[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas Winds blowing through breathing trees Strongholds on safe sunshine Good planets are hard to find yeah.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Hello, casequid listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly Case Good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Dr. Sunara Taylor, Assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Taylor is also an artist, writer, activist, and mother who's just published Disabled Lessons from a Wounded Desert. Her first book, Beasts of Animal and Disability Liberation, received the 2018American Book Award. Along with academic journals, Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets. Her artworks have been exhibited as venues such as the Kew Art foundation and the Smithsonian Institution, and as part of the Berkeley Art Museum Collection. Among other awards, she has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA grant, two Wynn Newhouse Awards, and an Animals and Culture Grant.
Professor Sanara Taylor, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:01:46] Speaker C: Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited for this conversation.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: You know, when we scheduled this interview, it was supposed to be about your new book, Disabled Ecologies. But after reading it, I went out and I bought your first book, Beasts of Burden. And to be quite honest, I liked it even more.
That's not a reflection on the second book. Yeah, it was much more thought provoking. So I'd like. I hope we can talk about both books and in particular your critique of the ways in which American society reifies the individual while blaming individuals and animals and aquifers for the disabling injuries, imposing them by social structures of oppression and erasure.
[00:02:28] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: Right. So it's a big story and it's a lot to talk about. But why don't we start with having you tell us what Disabled Ecologies is about?
[00:02:38] Speaker C: Absolutely. And firstly, I just have to say that's a wonderful compliment that you would go out and get the first book. And that book, I often feel like, is a little bit more. People either tend to really be drawn to it and really interested in it, or they're just very. Absolutely the opposite, because it's a book that's bringing together disability studies and animals, animal rights. So kind of controversial. But for this book, in any case, this is a book that does two things. So Disabled Ecologies at Once is a philosophical kind of reflection on the relationship between injury to human beings and injury to nature. My hope is to kind of offer a language to be able to address that relationship. The inseparability between harm to the natural world and harm to human beings. And I do that specifically through the lens of critical disability studies or disability activism. But the other thing that the book does is that it's really grounded in a particular story of one of the earliest environmental justice movements in the country, a group called Tucsonans for a Clean Environment that emerged in the 1980s in response to defense industry pollution of the south side of Tucson from the late 40s through the. Through the 70s. So it kind of does. Does both things simultaneously, kind of tells this amazing story of activism and also really tries to make a case for the importance of disability being part of the environmental conversation.
[00:04:17] Speaker B: Well, I mean, in many ways, it's the story of the Cold War, Right. The national security state, all kinds of things, including the mining of uranium, is a problem throughout the Southwest and didn't really exclude Tucson in that respect.
[00:04:31] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Before we go on to talk some more about the specific case in the book, you critique the notion of origin stories, even as you argue they're necessary. But I was wondering if you could tell us something about your origin story and how it motivated your art research, writing, and activism. And you might want to mention something about your art and your activism.
[00:04:55] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So, firstly, I'll say that I.
I do. I have a very complicated relationship with origin stories because as a physically disabled person, there's often this sort of questioning of what happened to you. Right. There's this sort of request from of. Of people about my origin story. And that is a common theme that disabled activists and disabled community kind of talk about and kind of challenge some of the things that can arise when that's the emphasis simultaneously. I've always felt that certain aspects of my origin story are really important to share. So I was born disabled on the south side of Tucson. My disability is likely caused by the same contamination that I write about in the book. So this book is not a memoir. It's not a sort of personal, you know, journey of discovery. But that origin story, having that origin story gave me an understanding of two of the concepts that are ultimately what this book is about. So it shaped my understanding of disability. I had an understanding from, you know, the time I was a little kid that disability is not just my own individual medical problem, but is a political issue, that disability can be caused by systems of violence and exploitation and extraction from war and from pollution. And I also had an understanding, right. That our environment isn't that Nature is not separate from us, that just humans are a part of nature. And again, that injury to nature is. Is injury to us. I had a visceral understanding of that and that ultimately those two things are ultimately what this book is about on some level. And so it made sense for me to return to. To Tucson, to ground this book in Tucson. The other thing that I'll say, other aspects of my origin that I'll say is that I was raised by a really wonderful parents and have amazing siblings and were. Grew up in a very sort of politicized home and a very, very creative home. And by the time I kind of discovered disability activism in my late teens, early 20s, it wasn't hard for me to kind of discover this whole other way of thinking about disability in terms of discrimination, in terms of ableism, because I already had such a sort of a political upbringing. And also, you know, the other sort of relevant aspect of that is that animals and nature were never sort of outside of our political frame, that we were, you know, my siblings and I were, you know, identified as animal activists early on.
