No Planet Without Us: Disability Ingenuity as Key to Climate Action
Keynote Remarks for International Disabled People’s Day, London Borough of Hounslow, 3 December 2024 (edited for publication, 15 January 2025)
Author’s note:
In the wake of the devastating LA wildfires of this month, I’ve watched more and more people come to the conclusion that climate change is not coming, it’s here.1 This realization, however, came too late for Anthony and Justin Mitchell, Rory Callum Sykes, Annette Rossilli, and Dalyce Curry, all disabled people who lost their lives in the fires.
Reading their names, along with the experiences of those who lost homes, wheelchairs, and more, I thought back to these remarks on disability justice and climate justice which I gave just last month in London — not because they explore the fact that disabled people are some of the most heavily impacted by climate change, but because my main aim was to argue that our embodied disabled knowledge is critical to surviving climate change: hence the title, “No Planet Without Us.” I am not the first to put forth these ideas and hope not to be the last, but I offer them so more disabled siblings, the world over, have the words to draw upon to express them.
Introduction
Hi everyone, thank you for having me and being here today to celebrate International Disabled People’s Day together. As was just mentioned, my name is Anna and I am a researcher and activist in the disability space.2
My remarks today will explore five main questions:
How are environmental justice and disability justice connected?
How are disabled people excluded from the climate movement?
What things can disabled people do to be part of the climate action agenda?
What can those already in the climate movement do to support disabled people, particularly in pursuit of a fair and just transition?
How does disabled wisdom and ways of being strategically enrich the climate action agenda?
And with that as our road map, I will begin with some framing remarks about we should view disability in the climate space.
Disability is a natural part of the spectrum of human diversity, and many ways of being which are considered disabilities are mere differences that ought to be celebrated for how they enrich the world. Absent the discrimination and restrictions placed upon us by society, disability is rarely the tragedy that Normate (or nondisabled) Culture would like us all to believe.
In fact, disabled people are some of the most joyful, creative, persistent, fun, and interesting characters I know. To paraphrase disabled portrait artist Riva Lehrer, many of us have an intensity of presence that is not often found in our Normate counterparts, who can drift through the world in their bodies, never developing the beautiful “hard-won luster” (Lehrer 2021) that disabled people possess from spending our lives perfecting the art of living in a world that is not designed for us.
Similarly, Alice Wong calls disabled people “Oracles” (Wong 2020), or the canaries in the coal mine, as we are often the first to warn of disaster to come, being some of the first to be affected, having the hindsight of being burned before, and the lived ingenuity that allows us to foresee solutions. In their book The Future is Disabled (2022), Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha also highlights this beautifully. Though like the mythical Greek Cassandra, our warnings are seldom heeded by those with the power to change the course of events.
It should be no surprise, then, that we — our disabled ways of life, thinking, creativity, ingenuity, resistance, and ability to thrive against all odds — will be key to human survival through the greatest existential threat of our time: climate change. That’s why this speech is titled “No Planet Without Us.” There has never been a world without disabled people, and if our expertise is not taken seriously within the climate action movement, there may one day not be a world at all. (For humankind, at least.)
Disability, to many of us, is not a site of limits. It is a generative force, a fount of creativity and knowledge. This understanding will frame my remarks today.
Disability Justice & Environmental Justice
And with that, we’ll move to the first of my five short sections for today, which is that environmental justice and disability justice are inextricably tied.
First, environmental injustice is an increasingly common cause of disability. Pollutants, carcinogens, climate-driven disasters, and more mean that, in the words of Julia Watts Belser, “human health is increasingly imperiled by environmental harm” (Belser 2020) — by both dramatic, fast-paced crises and the slow violence exacted on our bodies in imperceptible ways every day.
Likewise, the underlying structure and ethos of both the disability justice and environmental justice movements have many shared characteristics. Both hold that structural violence and oppression are unevenly distributed across society, hitting the most marginalized hardest and compounding that marginalization. Both were founded by communities of color, or the global majority, and in the case of disability justice, by queer disabled people too.
Environmental justice maintains a focus on the poor, and according to the UN, around 20% of the world’s poorest are persons with disabilities (United Nations 2015). Disability and poverty are in fact a cause and consequence of each other (Groce and Kett 2013).
Likewise, both movements prioritize organizing using coalitions, seeing our struggles as connected and our communities as needing far more than just laws and rights on paper. Disability justice and environmental justice are, in many ways, cut from similar cloth.
