Sunaura Taylor’s Disabled Ecologies is a revelation—gritty and intimate, blisteringly political yet tender in its insights. With poetic precision and righteous clarity, Taylor excavates the toxic legacy of Tucson’s aquifer poisoning, not just as a site of environmental collapse, but as a story of systemic violence against disabled, racialized, and working-class communities. What begins as a study of ecological harm slowly, devastatingly, unfurls into memoir: Taylor herself is disabled as a direct result of this chemical catastrophe, tying the fate of her body to that of the land.

Taylor defines a “disabled ecology” as the web of interdependent disablements that emerge when ecosystems are deliberately corrupted—by capitalism, by militarism, by settler-colonial extractivism. Her analysis pierces through the sanitized myths of environmentalism that so often center purity and whiteness, exposing instead how the state and corporations like Hughes Aircraft weaponize pollution, ableism, and racism to obscure culpability. These “slow violences” aren’t accidents, she insists. They’re choices—efficient and profitable ones—that disable both landscapes and lives with devastating permanence.

Through vivid storytelling and archival rigor, Taylor dismantles the artificial line between human and environment. She reminds us that aquifers are living bodies too—porous, vast, and full of memory. Her exploration of the O’odham people’s relationship to the land, of monocropping and eugenics, and of the weaponization of “health” against BIPOC communities, insists that healing must be collective, ecological, and rooted in justice.

This book aches with rage, but also with clarity and care. Taylor doesn’t just document harm—she insists on responsibility. She offers a fierce call for an “environmentalism of the injured,” one that centers interdependence over individualism, and truth over institutional denial. Disabled Ecologies is a luminous, unflinching testament to the fact that our bodies are not separate from the world—they are shaped by it, harmed by it, and, with enough will, capable of transforming it.

📖 Read this if you love: eco-crip theory, abolitionist environmentalism, slow violence narratives, or the works of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

🔑 Key Themes: Environmental Racism and Ableism, State Negligence and Corporate Harm, Disability and Ecological Entanglement, Collective Care and Interdependence, Capitalism and Contamination.