We use cookies to make your site experience better. Tracking cookies enables us to provide a functional Accessibility Toolbar, and easily log into your account (if you have one). For more information on how we use your data, read our privacy policy.

Imagining new accessible worlds
Member

Learning Modules

An illustration of a fire and a melting glacier, in shades of blue.

Climate Crisis and Disability

Table of Contents

  1. The Impact of Climate Crisis on Disabled People
  2. Disability Arts, Eco Performance
  3. Dreaming of Futures
  4. References

The Impact of Climate Crisis on Disabled People

Disabled people are disproportionately negatively impacted by climate change. In In Defense of the Wastelands, Nēhiyaw philosopher Erica Violet Lee uses personal storytelling to consider her relationship to “wastelands,” land/territory and bodies that have been devastated by the violence of ongoing colonial exploitation. She writes:

Wastelands are named wastelands by the ones responsible for their devastation. 

Once they have devastated the earth—logged the forest bare, poisoned the water, turned our neighbourhoods into brownfields so that we must grow our vegetables in pots above the ground—once they have consumed all that they believe to be valuable, the rest is discarded.

But the heart of wastelands theory is simple. Here, we understand that there is nothing and no one beyond healing. So we return again and again to the discards, gathering scraps for our bundles, and we tend to the devastation with destabilizing gentleness, carefulness, softness. […] 

I wonder how our bodies would function if they weren’t tasked with survival in an occupied state. What if our muscles did not have to stay braced for battle even as we sleep? How would we relate to one another if we were able to let down the weight of anti-colonial armour from our skin?

Reflection Questions

  • How do climate change and crisis impact Disabled people?
  • How do intersecting oppressions and privileges along lines of race, Indigeneity, class, gender, and more impact Disabled people’s vulnerability to climate change and crisis?

Disability Arts, Eco Performance

Note to instructors and students from Dr. Jessica Watkin

In this section, I respond to Disabled Indigenous artist moira williams’s performance of the piece, vacuum sealed, wrap, slough inside, tiiick tok, puncture ‘n’ cut, crush into bloom, which took place on January 20, 2022 at Practicing the Social: Entanglements of Art and Justice, an online arts-based gathering hosted by ReVision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice and Bodies in Translation. 

williams’s poetic and fragmented work inspired my writing. The quotations on the left side of the page describe my experience of the performance, from my perspective as a Blind performance scholar. The description is disrupted here by questions for reflection and discussion, activities, and supports and resources to further your learning.

Video: vacuum sealed, wrap, slough inside, tiick tok, puncture ‘n’ cut, crush into bloom by moira williams

williams uses a Zoom feature with green screen technology to blend into a background image of a tree. Sometimes I can see their hands, and with my ears I hear a voice creatively describing and inscribing nature.

Jessica Watkin

Activity: Ecosomatic Touch

Petra Kuppers’ ecosomatic (2022) work helps us to consider the ways that we touch on the environment as humans. In this invitation, drawn from Kuppers’ Starship Somatics (2023) sessions, we are called to pay attention to our clothing in tactile and mindful ways, to illustrate that everything around us has a complicated story behind it.

Invitation: Touch your clothing. What does it feel like? Where is it from? Where was it made? Who made it? What materials can you identify? Is the information on the tag?

Hear voice, hear williams, see head shaking, ASL interpreter also seems to accompany with percussive hands, I feel something from the way the interpreter is contrasted with moira/nature/technology and the other screen: Water.

Jessica Watkin

Reflection Questions

  • How can we understand “extraction” in a digital context? 
  • How does technology animate “extraction”?

williams sings. Water. Bath.

As williams uses a knife to slide a stick’s bark away from its core, we can see their head bounce with effort and their hands hold and enact energy to ensure the task is done. Brown, to green. Sharp.

It’s not durational, but time is a companion in this piece. Breaks between communication, moments between reception, moments to process and exist with the work. Breath.

williams applies medical tape to the shavings from the bark, and then wraps around their own head.

Pain, healing, existing with, relying on.

Black willow water of healing.