So. So I've also always been drawn to thinking about what disability can teach us about animals and our relationship to the more than human world. Not only animals, but animals and our broader ecologies and ecosystems. What disability studies can teach us about our relationship to the more than human world, how we think about the more than human world. Yeah. So I would say that whether in my art practice, which I. I identified and was a working painter for many, many years throughout my 20s and early 30s, or through my books and research, those are the kinds of stories and ideas that continue to shape whatever it is, whatever project I'm working on.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: I'm assuming that the Disabled ecologies is your PhD dissertation, revised, is that correct?
[00:08:39] Speaker C: It is, yes. It has been nine years in the making. It is as old as my. I started with my. Doing my qualifying exams when she was just a newborn. So, yeah, it's been a. It's been a long process.
[00:08:53] Speaker B: Something pretty remarkable about your book is that it positions you. You're not the center of the story, per se, but it positions you and the story part of each other. Right. I mean, we all have these histories. We all have these origin stories. Some are more compelling than others. It's interesting to see that in a. In a dissertation and then in a revised dissertation.
[00:09:16] Speaker C: Yeah. And it was a. You know, it was definitely, on some levels, it wasn't a hard decision for me to. To make, that I needed to include myself in the story. Right. That it Felt, you know, I think for. For me, I'm almost like, even though I am in the sciences, I have this sense that there is no objective place from which to write from. Right. That actually almost the more objective thing you can do is to be very clear about what your positionality and experiences and viewpoints bring to the research that you're doing.
And so I think in both, actually in Beast of Burden, my first book, and in Disabled Ecologies, I feel not only that, like I could not actually write myself out of it, that that actually wouldn't even be possible for me to do, but also that it's a responsibility I think I have. When I'm also dealing with questions that are quite complicated and can be quite delicate, it feels like my responsibility to also include myself in that frame. So that's been part partially why I have chosen to do that.
[00:10:25] Speaker B: Well, let's. Let's go to Tucson. Okay. To the landscape or the disabled ecology, you know, what's its origin story in more detail?
[00:10:34] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Well, its origin story is dependent on who you ask, which is one, you know. Right. One of the. One of the great ways in which we can think about origin stories being politicized. So if you ask the EPA or the city of Tucson what this story is, it will always start in the late 1940s when various defense industries moved into Tucson and lead among them was Hughes Aircraft Company, which was bought out by Raytheon in the 90s and is actually currently RTX. Hughes Aircraft moved in, I believe, in 1950. And pretty much immediately these defense industries started, you know, dumping their waste, their, their, their chemicals, their airplane degreasers, their solvents may lead, among them trichloroethylene or TCE into the desert ground, along desert fences and desert washes. This pollution eventually, of course, didn't actually take very long. Moved through the desert washes onto Tohono odum nation land would eventually seep into the groundwater where it was soon sucked up by neighborhood wells, by city wells. And then the community above drank this water, bathed in this water, and many people became sick. Many people died from various illnesses. When these industries first moved in, this was a largely rural area. It was a mixed race area. By the time the contamination had really was really impacting people's drinking water. And particularly by the time it came to light, this was actually largely a Mexican American community, many of whom had been kind of pushed to the south side because of a racist gentrification project that had happened in another part of Tucson in the 1960s. What happened on in. In terms of the pollution. And then the. The book continues the story by telling what happened after this pollution came to light. The amazing community organizing and this sort of expansive vision of justice that I feel like the community really had to protect and care for not only their own health, but also the health of the aquifer and the health of future generations. But I said at the start that it depends on who you ask. And that's because a lot of community members will tell a much longer story. Right. This is a story of settler colonialism, of dispossession. Right. This Hughes Aircraft built its facility, you know, literally like a mile away from the northwest or northeast corner, apologies, of part of the Tohono Odum Nation Reservation. This was also very close by to some of the earliest European settlements that happened in the area. So there's this long, long history in that region of continuous dispossession and exploitation of land and water and people that people also see as a sort of a longer history to this. So those are some of the things that happened in Tucson. And I could keep going, but maybe I'll see what direction you want to take it in.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipchitz, your host. And my guest today is Professor Sanara Taylor from UC Berkeley, who has just published Disabled Lessons from a Wounded Desert. She is, among other things, an artist, writer, activist, and mother. And we're just talking about basically, her case study in Tucson, where she was born and where defense industries contaminated the aquifers, leading to many cases of injury in nearby communities. Aquifers are largely invisible, you know, and people, I think, don't really know, they live over them. Even people who have well water probably don't often say, you know, where does this water come from? The other thing about aquifers is that, given the story, there's this injury at a distance kind of thing, right? The distance between where the problem is caused and where it manifests. And I don't know if you have any thoughts about that.