And at their intersection, we see that disabled people are some of the most negatively impacted by the consequences of climate change:
Higher temperatures mean that people on certain medications for psychosocial disabilities, like for schizophrenia, are three times more likely to die from heat exhaustion (Lee et al. 2023). So are older people, people with spinal cord injuries, and people whose disabilities impact cognition (NIHHIS 2023).
Those with mobility disabilities or caring responsibilities are less able to rapidly flee a mudslide or attempt climate migration when rising sea levels threaten their livelihoods (Belser 2019; Nguyen 2019), particularly if the places they live lack accessible transport.
Those with jobs rendered impossible by climate change, such as agriculture (Feriga, Gracia, and Serneels 2024), may face higher barriers to learning new trades if they have a disability.
And these are just a few simple examples of the intersection of disability and climate-driven marginalization.
Disability Exclusion in the Climate Movement
Second, I want to talk about how disabled people are excluded, and at times actively alienated, from the climate movement.
We’ve just talked about how disabled people are some of the most negatively impacted by climate change. The same is unfortunately true about the policy and lifestyle changes the world is making to try and deal with climate change, because we’re still marginalized in climate policy spaces.
The two main branches of climate policy are adaptation and mitigation.
Adaptation policies are those that seek to “[adapt] to life in a changing climate” (NASA 2020), in order to reduce human vulnerability. So that might include creating better disaster response plans for the more frequent and intense natural disasters that emerge due to climate change. But we fail to see those plans include disabled people — with deadly consequences.
For example, in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy, some disabled New Yorkers were trapped in high-rise apartment buildings for days (Santora and Weiser 2013). In Florida, nursing home residents died from extreme heat after their institution failed to evacuate in advance of Hurricane Irma (Nedelman 2017). And in New Orleans, wheelchair user Benilda Caixeta drowned when the city’s accessible transportation never arrived in time for her to escape Hurricane Katrina (Belser 2019). This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, where disabled people never survive because the world never planned for us to.
Disabled people are also disproportionately harmed by many policies designed to mitigate climate change (known as “mitigation policies”).
For example, the rise of bans on single-use plastic straws has emerged as a common practice to reduce pollution, even though many disabled people need such straws in order to drink. In fact, plastic straw sales were originally marketed to hospitals and are commonly cited as an early example of universal design (Smith 2018).
While many promote substitutes to plastic straws, such alternatives often fail to solve the access needs of different disability communities, “such as allergy concerns with plant plastics, the risk of breaking glass straws with facial tics, or paper that disintegrates under pressure” (Smith 2018). And reusable plastic straws often constitute health hazards, as they are difficult to clean and hubs for bacteria growth (Smith 2018). Thus, any ban on plastic straws deprives disabled people of a vital tool for everyday living. Efforts to ban prepared packaged foods (Louise 2018), disposable wipes (Pepper 2018), and other items deprive disabled people of accessible tools that help them go about their daily lives.
And beyond specific policies, overwhelmingly, I think a lot of those working in the climate space view disabled people as a threat to the movement and their plans for it — we require more electricity to charge our wheelchairs and power our ventilators, we need single-use plastics for our catheters and ventilator tubing. Because of this, disabled people are often positioned as scapegoats for the climate crisis.
I remember seeing an article a few years back called “Asthma carbon footprint 'as big as eating meat.'” It noted that “some inhalers release greenhouse gases linked to global warming” (Roberts 2019). Implicit in publicizing this finding is the idea that people with asthma are more to blame than others for causing climate change, and the potential solution is foregoing their medication for some ableist imagining of ‘the greater good.’ It shows how “research on climate justice underlines climate policies’ potentially huge equity consequences” (Kanbur & Shue 2018, 95).
And a lot of these assumptions are rooted in eugenics, buying into the myth that there is some “average” or “standard” human, and therefore an allowable limit of needs that a human can have.
[Cut for time: We see the same sentiment in much of the rhetoric surrounding disabled people in UK policy these days, where we’re hardly ever mentioned except to be framed as scroungers and burdens on the system, particularly in the two hot-button issues of this year: benefits cuts and assisted suicide lacking proper safeguards.3 It will seem unfathomable to some that framing disabled people as scapegoats for intensifying climate change could be a matter of life and death. And yet, one plastic straw ban at a time, this is how the drivers of eugenics movements of the past come back to haunt us.]
Finally, even the way disabled people are often talked about in climate movements is alienating. We’re called “persons with disabilities” a turn of phrase that is as far from acknowledging our shared humanity as it is unnatural to integrate into daily speech. These are the things we’re here today to talk about changing.
