While disabled people are often told how to act more responsibly, in a narrative where we are assumed to be a cost to society. Research suggests our contribution is largely denied in mainstream debates that ignore our contribution, while the impact of crises affect us most.
Sustainable Development?
The image of the earth as a marble was a defining point in history, and for many it was the first presentation of the globe as a single entity. To this day it serves as a representation of the connection between planet and people, the environment and society.
The earth you’d imagine should be a place where disabled people should feel they belong, storytellers in its story, part of its action. As a Disabled woman, I often feel I’m denied the role of its many storytellers. A single but authoritative voice among the many who holds its past, creates its present and shapes its future. But for many disabled authors our words do not count as voices of authority, more often our experience is not counted, our tales falling outside the more accepted tales ... told by the less disruptive Joannas on the omnibus. In education her learning is not viewed as progress, in work her contribution does not count as paid, in housing her needs do not count as priorities, as an academic voice in texts her knowledge is bent and moulded to count as someone else’s data, as a citizen she is not counted as a neighbour, mother, daughter, wife or friend. While some plop their empties in the correct bin and call it being ‘green’, for many such a luxury is meaningless in the small matter of surviving the harm in a fight to stay alive in a world littered with words that are toxic. As the Adapt Now: A Global Call for Leadership on Climate Resilience report states:
Climate change exacerbates existing inequities by widening the gap between people with wealth and people living in poverty. (World Resource Institute, 2019, p. 2)
Until recent months, stories about our planet have talked of sustainability as an interest that is somewhat separate to the globe as an indivisible whole. In addition, rarely viewed as an imperative, discussions about human rights were not placed at the heart of conversations about sustainable development. For many the impact of growth on disadvantaged groups was ignored by those telling stories of the advantages growth bring. Thus, overshadowed by a denial of its implications for life on the planet, an ambivalence was evident in matters of equality and fairness. To paraphrase Hawken (2007), it was a choice, to get on the environmental bus or on the social justice one, while ignoring the impact of the later on the former. He argued that the wrong questions were being asked as both buses run out of road.
Growing evidence suggest that the negative impact of inequality is currently threatening the lives of harmed by as levels of unsustainable, unchecked and uneven growth impose hardship and destruction. Furthermore, issues of social justice are often see as either /or propositions, broadly: to save the whales or to feed the starving. It is only recently that the literature has grown proposing an and/and/and view of such matters, linking issues, interests and crises as a deeply woven into an uneven global fabric. It is with this storytelling that issues of social justice have come to be seen as deeply enmeshed in matters pertaining to sustainable development.
I do think, at the end of much hard work, that there has been a lag in the language, with new vocabularies only just emerging to define ideas relating to this complex emerging view. With regard to politics, populations, groups and their activities, shared tales are often simplistic. Our storytelling mostly setting up the binary continuums that result in confused conversations where words poorly define much more nuanced ideas. The narratives used to define modern day lifestyles, the power held in the texts that hold ideas, can add to the oppressive nature of growing inequalities within social arrangements that fuel hardship and poverty for many, and injustice for all …
Image with thanks to @_louisreed ❤️
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Thanks for sharing Mole. For a while I have been exploring ways to get at the root of environmental and social justice issues. To find the flaw from which they both flow. I have been reading the ethics of care recently too and have been thinking about my own attentiveness. What do I notice, attend to? What do I not notice? Can't notice? And therefore cannot care for? How can I train myself to notice more? To notice differently what this bubble earth needs. What I need? What we need? And having noticed what responsibility will I choose? And what responsibility will I set aside. Recycling, for me, is an easy chore that salves conscience. And then there is the matter of competence; excellence in the actions of caring well, living well. Living at peace with myself and my place. How do I learn to do this better? More? And then what else is demanded of me, that is revealed by my caring? And then how do I de-centre myself as the carer and receiver of care and serve to build a caring collective? And that is what I am left with. Questions and reflections and experiments...
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