[00:14:57] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So the aquifer really became a central character. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that I. You know, through this research, I really fell in love with the aquifer and the. The book itself. I have this whole footnote system that I kind of analyze that I describe as the. The underground of the book or the aquifer of the book. I include a bunch of drawings that I did to help me better understand what an aquifer is. Because, you know, as you were Kind of just describing, I think people know generally that we rely on groundwater, that, you know, that they might know that their, their, their water comes from groundwater. But to actually think about aquifers as more than infrastructure or as, you know, parts of broader ecosystems is really not a part of our sort of general ideas of what we think about when we think of nature, for example, you know, and so, and partially that is because aquifers are invisible. We can't, there's not this sort of romantic idea of aquifers as a site of nature. But the more that I learned about aquifers, and particularly Tucson's aquifer, the more I became so sort of really bewildered by them and amazed by them because here are these, this massive amount of water that's sometimes thousands of years old, fossilized groundwater that is underneath a desert that doesn't, that to many people seems incredib, dry and without water. And there's all these entanglements that I find really fascinating that groundwater is so inseparable from above ground water systems, from weather systems, from weather patterns. And so all of these kinds of broader entanglements are really important because when we don't consider them, when we don't think about aquifers as ecosystems, then we also don't really understand how to best protect them. Which is partially why, you know, I don't have the exact numbers in front of me. But like a great deal of the numbers of the world's aquifer systems right now are at risk of depletion or otherwise are polluted and at risk. Right. So the aquifer in Tucson, you know, I think this question that you're raising of distance is a really important one, right? Because it took from the time the contaminants were dumped, it took many years for that pollution to travel through the groundwater. Because groundwater moves at different rates depending on how porous and what kinds of sediments and rocks make up the aquifer. Right. So that can lead to all sorts of challenges when a community is then trying to seek justice. Because there's always this historical narrative of like, well, that happened a long time ago, we didn't know better back then, or those industries may not even exist anymore. Maybe they've been bought out by other industries. So, and then there's also this sort of time it takes for contaminants and toxins to have their impact on our, on human bodies, on, on non human bodies, right? So there's all these ways in which the time of pollution isn't necessary, doesn't fit necessarily easily with the time frames of, you know, legal battles, for example. So those are just some of the ways that I have thought about aquifers throughout, throughout the book. But I do have this practice of I really wanted to get to know them to understand what an aquifer is better. And so I have this drawing practice that's included in the book of kind of my different kind of changing understandings of aquifers.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: One of the points I think that you raise is when you're talking about environmental justice, much of the focus is on immediately observable impacts. Communities that live next to landfills or air pollution from point sources or water pollution from point sources. It's visible, it's amenable, ideally to rapid action, and yet with something like the aquifer. And I think it's also true of the lung cancer cases from radiation, that the separation in space and time does mean that nobody notices it until later. And then the process of identifying what's going on is also subject to certain kinds of, I don't know, restrictions or procedures which I do want to also address in terms of particularly the Super Fund and the epa. You mentioned this point. We did not know any better in those days. Yeah, I mean, it's like, well, we used to enslave people. We didn't know any better in those days. And I wonder if you could sort of spin out that whole idea. I mean, is it correct to say we didn't know any better in those days, or is that a way of exculpating the past?
