University of California Press
Review by Brian Tanguay
Environmental justice advocates have long used origin stories to frame experience of disease, displacement and disability, to personalize and collectivize such experiences in the struggle against environmental exploitation and racism, and connect them to political and economic systems of power and influence.
“Tales of origin haunted my research,” writes Sunaura Taylor in Disabled Ecologies, and though one of those tales is her own, it’s not the primary focus of this important work of scholarship and reporting. Taylor, an Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley, traces her disability to US military pollution in Tucson, Arizona, the city of her birth. The story she tells is primarily about other people — some still living, many long gone — who lived the long-term consequences of the expedient risks taken by others.
Given her personal history, Taylor’s scholarly detachment is remarkable. Readers will search in vain for self-pity, bitterness, or even a hint of the most understandable and human question: why me? Taylor’s focus is water and people, and more specifically, water from the aquifer that was polluted by decades of industrial effluent from Hughes Aircraft Company and the US Air Force and unknowingly consumed by local residents.
Beginning in the early 1950s, and continuing until the 1980s, Hughes dumped millions of gallons of TCE (trichloroethylene) into the ground around its manufacturing facility on Tucson’s southside. Over time TCE leached into the aquifer and traveled in an underground plume, eventually returning to ground in the Santa Cruz River and on the Tohono O’odham Reservation.
As early as 1957, a representative of the Tohono O’odham notified the Arizona Department of Health about contaminated water coming from the Hughes facility.
Much of the early contamination occurred before the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, and the passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974. Thus, the working-class, predominantly Mexican-American and Indigenous residents of the southside were for years exposed to contaminated water. As with other sites of extreme industrial pollution, including Love Canal in New York, and Cancer Alley in Louisiana, the southside of Tucson would eventually be designated a Superfund clean-up site.
All the ground Taylor covers is extensively documented by news accounts, government reports, oral histories, hydrologic assessments, lawsuits, and her own interviews. The role played by local journalists, and the determined activism and organizing by southside residents, is one of the more remarkable aspects of the story. Without dogged reporting by Jane Kay of the Arizona Daily Star, and tireless advocacy by Tucsonans for a Clean Environment (founded in 1985), Hughes Aircraft, the US Air Force, local and state agencies, and the federal government might have parsed blame and ducked responsibility far longer than they did.
Delay is a polluter’s ally. For years committees were formed to study the problem and issue reports, but these often disputed the science or methodology, or blamed illnesses on the lifestyles and habits of local residents. Taylor explains how corporations and government agencies divide and black box responsibility, erecting procedural barriers in order to limit their liability. Walling pollution off from people and communities obscures cause and effect, as do official reports written in bland and boring language which render industrial pollution as something that happens, but which assigns no responsibility for the harm caused. Segregating the health of an aquifer from the health of a community might benefit a corporation, but it’s an insufficient solution:
“In an ecological context where the same pollution can cause cancer in one entity, miscarriages in another, congenital disabilities in a third, and mass die-offs in a fourth, clear boundaries between disability, illness, disease, and dying seem unhelpful.”
As with other natural resources, groundwater in the desert was viewed through an economic lens rather than as an integral part of a complex ecosystem. The Tohono O’odham and the poor and working-class people of the southside were exploitable because they lacked political clout. Even when clusters of cancer, birth defects and other diseases became too numerous to ignore and southside residents sued Hughes Aircraft, remediation efforts didn’t include long-term health care for people; some won monetary judgments, though hardly enough to compensate for disease and chronic illness.
As Taylor points out, environmental narratives don’t end when communities sue corporations or compel local governments or a federal agency to launch a study. By that time, harm has been done.
Taylor’s perspective is capacious and far-reaching, based in care of the environment and people. She writes, “How do people and landscapes continue living with illness and disability long after these battles have been fought? Struggles around access to health care and support services often continue for decades, long after journalists and lawyers leave a community.”
A long article by Sharon Lerner in the May 27, 2024 issue of The New Yorker titled, “You Make Me Sick,” amplifies Taylor’s observation about the long term implications of industrial pollution. Reporting about forever chemicals (PFOAs and PFOSs) produced by the 3M Company, Lerner cites a team of researchers from New York University who in 2018 estimated that the disease burden from such forever chemicals “amounted to as much as sixty-two billion dollars in a single year,” far exceeding the current market value of 3M.
Disabled Ecologies is a scholarly book, full of citations and extensive footnotes, but it’s also a well-crafted narrative that focuses on people while drawing important conclusions about the way our relationship to the natural world is hampered by an exploitative mindset and a reluctance to face consequences. The very way we think about and relate to the natural world, and how we understand our place in it, must change. Until and unless it does, injury and disability will continue to plague ecologies and humans.
