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A bit on Nature, a bit on Ears, a bit on Rewilding and a bit on Creativity.

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Kate Morley
May 2, 20239 min read

Ways of being… in nature… will the future forgive us?

Updated: May 3, 2023

When Environmental Justice Meets Disability Justice


As mentioned in my last blog post I have started a part-time PhD exploring disability and urban nature and how reflecting on the inclusive potential of nature settings through a disability lens, can alter our perceptions of these spaces.


Last month I was lucky enough to hear a talk by Professor Catriona McKinnon, as part of the University of Exeter’s Perspectives of Personalised Ecologies lectures. It was one of those ‘goosebumps’ moments, where my random muddled thoughts coalesced into a clear framing of many of the big issues around Disability Justice. Disability Justice is ‘a social justice movement which focuses on examining disability and ableism as they relate to other forms of oppression and identities such as race, class and gender’. The Disability Justice movement seeks to explore how “systems of oppression are intertwined”, and a ten-point framework of Disability Justice has been developed. The ten principles of Disability Justice include; Intersectionality, Leadership of those most impacted, Anti-capitalist politic, Commitment to cross-movement organizing, Recognizing wholeness, Sustainability, Commitment to cross-disability solidarity, Interdependence, Collective access and Collective liberation. I thought I would summarize these principles by pyrographing the 'Tree of Disability Justice':

Cedar wood with burnt image of a tree that depicts the ten principles of Disability Justice

Image: Tree of Disability Justice, pyrographed on repurposed UK-grown Cedar (K.Morley)


In the lecture, Prof McKinnon discussed the concept of ‘Extinction of Experience’, which is where ‘there is a progressive loss of human/nature interactions’. What Prof McKinnon termed “intergenerational blinding” (1) involves the “ethically objectionable imposition of ignorance by one generation to another” leading to shifting baseline syndrome, which I explored in a previous blog.


The notion of an ‘extinction of experience’ could be queried amongst people and communities- including many disabled people- who are not afforded equity of experience in the first place. Many disabling barriers to nature have been identified, some of these include;

  • Lack of local nature

  • Physical barriers such as steps and uneven paths.

  • Limited and/or inaccessible information.

  • Lack of accessible toilets and changing facilities.

  • Lack of accessible transport.

  • Poor maintenance.

  • Limited range of opportunities to connect with nature in different ways.

  • Attitudinal barriers including lack of confidence, and other people's attitudes and prejudices which may make disabled people feel out of place or unwelcome. (I plan to explore disabling barriers to nature in more depth in a future post)


However, when the ‘extinction of experience’ in nature is considered what is the ‘norm’ of ‘nature experience’, against which other people’s experiences are held/compared? Who decides what that is? What does that mean for people, who due to disabling barriers, for example, have had to improvise to forge connections/experiences with nature that might diverge from the norm or people who can only access nature that has already been supposedly ‘damaged’ in some way?


Do experiences of disability, ableism and/or disablism diminish one's connection to nature? Many commentators and papers explain how disabled people might experience nature differently. So, to look at an ‘extinction of experience’ could be deemed ableist as society is ‘normalising’ what a nature experience should be.


The disabled writer, Naomi Ortiz offers some insights into how disabled people perceive ecological destruction;


“Maybe non-disabled people can disassociate more from what’s happening, because they can access some of these wild spaces that are further in. They can get to spaces that are more isolated, more untouched. But I can’t. Whether I’m in a parking lot or just on a dirt road, I’m present with the man-made, extracted stuff. It’s harder for me to not be in constant relationship with the impact of what’s happening." This is what they call, developing a “witnessing relationship.”


One of the most striking moments in the talk was when Prof McKinnon explored Nozicki’s Experience Machine Thought Experiment. This thought experiment explores hedonism, the desire to increase pleasure (and decrease pain)… it’s a similar concept to the plot of The

Matrix film! In his 1974 book, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Nozick outlines the Experience Machine:


“Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel that you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, pre-programming your life's experience?'


'What (if anything) is wrong with a life lived in the experience machine?'


'Plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct ... perhaps what we desire is to live (an active verb) ourselves, in contact with reality.'


Black and white image showing a happiness machine with a child central and a man dressed in black operating the machine. Bolts of electricity leave the machine. It is shown to depict the Nozick Thought experiment Image by Yescela Vorazan

There is debate as to whether those who are ‘plugged in’ to the machine know what state they are in, and whether there is an ethical concern about who does the ‘plugging in’. Prof McKinnon stated that it can be argued that if a person plugs in another without their knowledge or consent, then ‘a grievous harm’ is done to the person in the tank… does this have parallels with how society curates so-called accessible nature experiences in the UK, in the present?