[00:20:12] Speaker C: Oh, definitely. We did know better. And, you know, it is such a sort of way of creating this narrative of innocence, of industry. Of industry innocence, but also of progress. Right. That we're becoming a more better stewards of the planet as we know better. Which, you know, is also very clearly not what's going on in our current reality in terms of the state of our environment. You know, I think if there's anything that we can learn from the moment that we are in is that we have all the science we possibly need. You know, these corporations, you know, can constantly demand new science, new studies, but we, we know. Right? So at a. What is happening. And so at a. At a certain point, it's no longer, you know, as much as I deeply admire and support and love the young climate activists who say, you know, trust the science, it's like we, on some level that the, the. We all know to trust the science. And yet there can constantly be this demand for more science. And so this was, this was part of the problem Even back in the 40s. Right. They, they can. There's this narrative of again, of innocence that we didn't know about better back then, but actually if you look at what, what the sort of general knowledge was of, of specifically of specific contaminants of trichloroethylene, we could even look at, but also just of how pollution moved in groundwater, of the impacts of chemical waste on drinking water on communities, there was already an abundance of information of science, of policies that maybe were not, what's the word? Maybe they were not enforceable policies, but they were certainly best practice policies that were all in place and that there's no doubt that higher ups at these various industries should have known of. Not only higher ups, but managers, people, you know, perhaps the, you know, the actual, the person working on the Hughes aircraft floor who was actually cleaning off aircraft or TCE with TCE or something. I think it's too much like they may not have known. Right. But certainly the managers, the higher ups should have had a sense and did have a lot of documentation. And so one of my chapters really documents a lot of this about, you know, of what was kind of commonly known should have been best practice. And so this whole narrative then is continuously repeated, but it's really not true. Right. So one of the questions that I ask in the book is, you know, individuals who are, who are in communities that are experiencing injury, that are experiencing sickness, they're constantly told to, they're constantly demanded to, to retell their origin stories and then to prove it. Right? Prove that your. The burden of proof is on them. Prove that your illness is caused by this chemical. Whereas these industries have the power to not only have to prove, but to not even tell a story. Right. They can basically be like, no, we, we didn't know better back then. So there's no point in looking, there's no point in questioning. So that is definitely like a line throughout the. Or a thread throughout the book that I follow is the different, again returning to origin stories, the different ways in which origin stories can be kind of deployed for different ends.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: Political ends usually.
[00:24:07] Speaker C: Right, yeah, political ends.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: You make this point, I think, in disabled ecologies, you know, is that normal science supports the erasure of individual and community injury. And this is actually the result of methodology.
It aggregates individuals into data sets to establish norms and risks of exposure to toxic substances and then to deny the impact by arguing that the data sets are too small. And this is in specific communities, Right, Yep. That individual effects can't be attributed to exposures because there's no clear sort of causal link. And I mean, this is a kind of. This has to do with the method, the analytical method, right. Which is the gold standard in science. And how does that work exactly? What arguments do you make about that?
[00:24:56] Speaker C: I mean, I think so a lot of environmental justice activists and, you know, their allies in the sciences and, you know, natural sciences and social sciences have framed this as a sort of the way in which studies are designed to be inconclusive, essentially. That is, you know, I mean, certainly in Tucson, a lot of the health studies, the questions that they ask are. Are specifically impossible. They're impossible to get the answer to that. You know. Okay, so a few examples. For example, trichloroethylene was one of many different kinds of chemicals, especially in the early years when it would have been really impacting people. Right. And yet all of this studies that were being done were saying, well, we can't specifically link your illness to trichloroethylene. Right. There has to be this one to one ratio.
Never mind the fact that we actually also don't have the science to totally understand the unique ways in which TCE is going to impact different kinds of bodies, bodies who might already have other kinds of conditions.
