Crip Ecologies: Complicate the Conversation to Reclaim Power

Crip ecologies describe the messy, diverse, and profoundly beautiful ecosystems which exist for disabled people. It is impossible to fit ourselves to a mold that nondisabled people adhere to, which allows capitalism (making money and paying money to live) to flourish, borders to be maintained, and uniform solutions to address some of our most pressing and urgent problems like climate change.

Crip ecologies are living, breathing spaces of conflict and creativity.

As a disabled person of color, my body, needs, and perspective do not have a home in conventional responses to climate change. Dismantling systems that were built up over centuries to increase access to the resources I rely on for food, shelter, and connection is not the strategy I choose. When the task to address climate crisis means taking apart multi-layered industrial, governmental, and care systems that I rely on to provide for every necessity, the work of this feels incomprehensible. Where is safety in this time? Is it in the ways I find to shore up my own security? Is it in voting and giving my proxy to corporations to make the changes needed?

I’m not sure.

What I do know is what a pursuit of safety is not. It is not going zero waste. To drink, I need a plastic cup or a straw. I can’t reuse bandages or needles. My hand does not pinch four fingers to thumb and my elbow cannot bend in order to use a menstrual cup. I bleed too fast, too heavy for cloth pads. Waste equals function. I need equity instead of equality. I need to utilize single-use products to live.

Safety is not found in growing my own food. I have to make choices about how I use my energy. Every day there is a finite amount. Do I use that energy to water and tend the soil or do I use that energy to feed and clean myself? As a disabled person, self-sufficiency is never viable for survival.

My body is the oldest story in the world. Part broken, part brilliant, all nuance, disability offers a layer of perspective that is unique and profound. Knowledge of disability experience is political, social, sexual, ancestral. To name something is to claim knowledge. Disability poetics reclaims the power of understanding our culture(s) and our truths. It has the ability to build bridges between communities and support mutual liberation. It is an essential tool to pry loose and shake out the vulnerabilities and possibilities that we all confront with climate change.

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As a child growing up amidst conflict within my home and neighborhood, I came across a book with a poem about a dragon who was afraid of everything and a young girl who helped them become courageous. I learned when I feel afraid, read a poem. Poetry became a companion. As a teenager, poetry became the way I created space between wounds.

Then I met my friend Marlin D. Thomas. We met at a youth disability conference and bonded over disability activism. One evening, we were sitting at a table in a cavernous ballroom listening to speakers, when this elderly white man rolled onstage with a cowboy hat. An Asian woman stood next to him holding a microphone so we could hear him speak. The first words out of his mouth were, “I love you.” Glancing around at all of the teenagers and twentysomethings, I was not the only one who immediately started squirming in their chair. And then, leaning closer to the microphone, he allowed a dramatic pause and again said, “i love you!” As he continued his speech, I looked over at Marlin who sat enraptured with a goofy grin on his face. I had never seen a grown person tell a crowd of people that they loved them, and I was ready to bolt, but seeing the expression on Marlin’s face made me pause and listen. When the speech was over, I leaned over to ask Marlin who that was, but he was already maneuvering around the table in his powerchair, headed to meet the man as he came offstage. The speaker was Justin Dart and the woman with him was his wife and partner in activism, Yoshiko Dart. Together, they had traveled to all fifty states collecting testimony in partnership with local activists. This testimony helped convince Congress to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act. Marlin showed me how to pay attention and collect courage from living disability history.

As our friendship grew, Marlin and I traveled across the country to visit one another. We would bring suitcases full of old notebooks to read in the few hours of privacy between personal assistants supporting Marlin with day-to-day life. He was the first person I became really close to who was also a person of color (POC), disabled, and a poet.

As we shared our writing and read other poets, I realized that what I connected to about poetry was not form, style, or rhythm. Rather, I connected to poems when the words vibrated on my skin or in my heart—all the diverse ways people captured truth.

In addition to poetry and activism, Marlin and I also shared a similar experience in our cultural communities—disability being shoved aside and disappeared, or focused on as the sole area of attention. As artists, it was tough to access performance or gallery spaces. Both because of physical barriers, but also because we weren’t seen as people who could contribute culturally—as people who would have something to say about our ancestors, place, or histories.

When Marlin and I would talk, especially on days when something terrible had happened, hearts were broken, or violence was experienced, after rehashing the details, Marlin would inevitably say, “We gotta put it in our poetry.” I learned poetry is a way to witness. The day Marlin died, I was working at my consultant gig, listening to music, dancing around in my chair. I have a poem about it.

Marlin helped me believe that my work is worth sharing, but in artistic spaces, I continually confront ableism. Recently, at an online Latinx writing conference, there were no options for access needs and my questions and feedback were ignored. At poetry open mics, I am unable to get to the stage or even to the sign-up sheet. Often I am not invited to cultural events because people know I am disabled. When I am invited, I am on my own to figure out how to get in (let alone find out if there will be a restroom I can use). If I cannot get in, no one identifies that I, or disabled people in general, aren’t there, that we aren’t part of the community gathering at the table. In facing such intense inaccessibility in artistic spaces, places that are supposed to be grounded in creativity, how do I find accessibility within the environmental movement’s response to the climate crisis?

