Disability and the Climate Camp

One of the things on my mind throughout the Climate Camp was its relationship with my disability activism. There are ways in which I think they are deeply and inextricably connected, and other ways in which I think there is an almost total gulf between them. Certainly, in the face of the apocalyptic visions of the future presented by some fairly incontrovertible (despite the efforts of government- and business-funded "scientists) climate science, concerns like disability rights (or gender equality, or ethnicity, or any kind of human rights/liberties/equalities activism) arguably seem almost irrelevant; what does it matter if crips, or transgender people, or any other group, are worse off than the rest of humanity, if the whole of humanity is doomed to extinction within (what would be) the "natural" lifespan of most people alive today anyway?

Luckily the impression that I got of utter hopelessness after the first climate science I went to was somewhat countered by the following debates, which left me with a bit more hope. But what is the relationship between environmental activism and disability activism? Ideas of austerity, the need for stripping back society to much lower levels of technology and energy consumption, local self-sufficiency, and similar survival-oriented conceptions - inherent in which is often the evolutionary idea that only those who are "fittest" for their environment will survive - can be in opposition to the liberation of disabled people through assistive technology and the demand for economic and technological fulfilment of impairment-related needs. The concept of biodiversity, in my view, is (at least one) key concept that can connect disability rights with ecological preservation - but the question of what to do if unsustainable technologies are needed to preserve that biodiversity (whether it's IVF for pandas or feeding tubes and respirators for humans) remains unresolved...

Nevertheless, I was massively inspired by the fact that there seem to be at least a few other people (in addition to the couple of disability rights activists I already know who are also ecological activists, of course) who make a positive connection between the issues - there were at least 5 people with very visible impairments at the camp, 2 of whom I managed to have conversations with about disability activism, one of whom already knew people in DAN and the other who wants to get involved in it... sadly I didn't find a pretext to talk to the others, since just going up to them and starting a conversation about disability rights (especially since my own impairment isn't obvious) didn't seem quite right... but still, the fact that they were there is testament enough to a genuine desire for inclusion and accessibility within (at least the radical end of) the ecological movement...

The accessibility of the site itself was also pretty impressive, with an accessible compost toilet (tech that is both disability-friendly and eco-friendly is extra, extra cool), wooden boards for walkways to make them more wheelchair accessible, interpretation available for BSL users (I think there was only one there, who also uses speech, but it's the fact that it was thought of), and a general vibe of acceptance of difference and willingness to do everything necessary to ensure inclusivity. Some other common issues to do with access simply didn't come up - eg. no lift/stairs issues, because no buildings above ground level...

I did have some really mixed/ambiguous feelings in the small immigration detention centre action at the end, with one individual who appeared to have some type of mental impairment (possibly something on the autistic spectrum, possibly something else) - he was continually talking, at normal conversational volume, but apparently to himself rather than anyone else, repeating and improvising slogans and statements in a way that was a bit suggestive of echolalia, and was swearing a lot (in the "using "fucking" as punctuation in most sentences" way that I find completely unoffensive and harmless, but which was an excuse for police attention and threats of arrest) - on the one hand I felt, or wanted to feel, solidarity with him, but on the other there was also something cringing, something embarrassing, that made me want to disassociate myself from him, then left me feeling guilty about that... this, I think, has at least something to do with me not being as "out" as a mentally impaired person as I would like to be, and something to do with that blurred zone in popular perception between having a mental impairment and being an unpleasant or irrational person, but is something I think I need to explore and analyse more in order to get some coherent thoughts on...

While helping to "tat down" at the end, it struck me that it felt almost laughable to think of myself as "disabled" in the context of life as it was lived at the Climate Camp: it truly felt like this was a "world" in which my differences from the "normal" human neurological model were almost completely irrelevant. Is this what it would feel like to live in a world without disablism? I don't know; certainly, for people with other types of impairments than mine (mobility and/or visual impairments, most obviously) a camp in a field is a lot less accessible than the "mainstream" built environment. The design principles of low-impact living and those of universal accessibility may not always match each other - but a genuine spirit of fairness and inclusivity, and most importantly the belief that disabled people are people, and thus deserve their needs met as much as anyone else - it particularly inspires me when this is "automatic", as it so often isn't, but at Climate Camp (in most cases) was - can get round many a lack of technology, even if not actually substitute for it...