But my point is that it wasn't just tce, it was a toxic soup. So that's one way. Another way is that they, the city of Tucson, failed in the early days to investigate actually who exactly had received contaminated water. They knew generally, but they didn't have exact addresses. They didn't have the exact range. So then when these studies came in to say, you know, that would be like, okay, for how long did you drink tce? And, you know, and then let's correlate that to disease. That, that information. They didn't have the information. So then to actually, how do those studies. So then when the studies would come back as inclusive, I mean, as inconclusive. Sorry, as inconclusive, then that became evidence, right, that there, you know, that maybe this wasn't a big deal, that maybe there wasn't actually, you know, something going on when in fact, the, you know, again, the whole point is that they were specifically kind of designed to be inconclusive. And so that's why at a certain point, organizers in Tucson said, we don't want any more health studies. These are just. These are just getting the community's hopes up and then just tormenting us essentially that, you know, essentially what they started kind of calling for after that was just, was, was health care. They were like, we know we're sick. So. And that we, we are experiencing these things. So, so let's just say what it is, what we actually need, which is that we need some sort of health facility to help deal with these chemical related conditions.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: Well, the point of, in a way, the point of doing the studies is to try and not just identify causality, but responsibility.
[00:27:51] Speaker C: Yeah, right.
[00:27:53] Speaker B: And I guess it's a tort injury. You then find the source.
[00:27:59] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: Retroactive punishment. I mean it doesn't much help in that respect.
What happened with Hughes, with, with Hughes's responsibility, how did that play out?
[00:28:11] Speaker C: Yeah, so, you know, Hughes and you know, again, we could look to all sorts of different, you know, industries that have, have done the same thing. Hughes basically said a few things. They said firstly that, well, it wasn't their contamination, it was everybody else's contamination. So they would point, point the fingers at all the smaller, you know, smaller aircraft industry. Smaller, smaller even like, you know, local kind of laundromats and stuff. And because TCE was pretty widely used right at that in that time.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: Dry cleaning, right?
[00:28:45] Speaker C: Yeah, dry cleaning. That's what it was. Yes. And so, so firstly there was that kind of technique of like, let's point the finger at everybody else. Then they said that okay, fine, yes, know, tce, you know, some of the TCE is from, from them, but they didn't know, they had no reason to know that the TCE would enter into the groundwater. Which again is just to go back to how we think about aquifers, which is just, you know, challenges any kind of basic common sense. Because of course Hughes also, the facility also had a bunch of wells, you know, so they knew that there was groundwater there. And even in Napoleon's time, you know, people understood that you shouldn't build your, you know, have, have, have your latrine upstream from, from your drinking source. Right. But then, you know, once, once it was kind of clear that that also was not necessarily like a workable argument. They, they started saying, essentially the Air Force started saying that, okay, they would be responsible for contamination, but only at the property line. Only to the property line. I mean, this in fact is how it is today.
The Air Force 44 plant is responsible only for the cleanup of the contamination up to the property line. You know, this was such a sort of a ridiculous thing that hydrologists were joking that it was the Los Reales fault line, which is the name of the road, as if there was some sort of geological structure that would keep the pollution there. The other thing that they did is that Hughes actually hired its own investigators, its own scientists and such to do a study to see. And this was early on, I think this was 1980. This came back, you know, not looking good for Hughes. It was very clear that the pollution was coming from them, that there was evidence that, you know, they should have known and such. And so they tried to keep this out of the hands of the EPA for years and luckily we're unsuccessful. But I partially tell that story because there's a description in that document that gives a site history and it says essentially that at the time of the polluting, these were widely used disposal practices and essentially nobody knew any better.
And, you know, and so, so one of the things that I. One of the kind of stories that I tell is how this history, this narrative of not knowing any better was actually designed by Hughes lawyers and Hughes scientists themselves. And yet it is still continuously repeated.
[00:31:34] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host Ronnie Lipschitz, and my guest today is Professor Sanara Taylor from UC Berkeley. She's just published a book called Disabled Ecologies, Lessons from a Wounded Desert. But she's also the author of Beasts of Burden, Animal and Disability Liberation. And maybe we can. There's more questions to ask about disabled ecologies, but why don't we shift for a moment to Beasts of Burden?