Often outdoor experiences for disabled people are carefully choreographed. Loaded with risk assessments and perceived accessibility needs, the nature experience of a disabled person can become so sanitised that the health and well-being benefits of being in nature are diminished.


There has been some debate about the potential role of Virtual Reality (2) in promoting access to ‘nature’ amongst disabled people, or other individuals without other forms of nature access; to what extent is this an acceptable replacement for an embodied nature encounter in situ? Is virtual reality better than, doing the bare minimum to create limited access to nature settings? Are either of these approaches ‘enough’ or ‘reasonable’?


Prof McKinnon spoke about the experience machine in terms of social, environmental injustice and intergenerational injustice. Perhaps it’s time to add disability injustice to the list. Intergenerational injustice is a threat to people living in the future (the generations yet to come) who are ‘radically vulnerable’ to present people’s actions or inactions. Future generations cannot alter the past so are reliant on the people of the present to ‘do the right thing’… The people of the future cannot hold us to account for what we choose to do, or not do now, in the face of climate and ecological emergencies.


In her presentation, Professor McKinnon stated, “There is no group of human being more vulnerable to us in the present than those in the future.” Without denying the agency of disabled people, one could argue that many disabled people experience these power differentials and abuses of power, in the ‘here and now.’ Those expressing concern about intergenerational injustice for humans living in the future could expand their awareness by recognising the ableist societal structures, systems, and policies that are compromising nature experiences amongst the current generation. Eli Clare writes about this in his Brilliant Imperfection : Grappling with Cure book, where he states that disabled people have "a life to live here and now, a life that will be made better by material and attitudinal access... we mustn't ignore the ways in which research's future-focused commitment has served to devalue people in the present." How are disabled people, present or future expected to ‘fit’ – or achieve equity of nature experience- in a society that is designed to favour non-disabled people and that actively disables people from living the life that they would choose?


When we talk in terms of intergenerational injustice for non-disabled people where does this leave disabled people? How could radical societal reform turn the tables from disabled people being viewed or ‘othered’ as ‘less than’ or disposable? How could society be reconfigured to challenge and address how it disables people?


The failure to value disabled people was thrown into stark relief during the Covid 19 pandemic when 60% of the people who died in England, were disabled.

Owl and Buzzard Feathers and crow feathers arranged in circle on grass with violets and celandines depicting 60% of people who died of Covid were disabled

Image: Remembering the 60%. Six Owl and Buzzard feathers, and four Crow feathers. (K.Morley)


The pandemic has shone a spotlight on disability rights and the potential for eugenic practices which are also being hotly debated around the Parliamentary Assisted Dying Bill. If a society fails to value the lives of disabled people in the present, where will that leave the disabled people of the future?


Rosemarie Garland-Thomson explores the ideas of 'world building' through a disability lens, where "ideological and material separation of citizens into worthy and unworthy (are) based on physiological variations". She questions "How can disabled people in our shared world now and in future worlds inhabit those worlds effectively?" When disabled people are valued and their differences embraced rather than eliminated, 'conserving disability' can be seen as a way of valuing human 'biodiversity' and variance.


As Riva Lehrer states in her wonderful memoir, Golem Girl, “Disability is the great billboard of human truth. Add it to any discourse and we can see what humanity truly values.”


Disability rights activist Syren Nagakyrie writes in ‘Nature is a Human Right’;

“Disability is a normal and natural way of being embodied. Disabled people have always existed, indeed as humans age, most of us become disabled in some way. It is beyond time for disability to be recognized as the natural part of human experience that it is. It is not separate from nature, not separate from humanity, not better or worse than any other way to experience life.”


Picture of green book cover "Nature is a Human Right' on green mossy tree

In her article, 'Accessible Outdoors: Opening the Door to Nature for People with Disabilities,' Bonnie Lewkowicz discusses how society can make nature experiences more equitable with and for disabled people;


“George Covington, the former White House adviser on disability, said it best: “You have to ramp the human mind or the rest of the ramps won’t work.” It’s not just about obeying a law; it’s about wanting to share what we all get from contact with nature and the outdoors. For those of us who believe passionately that a connection with nature is a powerful tool in making the world a better place, we can start by welcoming the opportunity to share the natural world with people different from ourselves. After all, the more of us there are going out into nature to do these things, the more likely it is that those mountains, rivers, and shorelines will be preserved for all of us for many more years to come.”