Disabled Leadership in the Climate Action Agenda
And with that, we move into our third topic of discussion: What things can disabled people do to be part of the climate action agenda?
Well, if we look to what our disabled colleagues are already doing, it appears the possibilities are endless.
First I’ll share a bit about one area of my work.
We’ve mentioned that climate change is causing more extreme and frequent humanitarian crises. Research shows that disabled people are two to four times more likely to die or sustain a critical injury in a disaster (UNDESA 2016). So I work as part of an all-disabled disaster response organization called The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies which promotes disability-centered emergency response and preparedness.
We believe that, in the words of Julia Watts Belser, “if we persist in framing disability and climate change as a problem of physical vulnerability, we miss the underlying realities of structural violence” (Belser 2019). So we work to support governments, disaster response organizations, and disabled people’s organizations in better practice before, during, and after disasters to ensure that disabled people will have higher chances of survival in these situations (The Partnership 2022).
And beyond my work, we have many fantastic examples of disability climate action in the UK. Doug Paulley, a well-known disability campaigner, challenged the government in a high court case this past summer for failing to co-produce its policy on climate change with disabled people and organizations (Friends of the Earth 2024). Francesca Digiorigio, of Friends of the Earth, is working to create a disability-inclusive network of climate activists and supporting people with learning disabilities to be activists in the climate space. Adam Gabsi of Inclusion London has been pushing for fire safety and Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans in the wake of Grenfell.
Internationally, we’ve seen some growth in the disability contingent at COP over the past few years, with activists pushing the hashtag #CripUpClimate amid invisibility and inaccessibility in Glasgow in 2022. At the same, Jen Deerinwater, a disabled indigenous woman from North America, held the panel: Indigenous People with Disabilities: The Frontline of Inclusive Climate Solutions.
And Georgetown University recently launched the Disability and Climate Justice Archive (Georgetown University 2022), which includes a plain language guide to climate change (Caplan 2022). In its closing statement by Professor Julia Watts Belser: "We are a part of making something that is deliberately investing in survival, and hope, and resilience, and gritty disabled joy."
Supporting Disability Justice in Climate Spaces
So, fourth, what can those already in the climate movement do to support disabled people, particularly in pursuit of a fair and just transition?
I have a small list of starting suggestions:
Disabled people & organizations need to be considered and included from planning stages. We need true coproduction, not mere consultation or tokenism.
We must cultivate a holistic view of disability. The disability community is incredibly diverse, and includes everyone from wheelchair users to autistic people to those with chronic illnesses, and more. Too often, disability representation in this space looks the same.
Take an intersectional approach. It is important to note that many disabled people face complex and compound marginalization at the interaction of their disability with other marginalized identities. Being disabled and low-income, Black, Indigenous, a person of color, part of the LGBTQ community, or embodying any number of other identities broadens the scope of policies that can be harmful to someone.
Resist ableist assumptions about who is “assistable/save-able” in a climate-driven crisis. No one should be an acceptable or expected loss. Likewise, see reconstruction and recovery from a disaster as an opportunity to build more inclusively.
We need to engage with disability ethics when evaluating the impacts of climate policy. This means looking past simple calculations of utilitarianism and consequentialism. Though these are often some of the easiest ways to frame justice issues, they can stifle minority voices by propping up problematic concepts of the ‘common good.’
[Cut for time: Care ethics, for instance, can be a helpful framework in encouraging policies that are inclusive of disabled people. Similar to the disability justice value of “community care” (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018), care ethics “implies that there is moral significance in the fundamental elements of relationships and dependencies in human life” (Sander-Staudt 2009). It prioritizes care-givers and care-receivers, both of which include people with disabilities.
The Capability Approach, offered by Martha Nussbaum, is another useful framework for evaluating whether climate change policies include disability justice. This approach “holds that the key question to ask, when comparing societies and evaluating them for their basic decency or justice, is, ‘What is each person able to do and be?’” (Nussbaum 1947). In taking “each person as an end” (Nussbaum 1947), the capabilities approach can highlight how many climate change mitigation and adaptation policies prevent disabled people from achieving certain ends.]
And beyond ethical frameworks, I urge those in the climate movement to critically interrogate what they mean by “a fair and just transition,” and/or “a green transition.” What people typically intend with those terms is “a shift towards economically sustainable growth and an economy that is not based on fossil fuels and overconsumption of natural resources” (Ministry of the Environment, Finland 2023).
I have two things to say about that.
