disability
- Indiana University Press
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129 6 Bodies of Nature The Environmental Politics of Disability The creatures that populate the narrative space called “nature” are key characters in scientific tales about the past, present, and future. Various tellings of these tales are possible, but they are always shaped by historical, disciplinary, and larger cultural contexts. —Jennifer Terry, “‘Unnatural Acts’ in Nature” Although concern with the environment has long been an animating force in disability studies and activism, “environment” in this context typically refers to the built environment of buildings, sidewalks, and transportation technologies. Indeed, the social model of disability is premised on concern for the built environment, stressing that people are disabled not by their bodies but by their inaccessible environments. (The wheelchair user confronting a flight of steps is probably the most common illustration of this argument.) Yet the very pervasiveness of the social model has prevented disability studies from engaging with the wider environment of wilderness, parks, and nonhuman nature because the social model seems to falter in such settings. Stairs can be replaced or supplemented with ramps and elevators, but what about a steep rock face or a sandy beach? Like stairs, both pose problems for most wheelchair users, but, argues Tom Shakespeare, “it is hard to blame the natural environment on social arrangements.”1 He asserts that the natural environment—rock cliffs, steep mountains, and sandy beaches—offers proof that “people with impairments will always be disadvantaged by their bodies”; the social model cannot adequately address the barriers presented by those kinds of spaces.2 I, too, recognize the limitations of the social model and the need to engage with the materiality of bodies, but I am not so sure that the “natural environment” is as distinct from the “built environment” as Shakespeare suggests. On the contrary, the natural environment is also “built”: literally so in the case of trails and dams, metaphorically so in the sense of cultural constructions and deployments of “nature,” “natural,” and “the environment.” 130 | Bodies of Nature Disability studies could benefit from the work of environmental scholars and activists who describe how “social arrangements” have been mapped onto “natural environments.” Many campgrounds in the United States, for example, have been designed to resemble suburban neighborhoods, with single campsites for each family, clearly demarcated private and public spaces, and layouts built for cars. Each individual campsite faces onto the road or common area so that rangers (and other campers ) can easily monitor others’ behavior. Such spacing likely discourages, or at least pushes into the cover of darkness, outwardly queer acts and practices.3 Environmental historians such as William Cronon document the displacement of indigenous peoples from parklands; indigenous people were removed and evidence of their communities was destroyed so that the new parks could be read as pristine, untouched wilderness .4 Nature writers such as Carolyn Finney and Evelyn White explain that African Americans are much less likely than whites to find parks and open spaces welcoming , accessible, or safe; histories of white supremacist violence and lynchings in rural areas make the wilderness less appealing. Park brochures, wilderness magazines, and advertisements for outdoor gear have, in turn, tended to cater to overwhelmingly white audiences.5 As these examples attest, the natural environment is also a built environment , one shaped by and experienced through assumptions and expectations about gender, sexuality, class, race, and nation. As Mei Mei Evans argues, “One way of understanding the culturally dominant conception of what constitutes ‘nature’ in the United States is to ask ourselves who gets to go there. Access to wilderness and a reconstituted conception of Nature are clearly environmental justice issues demanding redress.”6 How might we begin to read disability into these formations? How have compulsorily able-bodiedness/able-mindedness shaped not only the environments of our lives—both buildings and parks—but our very understandings of the environment itself? One way to address these questions is by examining the deployment of disability in popular discourses of nature and environmentalism; another method would be to uncover the assumption of able-bodiedness and able-mindedness in writings about nature. I follow both paths in this chapter, unpacking the work of disability and able-bodiedness/able-mindedness in cultural constructions of nature, wilderness, and the environment. As with the visions of a “better” future found in discussions of reproduction, childhood, community, and cyborgs, visions of nature are often idealized and depoliticized fantasies, and disability plays an integral, if often unmarked, role in marking the limit of these fantasies. Whether we focus on...