From eco-ableism to solidarity in climate activism

By Rebecca Yeo and Sarah Bell

In March this year, we published a new paper in the journal, Geoforum, called “’Being disabled is a radicalising experience’: From eco-ableism to solidarity in climate activism”. This news piece offers a summary of its key messages, reflecting on the need to move from eco-ableism to solidarity in climate activism.

It is increasingly clear that we need better responses to climate change. We need to create sustainable systems that value all humans and the planet that we live on. The disabled people’s movement has long called for an end to a system that values profit above human needs. Yet, rather than understanding disabled people as essential contributors to the creation of a just system, all too often mainstream environmental messages ignore, devalue or frame disabled people as if a warning to others.

As part of our research, the Sensing Climate team heard from disabled people in Bristol, UK, about experiences of and responses to climate change. People talked about how environmental campaigns often focus on individual behavioural change, such as using cars less, cycling more, reducing energy use, and avoiding plastic. But this individual focus does not address the systemic causes of the climate crisis, and it too often results in disabled people getting blamed for and/or feeling guilty about meeting essential needs that may involve travelling by car, using electric appliances or single-use plastics. Despite the urgency of addressing the climate crisis, the capacity for people to meet immediate needs must take priority. Meanwhile, as some people involved in the project pointed out, it is not uncommon for some of the loudest proponents of individual action to engage in contradictory behaviours, such as routinely taking long-haul flights to holiday destinations.

If attention is focused on the symptoms of current problems, and resources are deemed scarce, disabled people are too often framed as a burden or as among the many unfortunate, but inescapable, victims of climate harm. If the focus is instead on the causes of both climate crisis and the struggles faced by disabled people, then similarities become clear. Both are caused at least in part by a system that values economic growth above caring for diverse human needs. The insights and experiences of disabled people can be seen as central to managing a disabling climate, as well as collaboratively building new ways of organising society that prioritise care and justice for everyone.

Instead of framing these as separate or even competing issues, the challenge is to find opportunities to share insights and combine energies. We call for shared learning, solidarity and collaboration between the climate justice movement, the disabled people’s movement and wider movements for justice.

The interconnections between human and planetary needs must be made explicit, and deeper alliances forged between disability and climate justice moments. Without these alliances, the climate justice and wider environmental movements are missing opportunities to learn from disabled people; to understand how to create accessible protests that build strength in numbers; to learn how to sustain care for self and others without pushing beyond bodily and emotional limits; and to reimagine a world based on care for each other and the planet.

The full paper is published in Geoforum and is available to read online.

More information about the mural activities that informed the paper (alongside a series of in-depth interviews) can also be found online.