As an old white guy, I like to think I've learned to identify and change the biases I learned growing up, you know, the things I was socialized into. But, you know, while I was reading this book, Beasts of Burden, I realized that I remain an ableist. And so I wonder if you could explain that term and how ableism is structured into our society and of course, how that then, you know, reflects on the use of the term or the application of disability.
[00:32:30] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, at its most simple, I think we can think about ableism as a system of power, as a system of oppression similar to racism or sexism. It's the way in which a certain kind of privileging of some bodies, of. Of bodies understood as or perceived as able bodied are. It's that the privileging of those bodies are sort of invisibilized, right? Depoliticized. And then the devaluing of bodies associated with dependency, with vulnerability, with needing care, with needing help are systemically and structurally sort of left out, devalued. And certain kinds of narratives are, you know, continuously told about those conditions, about being dependent or about being vulnerable or so I think, I think that that is, that is part of it, right? Is that ableism is a structuring force in our. In our world. If we think about again, just how sort of.
What is the word I'm looking for? Like how.
How disdained these sort of the idea of being weak or the idea of being, you know, being dependent on another person are. Right. And the way in which we celebrate these ideas of being independent, of being efficient, of being productive. Right. Those are these. And I know I'm being kind of broad here, but those are kind of examples of just the way that ableism kind of structures our ideas of what it means to live a good and meaningful life. Right. And of what it would mean to live, you know, to live the kind of life that you don't want to live again, as dependent and such. So ableism is, you know, baked into our philosophies, our histories, our ways of what we value, but also into just the structure of our architecture. Right. The way that we presume that certain. All that bodies will access a space all in the same way, or that we see certain kinds of architectural changes or geographical changes as, you know, specialized. You know, that. As if there's something more natural about stairs than there are ramps. So I'm probably being more sort of theoretical about it than I need to be. I think for me, ableism is actually like. Makes such a complicated concept that shapes so much that it's hard for me to sort of step back and describe it more accessibly, but maybe, hopefully you can get something there in that clip that will be useful to you.
[00:35:41] Speaker B: Well, I'm thinking about the way in which statistics in particular does normalization, right. In the sense of doing regressions on data, drawing straight lines and then ignoring what are called the outliers, the points that don't lie anywhere near that particular line. Just saying by calling them outliers, just saying, well, they don't count. There's a sense in which normalization or normalizing is a characteristic of our society and those that don't fit those particular norms. And I mean, we see that in spades right now in this election.
Are considered, you know, outsiders to be excluded. I mean, it's, it's. And I guess that came, of course, before the statistics. Yeah, absolutely. Well, the arg. What are the arguments that you make in Beasts of Burden linking disability and animal liberation movements? I'm especially. I was especially intrigued by your philosophical perspective, you know, political theory and critiques of those who have advocated animal liberation while treating disability as an obstacle to a full and rewarding life. And I'm of course thinking here about Peter Singer.
[00:36:54] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:36:55] Speaker B: And your, you know, exchanges and encounters with Peter Singer and maybe you could tell us about that.
[00:37:02] Speaker C: Yes, absolutely. So I have, you know, I mentioned at the top of the show that I have kind of long identified as, you know, a someone who cares deeply about animal, animal. Animal issues, animal justice, animal rights. And of course I care deeply about disability and disability justice. And when I was in my, I guess in my 20s, I kind of came to this surprising realization that for a lot of disability community these issues were really seen as at odds with each other. I was increasingly at the time making a lot of artwork that was, that was, that was thinking about them as, as interconnected.
