I’m just going to say it. I am so sick of climate change guilt.
I am a woman living with a disability. The small measures I can do to lower my impact on the climate catastrophe that beckons to us are infinitesimally minute and yet I am bombarded by groups to do my bit.
The facts are that people with disabilities (PWD) are affected by climate change-related health impacts, maybe affected more than others. People with disabilities often live in poverty, facing barriers in accessing healthcare services and in receiving timely public health or emergency information in an accessible format.
People with disabilities experience high rates of social risk factors that contribute to poor health, such as poverty, unemployment, and lower education. For example, people with disabilities are twice as likely to be unemployed than those without disabilities. People with limited incomes may not be able to afford air conditioning in their home during heat waves, increasing their risk of heat stroke (EPA, 2016).
When mainstream climate change activist groups try to sell the message of our changing climate and the devastation inaction will cause, PWD feel disenfranchised from this message.
There is no denying the message is important. But on an individual and personal level when you struggle to walk, breathe, talk, communicate, and to deal with the impact of the circumstances in which you live, climate change guilt is just another ableist narrative that is layered onto people living with disability.
This ableism can be succinctly articulated in the debate about plastic straws and the environmental impact that 8.3 billion plastic straws pollute the world’s beaches detrimentally impacting bird and sea life. The is no denying the horror of seeing sea life dead with plastic straws protruding from their bodies.
However, the ad hoc sweeping ban on plastic straws in some local government areas has left PWD shocked at the lack of thinking and consultation by able bodied people around their needs and their displacement in climate action. The thing is that people with disabilities often routinely rely on plastic straws to drink and they seem to be totally forgotten in these decisions.
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Is climate action only for the able bodied both young and old and the well healed, those with disposable income which enables them to placate their guilt by their ability to bank roll their personal crusades against climate change? Is climate change a middle class action?
This is the impression the movement gives off and if PWD are going to be included in the debate on climate action we need to be included in the discourse.
A climate action in a far off remote forest, that a person in a wheelchair, deaf person or any other PWD with limited social mobility may never have the opportunity to visit or even know where it is, creates a disconnect. The person with a disability feels the guilt of using so much of the worlds resource to survive and is unable to mitigate their needs to appease the climate action groups and thus the guilt feasted on us is ableism.
Taking away straws is akin to taking away ramps because they take up too much physical space in our over crowded world.
Human rights really need to put back into the equation of climate mitigation.
We are not responsible for the greed of corporate over-consumption, we are not wearing the designer clothes and eating the expensive food, we are just surviving on the margins and it’s not our fault.
Climate action should not be a competition in cultural capital, about who has the ability to be involved and how, and ‘out groups’ who don’t have the capacity to take a stand or even participate.
We care about the planet just as much.
Tammy Milne is a deaf interpreter, a community activist in various fields and a person living with Arthrogrophosis Multipex congenita.