First, that shift, in how it is carried out thus far, often has negative impacts on disabled people specifically: because either we’re not consulted and we don’t get a chance to raise our concerns, or because those concerns are ignored. We see this, for instance, in bans on single-use plastics and cars.
Second, conversations about a green transition are still inherently tied to the idea that the economy must continue to grow infinitely, that we all have to be focused on and dedicated to production in a very particular, capitalist sense, and that our value lies in what we can produce. And many disabled people do not fit into that sort of model; some have health which is too fragile to work in a traditional sense, or work full time, or produce monetary value. And as a result, we’re viewed as a drain on the system, which falls into dangerous tropes of eugenics. So while we all want a greener world, I think it’s important to ask hard questions about who this could threaten, or at the very least leave behind.
Disabled Ingenuity as Key to Climate Survival
So to close, I think the most important issue of this discussion is asking and answering: How do disabled wisdom and ways of being strategically enrich the climate action agenda?
When we talk about the future, we need to realize and become comfortable with the fact that disability will become part of all of our stories. Every single person will become disabled
And we all know disabled people.
So this is not a niche need or a potentiality, it is universal and an inevitability.
Disability is as universal and inevitable as our changing climate, and we need to come to terms with and embrace solutions that encompass both.
And the fact is, our community is key to finding solutions. As disabled people, we live “apocalypse” like no one else does. We breathe “crisis” every day.
We are typically the first to be impacted and to start finding solutions to what’s to come. We’re accustomed to working in and living in spaces that are at best not built for us, and at worst hostile. That resilience, creativity, and community care is exactly the type of perspective that will get us through the reality of our changing climate.
There is no future without disability in it, without disabled people in it. There is no planet without us.
With thanks to those who helped look over both the spoken remarks and written version of this piece: Richard Amm, Mary Hood, Nora Genster, and Celestine Fraser.
References
Belser, Julia Watts. 2019. ‘Disabled People Cannot Be “Expected Losses” in the Climate Crisis’. Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/disabled-people-cannot-be-expected-losses-in-the-climate-crisis/ (April 16, 2021).
Belser, Julia Watts. 2020. ‘Disability, Climate Change, and Environmental Violence: The Politics of Invisibility and the Horizon of Hope’. Disability Studies Quarterly 40(4). doi:10.18061/dsq.v40i4.6959.
Caplan, Reid. 2022. ‘Climate Change: A Plain Language Guide’. https://disabilityclimatechange.georgetown.domains/climate-change-a-plain-language-guide/ (January 14, 2025).
Feriga, Moustafa, Nancy Lozano Gracia, and Pieter Serneels. 2024. The Impact of Climate Change on Work Lessons for Developing Countries. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change.
Friends of the Earth. 2024. ‘Climate Adaptation: Appeal Considered after High Court Rejects Legal Challenge over Government Plan | Friends of the Earth’. https://friendsoftheearth.uk/climate/climate-adaptation-appeal-considered-after-high-court-rejects-legal-challenge-over (January 14, 2025).
Georgetown University. 2022. ‘Professor Julia Watts Belser Launches “Disability and Climate Change: A Public Archive Project”’. Georgetown Humanities Initiative. https://humanities.georgetown.edu/news/professor-julia-watts-belser-launches-disability-and-climate-change-a-public-archive-project/ (January 14, 2025).
Groce, Nora, and Maria Kett. 2013. The Disability and Development Gap. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. SSRN Scholarly Paper. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3385372.
Kanbur, Ravi, and Henry Shue, eds. 2018. Climate Justice: Integrating Economics and Philosophy. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Lee, Michael Joseph, Kathleen E. McLean, Michael Kuo, Gregory R. A. Richardson, and Sarah B. Henderson. 2023. ‘Chronic Diseases Associated With Mortality in British Columbia, Canada During the 2021 Western North America Extreme Heat Event’. GeoHealth 7(3): e2022GH000729. doi:10.1029/2022GH000729.
Lehrer, Riva. 19 July 2021. Panel Remarks at Disability Futures Festival, Ford Foundation.
Louise, Shona. 11 January 2018. “Criticisms of prepared packaged food completely ignore the thousands of people in the UK living with a disability.” MetroUK. https://metro.co.uk/2018/01/11/criticisms-prepared-packaged-food-completely-ignore-thousands-people-uk-living-disability-7221575/?ito=cbshare
Ministry of the Environment, Finland. 2023. ‘Preventing Environmental Pollution - Ministry of the Environment’. https://ym.fi/en/what-is-the-green-transition (January 14, 2025).
