Book Launch: Disabled Ecologies by Sunaura Taylor

Join us for a book launch for Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert by Sunaura Taylor. The book is a powerful analysis and call to action that reveals disability as one of the defining features of environmental devastation and resistance. Following a reading from Disabled Ecologies, Taylor will be in conversation with writer and historian Dr. Lydia Otero. Revolutionary Grounds will be partnering for book sales.

Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican American community living above on Tucson’s southside. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Sunaura Taylor takes us with her to follow the site’s disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered.

What Taylor finds is a story of entanglements that reach far beyond the Sonoran Desert. These stories tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, but they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement, Disabled Ecologies is a powerful call to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires.