Disability is NOT inability: What disabled people can contribute to

sustainability

Walking InterconnectionsRESEARCHING THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF DISABLED PEOPLE FOR A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY

Sue Porter University of Bristol

An argument for consideration

According to the United Nations, over 15% of the world’s population live with disabilities. They are the world’s largest minority.

In countries with life expectancies over 70 years, individuals spend on average about 8 years, or 11.5% of their life span, living with disabilities.

Previous research into disabled people and climate change

related emergencies identified that:

1. Disabled people were amongst hardest hit by climate change

related disasters: they are starting from a low point

– Poverty

– Poor housing

– Unreliable transport systems

– Attitudes

2. Disabled people were as interested in sustainability as any

other group, but often excluded from participating

3. Disabled people have experience and skills, however were

viewed as ‘only vulnerable’, their knowledge not well used by

agency planners and emergency services. (Abbott and Porter, 2013)

Benilda Caixeta (1954 – 2005)

Despite her best efforts, BenildaCaixeta was unable to evacuate before or during hurricane Katrina… She told me the water was rushing into her home just before her phone went dead… her body and her wheelchair were found floating inside her home three days later.(Marcie Roth, Executive Director, National Spinal Cord Injury Association)

1. Hardest hit

1. Hardest Hit: attitudes and ethics

“When I inquired about the sheltering needs of people with disabilities, one Red Cross operations official told me, “We aren’t supposed to help these people. The local health department does that. We can hardly deal with the intact people”.

(Marcie Roth)

2. As committed to sustainable living

Different life styles

– Should everyone be asked to make the same changes?

– Different needs in order to live independently

e.g. cooling, lifts

Excluded thoughtlessly

– Feeling judged e.g. use of car not cycling

– Ableist assumptions

3. Experience and skills to offer

What’s so great about independence?

‘…the disability perspective of interdependence is a practical guide from the margins for making new choices that may lead to a just and sustainable world—a concept that reduces the distance between each other and our environment.’ (Erik Leipoldt )

The experience of being in need and in receipt of care, which requires an interdependence with others, may also equip disabled people to contribute to the debates around sustainability and our relationship with the environment.

3. Experience and skills to offer

Disabled people may have more to offer the debate around climate change from their different lived experiences, particularly around the idea of resources (both external resources and their own internal resources), which means that they may have a much more nuanced approach to conceiving of ‘limitedness’.

Environmental/sustainability organisations have pointed out the problem of ‘mainstream’ views about ‘limitlessness’ – of resources, energy and consumption, and the need to change attitudes if we are to challenge this ‘addictive’ behaviour.

Individual/social models Individual/lifestyle model Structural model

Literature and activists advocate individual actions forsustainability.Focus is on sustainable consumption

Broader societal changes required in organisation of social life and embedded power relations.Structural issues and inequalities reproduced in environmental inequalities

It’s the individual that needs to be ‘fixed’ by treatment, cure or rehab.

Society needs to make structural changes to include disabled people.Physical and social barriers to participation need to be addressed

Medical model Social model

So why don’t we make common cause

“I was at a meeting recently which included quite a lot of disabled people including people with sensory support needs.

At the start the Chair told us what would happen in the event of a fire alarm. We were told that we should look out for people in blue vests and then listen out for personalised alarm messages which would tell us what to do. Nobody seemed to think this was problematic”.

So why don’t we make common cause

“I signed up for a Transition Research Network meeting, and on checking access was told (very apologetically) that I’d have to use the public toilet 120 yards down the street”.

“Very interested (although unsurprised) to hear about your experience regarding the Transition Meeting - I have noticed here in Leeds meetings arranged in rooms that are "unfortunately not wheelchair accessible".

“One of the reasons I became interested in this area of research was from my own experience of developing a chronic illness and finding I wasn't able to continue with many of my previous pro-environmental behaviours, whilst at the same time feeling quite judged for using a car and not cycling etc when I attended environmental events!”

So why don’t we make common cause

“Having been involved in environmental and disability movements I've been surprised by the lack of crossover - and had interesting conversations with my disabled friends about how the more 'environmentally sound' shops etc. tend to be inaccessible, whereas the bigger chains are more likely to be accessible”.

“One friend in particular complained of green campaigners advocating the use of bikes over cars etc, [they] often don't take different forms of embodiment into account. She worried that such campaigns can even strengthen the discourse of disabled people are burdens on society”.

Walking Interconnections: Who, what, why

Participants were people who identify as disabled and people

who identify as interested in sustainability

Walking and talking together in pairs – using a physical activity to

surface things that we know in our bodies, as well as what we

know in our minds

Using arts based methods, including writing, photography,

drawing and mapping to know and voice different things,

differently

In order to see what happens – are there things from our different

perspectives and experiences that we can offer each other, and

might enhance our thinking about sustainability?

We were thinking of the social and economic aspects of

sustainability, as much as the environmental ones.

Walking Interconnections: Insights from the research

• The relationship between resilience and risk taking, deviation, problem solving, persistence and creativity;

• The absence of the disabled body within spaces typically coded as ‘environmental’ – e.g. heritage sites and ‘natural’ landscapes’;

• The recognition that the dominant discourse of ‘independence’, belies the reality and necessity of interdependence – interdependence offering alternative and useful conceptions of ‘sustainable living’;

• That ‘ability’ is a dynamic definition for all human subjects;• That the uplift in some sustainability initiatives – for example,

urban cycling routes - has ironically impacted negatively on disabled people’s experiences of supposedly shared walking/cycling paths.

Walking Interconnections: Insights from the research

Walking Interconnections has enabled us all, as co-researchers, to recognise the creative, adaptive, resourceful dimensions of disability.

Possibly our chief insight has been that disability can teach us—in the words of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

“to abide the unexpected, to live with dissonance, to

rein in the impulse to control”.

What next?Where next?

Please contribute a guest blog post at:

www.walkinginterconnections.com