And, and so this was, this struck me as really curious. I was, you know, and, and what I found or you know, there's multiple, there's multiple reasons and, and I'll, I'll limit my answer to just a few of them, but. Right. There's of course a long history of dehumanization. Right. The, it is a complicated thing to say the least for communities that have been animalized, that have been dehumanized to then, you know, join, join ranks with or, and even just theoretically. Right. With animal, animal issues. So there's, there's that. There's also the fact that a lot of sort of animal rights work has often been framed. To me, it's been kind of co opted as a sort of a lifestyle choice, right. As a diet and a certain ableist idea of what it means to be healthy and fit often goes along with that. You know, the example I always use is the popularity of the vegan book Skinny Skinny. You know, that if you just eat the right diet you'll cure, cure yourself of all disease and you know, you'll be a, you know, a skinny, a skinny like these, you know, fancy white vegans. So, so there's, oh, there's the way, there's that. There's the fact that sometimes the way in which veganism has been represented has been through also these sort of ableist frames. But then the, there's also this complicated legacy of philosopher Peter Singer, who many of your listeners might know as a pretty controversial utilitarian philosopher who wrote these sort. He's often kind of called the father of animal rights. He wrote, I believe it was in 1975 is the publication date he wrote Animal Liberation, which is kind of a founding text.
And that book was profound. It shaped my thinking as a child. It exposed the brutalities of animal industries. A lot of that book is exploring what happens behind factory farm walls in slaughterhouses in, in fur farms, you know, animal testing facilities.
But Singer also does this strange sort of philosophical comparison essentially between intellectually disabled people and non human animals that I can get into though it's a little bit complicated. But this.
Yeah, okay, so he, he essentially is, he's interested in which I am too in thinking about what, how can we think about justice or the language he uses as, you know, equality if it's, if, if we're trying to get beyond speciesism, right. There's no one capacity that all human beings have that all non human beings don't have. So here's, he's starting to get to capacities. He's saying, you know, is it, is it rationality that makes human beings special? But no, there's some human beings that aren't necessarily rational, right? Is it, is it the ability to have language? No, there's, you know, people at different human beings at different life cycles don't necessarily have life stages, don't necessarily have language. Intellectually disabled people. So he's kind of, he's, he's trying to kind of show that there's no kind of capacity that inherently makes us morally relevant, more morally relevant than other non human animals.
And so at this point I actually think this argument is very anti, very anti ableist. And I actually look at it in the book and you know, agree with him, right, that when we hold up these particular kinds of capacities as being, being the thing that sudden, that, that offers moral worth, then that, that, that is not only a speciesist, but it's also ableist, right? But Singer also, he goes into this next sort of register where he says, like, like many people, he has this feeling that well, it still worse to kill, you know, it might, it's still worse to kill a human being than it is to kill a chicken or something. And so he says, he, he's, he says well why is that, you know, if it's not that the human being has some particular capacity, if it's not just this sort of sanctity of human life, that's that, that is, that is speciesist, then what is it? And he ultimately kind of, to me, he kind of backtracks and he ends up suggesting that there are these capacities that make it, that make human life more valuable when they, when they, when someone has them. So the capacity to envision a future, the capacity to have rational thought, the capacity for language, the capacity of self awareness.
And but for Singer that doesn't mean that just to re. Throw in human beings. It means that we have to, to if we agree with that, that we have to agree then that there's some animals who do have those capacities and some human beings who do not have those capacities. And those human beings are, you know, intellectually disabled people or are, you know, elderly. Elderly people with dementia or infantry. And so that maybe those human lives are.
It gets into this very complicated territory, but basically, you know, are. On some level, it's. It's. Under certain conditions, it could be less wrong to end those lives. So this has obviously has very scary implications for disabled community who has. And particularly intellectually disabled community who have only within the past few decades really, you know, been. Been granted certain basic human rights and protections, you know. So my point throughout B Sub Burden is that Singer's argument is not only ableist, but that it is also speciesist. And that actually what we need to be, instead of seeing these conversations as at odds, we need to see ableism and oppression. Ableism as a system of oppression and speciesism as a system of oppression, as entangled, right? That these capacities that have long been held up as justifications for why we can exploit other animals are again, not only speciesists, but also ableist. And I'll just add here that I think, you know, our. To get back to science, right? Our science is kind of in terms of animal behavior. Animal cognition is increasingly catching up with, you know, what many of us have kind of intuited all along that there's a whole variety of different kinds of intelligences, that there's a whole very vast, amazing world of animal emotion, that animals of all kinds can use tools, have language, mourn their dead, you know, all these different things constantly.