By exploring ‘Futures Philosophies’ of the lives that will be lived by disabled people and those people who are not disabled yet, we may be able to gain insights into how to live well together, within environments that are increasingly challenged by an inhospitable climate and catastrophic biodiversity loss, whilst also taking action to minimise such risks in the first place. Disability studies theorist Michael Dorn argued that because the disabled body “remain[s] attentive and responsive to changing environmental conditions,” it “exhibits a mature form of environmental sensitivity” and calls this ‘heightened attention to the environment’, "geographical maturity." Riva Lehrer writes:


“… what defines strength in a time of crisis? In the coming decades, humanity must reimagine how to do every damned thing in the world. Disabled people are experts in finding new ways to do things when old ways don’t work. We are a vast think tank in plain sight. A bottomless well of ingenuity and creativity.”


By turning to disabled people and involving them in the quests for solutions to these big societal challenges, we obtain a richness and wealth of lived experience that can leave a better legacy for all.


Thanks to the brilliant Dr Sarah Bell for all her input and discussions in the creation of this blog post!


Links and further reading:


FOOTNOTE 1:

Note on the Tragedy model of disability in climate and environmental justice discourse:

It’s worth picking up here on some of the vocabulary used in climate and environmental justice. Using language that equates disability to something negative (eg blindness) has been highlighted as ableist, or as Sara Novic explores in this excellent article on the complexities ‘linguistic microaggressions’. With dire consequences of climate inaction, some educators inadvertently slip into doom-laden ‘Personal Tragedy Models of disability’, hoping by so doing, shock people into action.


FOOTNOTE 2:

Use of technology:

From a personal perspective; for twenty years I have worked alongside the medical profession and had a career in audiological rehabilitation, working with people with hearing loss to minimise the impact that this has on their day-to-day lives, for me, these newfound ways of viewing disability are sometimes hard to grapple with. Technologies that may minimise disabled identities can also assist disabled people in living their lives.... which is why I wear hearing aids every day... Rosemarie Garland-Thomson discusses the complex relationship that some disabled people have with emerging technologies in her 'The Story of My Work: How I Became Disabled' essay: "technologies- were what kept me out; they are now what let me in," and goes on to say "The built and social environments make disability, and they can help unmake disability as we know it." The long-term potential impacts (both for good and bad) of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) on the lives of all people are yet to be fully realised. Certainly, the Audiology profession has been wrestling/embracing these technologies for a while now and the impacts that this will have on how Audiologists practice and the profession as a whole, will be vast.

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Kate Morley
Jan 24, 20231 min read

Nature's Ear YouTube Channel

I have refreshed Nature's Ear's Youtube channel and you can find the videos we recorded when we were hosting the online Devon Rewilding Network in 2021, as well as some wildlife videos from our trailcams. I will try and add some more videos of the wonderful wildlife that visits us and a few of the land and how it is changing, as Nature returns. To find out more click here:








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Kate Morley
Dec 6, 20229 min read

Exploring disability: from theory to personal perspective.

Updated: Dec 7, 2022

This autumn I have started a part-time PhD with the University of Exeter’s European Centre of Environment and Human Health (ECEHH) , as part of the GroundsWell project, researching the issues surrounding disability and wilder urban green space, touching on elements of environmental justice. Starting out this seems like a hugely complex issue, one which pulls in strands of my former life as a health professional, my current interest in nature recovery, as well as my lived experience of someone born with a hearing loss. Over the next four years I hope to unpick some of these huge issues and weave them back together, to allow disabled people’s voices and stories to be heard, and to learn where disability fits within urban green space policy / decision making, and the wider Rewilding discourse. Embarking on this research has led me to re-examine my current beliefs and understanding of disability.

I was born with Herlyn-Werner-Wunderlich syndrome with associated hearing loss, and as a partially deaf individual training to be an Audiologist back in 1995, it has been really fascinating to look back at how I was initially taught to frame disability. It was strange to be taught concepts, definitions, and categorisations, that applied to me but were abstract theories designed to make it easy for others to understand people like me, but how did I understand myself? With words such as ‘handicapped’ and ‘crippled’ still in the lexicon of the day, I was taught to analyse and quantify peoples’ hearing loss in terms of impairment and rarely in terms of how much difficulty the person had in living their day-to-day life. This was the Medical model of disability. The medical model puts the focus of the disability onto the individual, where their physical or mental capacity, limits the individual’s ability to be able to participate in wider society.

The focus is on impairment and how it can be ‘fixed’ by rehabilitation or providing segregated services. This focus individualises disability and can lead to disabled people viewing themselves as ‘lacking’ or in need of further fixing. It also victimises disabled people and encourages wider society to view disability in terms of vulnerability and ‘pitying.’ Some have suggested that this medical modelling of disability inadvertently leads to oppression, where people with an impairment are less likely to challenge their exclusion from wider society and become more accepting of discrimination.

