Book Review | Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert, by Sunaura Taylor (University of California Press, 2024)

Beneath the desert floor, groundwater flows through layers of rock and sediment, carrying with it histories of contamination that connect military industry, community and multispecies illness, and environmental degradation across generations.In Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert, Sunaura Taylor traces these underground flows to uncover stories of disablement and illness that cross communities, species, and landscapes.Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and artistic practice engaging with Tucson's contaminated aquifer, Taylor challenges us to recognize how bodies and ecosystems share vulnerabilities and capacities for resistance.Taylor's positionality as a disabled person born in the toxic plume of Tucson's southside and a scholar-activist-artist injects her story with potent urgency and care for finding pathways towards environmental justice that refuse to separate human healing from ecological remediation.In an era of accelerating climate catastrophe, Disabled Ecologies offers not despair but a compelling invitation to reimagine our relationship with an increasingly wounded world.In the "Introduction: Age of Disability," Taylor charges that disability and environmental degradation are not separate or parallel issues but deeply entangled realities.Taylor charts the leadership of disabled people in environmental justice movements, linking environmental justice and disability justice together under the term "injury environmentalism" (25).By centering disabled experiences in narratives of environmental degradation, Taylor argues for a radically different approach to understanding ecology, one that works with the tension of ecological injury or bodily disablement as sometimes born out of