Similar to how I feel in artistic spaces, I feel like a lost soul wandering around the communities and discourse of the environmental movements, shaking my jangly earrings, whispering, “Hello,” into the wind, my ghostly presence they cannot quite make out. Yet, they use language in which I recognize my reflection. Mining scars cripple and deform the earth. People are blind to the cost. Pollution spreads like a cancer. Disabled bodies are thrust like a dam to make people stop and pay attention. Using the fear of my body and other disabled people’s bodies as a metaphor for environmental destruction is just using fear to incite fear.

Fear of disability is transferred and leveraged as a cautionary tale, to stop us from embracing our environments. Why incite more fear? Does fear create agency? The thing is, fear doesn’t define my relationship to my disabled body. Discrimination? Fewer options? Yes. Making do with less? Making hard choices? Yes. But I have an intimate awareness of my needs. I know what minimums I can live on.

Here it is—we now live in a disabled world. Earth has been forever altered. Disability is not fair. Some of us live shorter lives. Some of us do not make it. Some of us live far better and longer than anyone would have predicted. There is not a roadmap for change, but change is happening.

In the Sonoran Desert, where I live, the Palo Verde tree has green bark in order to absorb the sunlight, so it is free to shed its tiny leaves during the long periods of drought. Vulnerability is the best teacher of adaptation. Disabled people know how to adapt to a world which is ever changing without considering us.

I, too, want to save ecosystems. I believe the animals and plants deserve to live. Yet if disability has taught me anything, it has taught me there is much I do not control. Very little in fact. But choices always matter. Disability is a life of inhabiting contradiction and venturing into vulnerable unpredictability.

One of the foundational elements of ableism is a fear of vulnerability, a desire to push away and ignore what reminds us of helplessness. Disabled and nondisabled people alike are taught this in our families, communities, and institutions. This desire to push away leads to judgment, exclusion, and oppression. Forced into competition with each other for scarce resources, helplessness can be equated with powerlessness.

What clues towards resilience and creativity are my other cultural communities missing? Disability poetics are how disability gets politically translated into everyday life. The hundreds of ways we have to ask for help—whether we want to or not—and the ways we find to reciprocate or help others. The humor at some random stranger throwing change in our half-filled coffee cups. Having to plan for everything. And then have a backup plan for each plan. The brutal experience of having little pieces of your humanity splintered away as you try to wedge yourself into a system that is supposed to help you survive. How Crip sex takes all the creativity earned by having to function in oppressive and inaccessible environments (having uncomfortable and awkward conversations, explorations of adaptive equipment, explaining to another person exactly what you want done to your body) and puts it to an amazing use. How we are brave only because we cannot back down from other people’s fear of vulnerability. As I learn from Crip art, I think about how my other communities could gain so much wisdom from disability culture.

If one is afraid of being vulnerable, how does one adapt? Disabled people know that living into the future means learning to ask for help, and being patient, flexible, and insistent. To provide help is to be in a place of having resources, time, or energy to share. To give respectful help is a process in becoming aware of our own capacity in the moment. It takes practice to know providing help is not always convenient and boundaries can also exist. Grappling with interdependence necessitates slowing down, listening, disappointing each other, and mending.

I have touched the edges of interdependence. I know how underdeveloped and limited people’s understanding of interdependence is. Yet climate change isn’t an “I” situation. As a single person against the proposal of the world’s largest copper mine, or the housing developments which keep getting constructed despite the lack of groundwater, I can only do so much. Relying on each other, however, builds power.

As a disabled mestiza, growing up in the borderlands, poetry serves as a way to reclaim my cultural relevancy. To share my understanding of driving weekly through one of the many border patrol checkpoints set up near where I live, miles from the international line, or witnessing climate change’s effect on the desert ecosystem. My visual art, writing, the songs I sing to the sky are all ways to glean what matters from my lived experience. These understandings are intersectional. They are disability culture experiences and ethnic cultural experiences.

What does it mean to be a disabled mestiza cultural worker? I am bruja when I write my truth down on paper, casting spells of transformation, even if it’s just coaxing a different perspective on the sunlight illuminating cactus thorns next to the patch of pavement outside my door. In capturing a moment, a feeling, I am child, elder, ancestor. I render safety by bracing against place, maybe found on the edge of a parking lot between picnic table and wild, helping me to inhabit spaciousness. This allows my arms, legs, feet, torso to remember what body integrity feels like outside the constriction of rooms where medical trauma or other harm has occurred. Describing how I know family through plantas and ancestors is my own mending. It is sharing a model of restoration that transcends individual relationships.

A legacy I carry from my friendship with Marlin is I know in my bones that art and writing by disabled people of color is valuable. Living in multiple worlds at once, we explore the hidden tunnels between our disability and POC associations and grapple with the consistently rotating reasons given for our exclusion. There is power claimed by naming these layers. Our work unearths links, sometimes even between contradictory realities, which can deepen relationships between our communities. Living within contradictions facilitates a kind of problem-solving that is inclusive, a means of tackling problems where diversity and an expectation of difference is valued. This provides support and structure to our collective journey toward intersectional liberation and facing climate catastrophe.

Climate change is a “we” situation. We have hard choices to make. Ecosystems which include disabled people consider accessibility and interdependence in relationship to everything. Crip ecosystems flourish in a state of creativity.

They ask: What interventions can support continued life? How can they be sustained? By whom? Where do we need to just accept the altered state? How do we adapt? Ask for help? How can disability poetics help us touch what is scary? Confront our own fears of vulnerability? How do we prepare not just for suffering, but for sharing and innovation?

These questions are not just full of agency and self-determination, they are what hope looks like now.