And yet. So I could see how some. Some people could, you know, could say, well, yes, no, those kinds of capacities, you know, never. We no longer make the case that we can exploit animals because they're just. They're dumb and they don't have language. But the, but the fact is, is that those arguments are part. Part of the argument that part of the philosophical structure that has shaped the very systems of animal, Animal exploitation, animal use, that, you know, structure our relationship with animals now, right? They are built into the legacy of these. Of these things. So that's one way. And then I'll add really, you know, I'll try to add really quickly that the. The other kind of relationship that I follow between disability and animals is more material. So the. So actually, the sort of more political economy aspect of it, the fact that animal industries of all sorts, and, you know, it's a mo. The most clear example is in the animals, you know, big Meat and dairy, the animals that we exploit for food. But these animals are specifically manufactured to be disabled. That. That is essentially what makes them profitable. What, what makes them this disablement is what makes them objects for the market. And so that kind of just material reality of disablement of the animals that we exploit, whether we're exploiting them for zoos, whether we're exploiting them for meat or for various other industries, there's always this inherent disablement that is part of what makes turns animals into consumable, profitable commodities.
[00:47:53] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Professor Sanara Taylor from UC Berkeley. We've just been talking about her book Beasts of Burden and the whole issue of animal liberation. But we only have a few minutes left, so let me ask you a somewhat different question. So one of the contradictions you identify in the Superfund legislation, and you mentioned this, actually, is that EPA and state agencies treat disabled ecologies, but deliberately exclude those who have been injured by the toxic chemicals responsible for both disabled ecologies and individuals.
So individual and community health are the responsibility of underfunded health agencies and overburdened clinics who have neither the interest or expertise to address these kinds of injuries. Since you're now I'm getting to the nub of the question. Since you're now a professor at Berkeley, I'm sure you're often asked by students about what are we to do?
Are there ways to take advantage of these unrecognized entanglements to make care available to both injured people and injured ecologies? What do you tell them?
[00:49:01] Speaker C: Yes. Okay, so maybe I'll just say, really? You know, I think returning to how we started the show, this the sort of political thrust or one of the political thrusts behind this book is to try to untangle different ways that we can begin to start identifying how we can, through our policy or through our laws, through our mutual care networks, whatever it is, how we can begin identifying the need to think about, you know, human injury and injury to water, injury to air, injury to other animals together and not to see them as separate. That said, I am not, you know, and my students are well aware of this because I repeat it to them. I am not a scientist. I'm not a natural scientist. I am not a policy buff. So I think my role as I see it right now, as someone who's kind of as a disability studies scholar, as a more humanities leaning social scientist who's landed in this Science Department.
I feel like one of the roles that I can have is to provide a space where the tools of disability studies, the tools of disability activism, can be taken up by my, you know, brilliant, wonderful students who are studying the ins and outs of policy and the ins and outs of, you know, whether it be river science or forest fires or climate adaptation, you know, and to take that disability studies framework and disability activism into these fields.
So that's, that's, that's what I hope is. Well, you know, this book can partially do is to create more space where we don't just automatically think, oh, disability and environment don't have anything to do with each other, or, you know, I want to see lots of disability labs open up in environmental studies departments across the country, you know, because that's, that is, we need a lot of different disabled people, different disabled thinkers thinking through these kinds of complicated questions, whether the science behind it or the policy questions.
[00:51:45] Speaker B: Okay, well, Sanara Taylor, thank you for being my guest on Sustainability Now.
[00:51:50] Speaker C: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:51:53] Speaker B: You've been listening to Sustainability now interview with UC Berkeley professor Sanara Taylor, author, artist, activist, and mother who's just published Disabled Lessons from a Wounded Desert. She's also author of Beasts of Animal and Disability Liberation.
And if you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] SustainabilityNow and Spotify, YouTube, and PocketCasts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make KSQUID your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next every other Sunday, sustainability Now.
[00:52:44] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out Trumpets a tropic climb Times are not through currents and thriving seas and winds blowing through breathing trees Strongholds on safe sunshine Good planets are hard to find yeah.