Jessica Watkin

Unpacking the Performance

This performance embodies nature as a living thing when williams as performer blends in with the digital background of their own design, and when they hold a real stick in their hands and scrape away with a tool until the shavings cover their skin.

The earth’s pain contrasts with williams’s pain. The land eases pain. The labour of easing pain in relationship to the earth through the stick in her hands, and the living plants and their uses and their disembodied voice animating the performance. I think of descriptive words like boiling and soft.

Jessica Watkin

Erica Violet Lee’s (2016) work on wastelands comes to mind, relating this performance to what we understand as the anthropocene. This Disabled Indigenous artist invites the Zoom audience to reflect on the outside world during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when many of us are staying indoors. They take photographs of the outdoors and use the technology available through Zoom to contrast our indoor lives with their animation of the land. Everything melds into one another.

Explore Further

Reflection Questions

  • In what ways is williams’s performance “activist art”?
  • When it comes to normative art practices, sustainability and impacts on the environment are not always a priority or value of the creators or artists producing a work. What are the implications of activist art when it comes to the climate? 
  • In what ways could activist art invite us to think differently about sustainability and our impact on the environment through consumption?
  • In what ways could Disability art invite us to think differently about sustainability? Our environment? Crisis?

Dreaming of Futures

Recommended Readings

In the introduction to Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, editors adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha describe the connection between speculative art and social justice movement work: 

Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction. […] We want organizers and movement builders to be able to claim the vast space of possibility, to be birthing visionary stories. Using their everyday realities and experiences of changing the world, they can form the foundation for the fantastic and, we hope, build a future where the fantastic liberates the mundane.

brown & Imarisha (2015), pp. 134–135, 139–140

Reflection Topic

Ask students to read “To Survive Climate Catastrophe, Look to Queer and Disabled Folks,” by Vanessa Raditz and Patty Berne (2019), then consider how crisis, emergency and Disability fit into Erica Violet Lee’s (2016) wasteland theory.

Antarctica by Syrus Marcus Ware

Black, Mad, Trans, Disabled artist and activist Syrus Marcus Ware created his play Antarctica after spending a year dreaming about what would happen if humans colonized Antarctica—the most “untouched” place in the world—to run away from the climate crisis. He created a play of science fiction, or as brown and Imarisha might suggest, speculative fiction, that is a practice in world-building. Students can watch an excerpt of the play on Ware’s YouTube account, or read the full script in the book Interdependent Magic: Disability Performance in Canada (pp. 129–156).

As Raditz and Berne (2019) point out, in this time of climate crisis it is necessary to learn from Disabled, Different, and multiply marginalized people:

In the face of so much institutional apathy, it is left to those living squarely at the intersections of all of these injustices to tear down the centuries-old silos among climate justice, disability justice, and queer liberation organizing. Disabled queer and trans communities of color are already preparing for the survival of their communities through oncoming disasters, teaching each other skills in resilience-based organizing to strategically create the changes that we need for queer and trans futures.

Activity: Dreaming the Apocalypse

Syrus Marcus Ware dreamed about a future world for a year before beginning to put down words on a page for his play Antarctica. For Ware, dreaming is resistance to normative, ableist, racist, and colonial approaches to “future planning.” Dreaming facilitates a more speculative route, allowing us to imagine that the apocalyptic moment usually understood as “the end of time” could also be considered the “beginning of times,” or an opportunity to reimagine oppressive structures and attitudes, and dream of a world made by and for people marginalized within current systems, including Disabled people. 

Provide the entire class with a prompt outlining a specific apocalyptic scenario. You could use the situation from Ware’s Antarctica, where the climate crisis has pushed people to rebuild society on the only remaining inhabitable land; or another hypothetical situation, such as that the global food production and distribution system has stopped working. 

Starting independently before coming together as a group, ask students to dream up new systems that take into account differently-situated people’s needs, responding to the following questions:

  • How can we expand access to basic human physical needs like water, food, and shelter? 
  • How do we nurture other important human needs like community and culture while rebuilding? 
  • What kinds of intersectional factors would we need to consider?

A detail from a larger illustration by Josephine Guan, featuring a melting glacier and a fire, shown in shades of blue.

Scroll to top
  • Contact Us