NASA Science. 2020. ‘Mitigation and Adaptation’. NASA. https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/adaptation-mitigation/ (January 15, 2025).
Nedelman, Michael. 2017. ‘Eleven Dead from Florida Nursing Home after Irma’. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/20/health/florida-nursing-home-ninth-death/index.html (January 14, 2025).
Nguyen, Huong Thu. 2019. ‘Gendered Vulnerabilities in Times of Natural Disasters: Male-to-Female Violence in the Philippines in the Aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan’. Violence Against Women 25(4): 421–40. doi:10.1177/1077801218790701.
NIHHIS. 2023. ‘Who Is at Risk to Extreme Heat’. National Integrated Heat Health Information System. https://www.heat.gov/pages/who-is-at-risk-to-extreme-heat (January 14, 2025).
The Partnership. 2022. ‘About Us – The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies’. https://disasterstrategies.org/about-us/ (July 23, 2022).
Pepper, Penny. 09 July 2018. “I rely on plastic straws and baby wipes. I’m disabled – I have no choice.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/09/disabled-person-plastic-straws-baby-wipes.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2022. Future Is Disabled, The: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Roberts, Michelle. 30 October 2019. “Asthma carbon footprint 'as big as eating meat.'” BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50215011
Santora, Marc, and Benjamin Weiser. 2013. ‘Court Says New York Neglected Disabled in Emergencies’. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/nyregion/new-yorks-emergency-plans-violate-disabilities-act-judge-says.html (April 7, 2022).
Sander-Staudt, Maureen. 2006. ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics’. Hypatia 21(4): 21–39.
Smith, S.E. 19 July 2018. “Banning straws might be a win for environmentalists. But it ignores us disabled people.” Vox. https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/7/19/17587676/straws-plastic-ban-disability.
UNDESA. 2016. ‘Disability-Inclusive Humanitarian Action’. UN Enable. https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/issues/whs.html (April 16, 2021).
United Nations. 2015. ‘Factsheet on Persons with Disabilities | United Nations Enable’. United Nations Department on Economic and Social Affairs. https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/resources/factsheet-on-persons-with-disabilities.html (April 15, 2021).
Wong, Alice. 2020. ‘Message from the Future: Disabled Oracle Society’. Presented at the Assembly for the Future. https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/08/14/message-from-the-future-disabled-oracle-society/ (January 14, 2025).
Zhu, Yuan Yi. 2024. ‘History Will Not Be Kind to the MPs Who Backed Assisted Dying’. The Spectator. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/history-will-not-be-kind-to-the-mps-who-backed-assisted-dying/ (January 14, 2025).
“Here” being, of course, a place that looks like home to those of us who have (until now, perhaps) had the means to opt out of experiencing most of the effects of the climate crisis — that is to say, much of the Global North and/or those with financial means.
For ease of reading, I have removed the following elements of the spoken introductory remarks from the main body of the text:
“I must admit that I rarely say yes to IDPD invitations, as the events rarely feel like they are for us as disabled people. Instead, all too often, they are attempts at virtue-signaling by some corporate, medical, or political entity where we end up spending time and energy to socialize them to the idea of seeing us as human. And while I’ve resigned myself to doing that on occasion throughout the rest of the year, I allow myself to refuse to do so on a day named for my people. So it’s really nice to be at an IDPD event that feels a little more like a community gathering, a celebration, and I hope this is the first of many that we can look forward to.”
“I offer the following as an access statement to guide our time together: While there’s no such thing as a “fully accessible” event, please feel welcome to interact and cultivate access for yourself as is comfortable for you. Take in this conversation in any number of non-normative ways that facilitate your own access — that may mean moving around, closing your eyes, getting a drink of water in the back, or something else. I will not be insulted. And please alert me if I can do anything more to create access for you.”
A quotation from the fantastic opinion piece published in the Spectator by Yuan Yi Zhu: “There was no way, [MP Leadbeater] and her allies said, that Britain would become like Belgium, where depressed teenagers can now legally take their lives with the help of doctors. Or the Netherlands, where disabled toddlers are now involuntarily euthanised. Or Canada, where disabled people are regularly asked by doctors whether they want to be euthanised. No, Britain would be different, of course. … In Oregon, there are reported cases of people being given ‘assisted suicide’ for anorexia, sciatica, arthritis, complications from a fall and, incredibly, a hernia (we do not know the precise details of these cases because medical files are destroyed after death). Yet this was the system our legislators wanted to replicate” (Zhu 2024).