Another model that sits alongside the medical model of disability is the Charity model. Here it frames disabled people as in need of pity, living ‘tragic’ lives, being vulnerable and sees non-disabled people as philanthropic saviours. Michael Oliver & Colin Barnes argue in their book ‘The New Politics of Disablement’; that “within modern capitalist societies, disability is produced as an individual problem underpinned by personal tragedy theory and shaped by a process of medicalisation.” Indeed the definition of disability in the Equality Act 2010 states: "You’re disabled... if you have a physical or mental impairment that has a ‘substantial’ and ‘long-term’ negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities." This very definition seems to individualise disability and sit firmly within the medical model.

The teaching on my Master’s in Audiological Rehabilitation back in 2009 had shifted towards

a Social model of disability, where exclusion, lack of reasonable adjustment, prejudice and discrimination by society leads to disabling barriers. Disability is seen as ‘a relationship involving the state of the individual (their impairment) and the state of society (the social restrictions imposed on individuals)’, [1]. Where organisations have inflexible procedures, practices and inaccessible services, communication, or buildings, which fuels stereotyping and discrimination.

Another 10 years later, where are we now with disability justice? Well the medical and charity model are still widely used in society and particularly within the media but the theory now moves beyond the social model. In my current extremely limited knowledge of where the models are, we can think in terms of disability continuums. These sliding continuums from enablement to disablement. [2] Where sometimes disabled people are disabled by society and, sometimes they are not, depending on the barriers that they encounter daily. Often a socio-economic factor can itself be disabling, this is seen starkly in the cost-of-living crisis where some disabled people have inadequate funds to keep their homes warm and eat nutritious food, which leads to poor health outcomes making their impairments or conditions worse and disabling them further.

As an Audiologist I often had to define and classify someone’s impairment for medicolegal cases or Access to Work assessments, where we were categorising people’s tinnitus or hearing loss in terms of 'damage done' or 'assistive equipment needed'. I find it a struggle to abandon the medical model completely and frame everything in terms of societal effects, as there are occasions where the ‘impairment effects’ do impact lives on a practical level. An example of this was seen when we were assessing the ‘fitness to work’ in extreme environments for Firefighters, where they are required to wear protective clothing, hoods and respirators; could they do this with a hearing loss? Were the hearing aids helping sufficiently enough to ensure the safety of the individual and colleagues as well as ‘get the job done’ of fire rescue? What would happen if a hearing aid battery suddenly died mid rescue? How would the hearing aids work at hot temperatures? All these questions were assessed in terms of the formulaic Health & Safety at Work regulations but were contrasted with the understandable desire of many individuals to continue in their frontline firefighting roles, which they had trained so hard to achieve, and was such a huge part of their own self-worth and identity… These ‘impairment effects’ or implications of sensory impairment combine elements from both the medical and social models of disability.

Other ways of framing disability include the Affirmative model, which is a non-tragic view of disability, embracing how disability shapes lived experience. Where impairment is a characteristic of difference not inferiority. Dr Colin Cameron suggests that the Affirmative Model “offers a renewed framework for making sense of the individual and collective experience of impairment within a disabling society, something that’s maybe been lost in this whole pursuit of the mainstream”. This is described by a participant of Dr Cameron’s research: ‘It’s very hard for me to imagine myself as separate from my disability. To an extent, the disabilities that I have are the price I pay for being the person I am. And I don’t particularly want to be anybody else. So, I’m willing to accept that as a package.’ [3]

I often think back to that ten-year-old, having her first hearing aids fitted and deciding that day to become an Audiologist... where would I be without my hearing loss? It has shaped my life and world view in so many ways.

Many disability activists now talk in terms of ‘identifying as disabled’. This allows disabled people to self-determinate, which is particularly relevant to those with fluctuating health conditions where sometimes if they have a flare up or worsening of their condition, they may feel disabled. From a different perspective, societal changes can make a person who previously may not have identified as disabled, encounter new, unfamiliar disabling barriers.

An example of this was seen recently during the Covid 19 pandemic where the government mandated the use of face coverings to stop the spread of coronavirus, but this led to huge issues for Deaf people and those with hearing loss which rely on lipreading. Suddenly those individuals that normally managed to hear well with assistive technologies couldn’t hear well; this was due in part to lips being obscured but a reduction of the sensitivity of hearing aid microphones brought about by social distancing, as well as sound distortion leading to an additional loss of speech intelligibility [4]. These practical aspects of a public health need, led to societal change which was disabling for many people. This was augmented by systematic governmental lack of understanding, or even empathy, for those with additional communication needs. An example was seen when the English government's Covid 19 daily briefings failed to provide interpreters for British Sign Language (BSL) users, a move that was later deemed to be unlawful. Some people with hearing loss have described how the pandemic provided opportunities for improved inclusion and communication, with the accepted wider use of video conferencing and captioning technologies, as well as not having to feel anxious ‘having to hear’ people in social situations.

The Human Rights disability model is where disability rights sit within other intersectional identities (race, gender, LGBT+ and socio-economic factors), a shared humanity and respect for differences and dignity. The Humans rights model of disability "recognizes that disability is a natural part of human diversity that must be respected and supported in all its forms. People with disability have the same rights as everyone else in society,” and disability “must not be used as an excuse to deny or restrict people's rights.” [5]

This sits alongside Differentiated experiences where you get to know a person in respect to their personal experience, impairment, intersectional identities, and life lived. This seems a more equitable way to view all people and moves to a world view that does not judge. Surely a healthier way to live and view life. The theories of equality, equity and intersectionality will be covered in more depth in a future blog post.

There is an informative ‘understanding disability’ chapter in Sarah Bell et al 2022 publication, Disability, Landscapes and Nature: Re-Storying Landscapes for Social Inclusion; that explores these ideas in more depth in the context of designing, managing and interpreting disability inclusive and multi-sensory nature experiences.

Frances Ryan [6] discusses the trend for disability campaigners to describe non-disabled people as the “not yet disabled”, this addresses the belief that ill health will only hit other people and instead acknowledging that it can hit anyone of us, at any time... bad luck could mean that we can become too ill to work and the importance of an effective welfare state to maintain a safety net.

What I find fascinating at this stage is that the word ‘enabled’ is a word that keeps popping up in my work on Rewilding, and it appears in the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) recent 'Rewilding our cities' report [7]; where rewilding is nature led but human enabled. This is co-incidental but there are parallels with letting landscapes be ‘less normalised’ and more ‘self-willed’. The idea of a continuum for rewilding where a system can move both ways from a more formal human constructed green space to a wilder less restricted ecosystem that has the capacity to deliver benefits to both nature and human health and wellbeing. Here the discussion of ‘reciprocity’ sits at the heart of my current thinking... and parallels with disability modelling...


The paradigms of disability are complex, and I am hoping to grapple with them further as I proceed in my research… No doubt over the next 4 years I may well look back at this blog post and cringe at my current limited knowledge...The problem with models is that we try to ‘shoe-horn’ people’s lived experiences into a framework of adherence; assumptions are made, complexity is simplified, and nuance is lost. The reality in many cases is somewhat different.

So how do I currently feel about my own hearing loss? As someone who has always sat on the edge of communities, neither Deaf nor Hearing... wearer of hearing aids... but relatively small inconspicuous ones... reader of lips...would I class myself as ‘deaf enough’? As an Audiologist there was always a pressure to be seen to be hearing well... if I couldn’t hear well, what did that say about the capabilities of the hearing aids I was prescribing, that were after all marketed to be the ‘saviour of all your hearing woes!’ As Mat Fraser declares in his Radio 4 “What if everyone was disabled?” programme, that he “would “deny” his own disability … reject the label” and he was “hiding in the 'disability closet'”. Do I identify as being disabled? Certainly, leaving the soundproofed rooms behind where communication was a doddle; becoming a Mum has led to many more challenging hearing situations, noisy school halls, chaotic chats at the school gates, with the obscuring of faces with masks during Covid 19 and not having to socialise; and the relief of a previously unacknowledged stress of hearing at novel social situations... to be honest, at the moment I really don’t know. Maybe this PhD will not only reveal insights into how the lives of disabled people are influenced by urban greening and the potential social impacts of green gentrification... just maybe it will lead to a broader understanding of myself.

Writer and activist Eli Clare sums my feelings up perfectly in the wonderful book, Brilliant Imperfection:


“I walk, thinking not of concepts, but of beings... Just over the rise is the illogic of natural and unnatural, normal and abnormal. Just over the rise, we wrestle with loss and desire, promise and injustice.... Just over the rise we need to choose between monocultures and biodiversities, eradication and uncontainable flourishing... This little pocket of prairie is not a return to the past nor a promise to a future, although it may hold glimmers of both. Rather it is an ecosystem in transition from cornfield to tallgrass, summer to winter.... I feel... my own heart beating, imperfect and brilliant.”

References:

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