I don't know. This is a really, really ongoing contradiction/tension in my life - I don't know if I'll ever be able to reconcile "crip stuff" and "environment stuff" fully. But the experience of Climate Camp suggests to me that a society which is ecologically sustainable could also (especially if, as I believe is necessary for sustainability to be achieved, capitalist paradigms of work and employment are rejected, and a "mutual aid" ideology adopted - more on this in further posts) be a society in which human physical and mental differences would be more accepted, understood and accommodated - and this gives me some hope...

Camp for Climate Action: a (hopefully) somewhat more coherent post

OK, so i've come down from the poetics a bit ;)

The Camp for Climate Action 2007 (or just Climate Camp) was an awesome experience. Over 1000 people coming together, through a leaderless, decentralised and locality-based autonomous process of organisation, for a week of low-impact DIY living, high-quality climate science discussion, workshops both theoretical and practical, and high-impact direct action.

I'm going to write a few more posts about specific events and issues that arose from the Camp, including disability issues, sexism/gender issues, and particular aspects of science/technology debates. Also possibly a few pics, but i only have a few and they're mostly not of the "standard" views of the camp etc (i was working on the presumption that there would be plenty of those on Indymedia and elsewhere, and also a lot of people involved, including myself, weren't particularly keen on being in many photos), but of little things that were of specific interest to me...

It was a huge emotional rollercoaster for me, involving moments of utter hopelessness for both personal and scientific reasons, but overwhelmingly one of the strongest feelings i have ever had of genuine community and being a part of something that has some hope. There were workshops and discussions on all aspects of climate science (possibly somewhat reassuringly, there was not absolute agreement between all scientists involved), and other things as diverse as feminism and practical off-grid electricity.

The camp was organised on a decentralised "neighbourhood" basis, with each area of the country having its own neighbourhood with consensus-based meetings and its own area on site with a kitchen and meeting/chilling space (this was pioneered at the anti-G8 convergence at Stirling in 2005, but, possibly because of the smaller scale, worked a lot better at Climate Camp). This meant that no one group was "the organisers", but everyone could be involved not just in the camp itself, but in the (equally if not far more important) work of building active groups in their own localities...

As well as seriousness there was a real party spirit, with music, comedy, a bar and all kinds of social networking going on (i even managed to meet some other disability activists). The awesome pedal-powered Rinky Dink sound system was a highlight, although its music policy was a little incomprehensible, consisting of heavy dub and jungle, crusty folky-punky stuff, and then... Disney movie theme songs (???)

On Sunday and Monday there was a day of mass direct action involving an all-night blockade of the British Aviation Authority's offices. Police were incredibly heavy handed (not surprisingly for anyone with experience of UK or European activism, but i think this may have been an awereness watershed for the UK media) - I among many others got some rather spectacular bruises to show for it - and the complete contrast between the attitudes to life of the state and the people was shown as overwhelmingly obviously as that betweenm life and death.

Indymedia's report on the Climate Camp is here, there are loads of pics including some awesome art drawings, photos of the big day of action including these, these, these, these and these, photos of the camp itself, and some of the other actions (including daft puddings, red herrings and many more)...

(links now unbroken)

Camp for Climate Action 2007

unordered thoughts, getting them down while i can... probably about 10 "proper" posts to come about it... also, i seem to have somewhat channelled the spirit of Larry Arnold for this post, as i did that of Dave Hingsburger for the last one... i think this may be a form of echolalia, but apologies to both for what might seem like unintentional plagiarism...

The Battle of the Beanfield, mark II. Baton blows like brutal lightning. Bruises like magnificent thunderstorms. NVDA meets BDSM. Oh my God - I am human. So weak and so strong. So broken and so whole. So monstrous and so beautiful. Confrontation, so different from humiliation - the very opposite of trauma. Pain can heal.

We are Hydra, they are Leviathan. If they are a big tree, we are a small axe - or better yet, if they are one big blunt axe, we are a million tiny trees. Nevertheless, the old proverb bears repeating that when the axe came into the forest, some of the trees said "the handle is one of us". Will the social tipping point be reached before the atmospheric tipping point?

A tantalising glimpse, just for a week, of what reality can be - feeling more like a real living being than in normal circumstances i would even think it possible to feel, yet almost instantly vanishing as if it was no more than a dream.

The rollercoaster of at least two completely different kinds of despair, and blazing, angry, defiant, unstoppable hope.

This is how it feels to be alive.

Biodiversity: an introduction

Right. I've been having trouble writing any actual blog content without feeling like there ought to be something here that's kind of... introductory. (I need to find out how other bloggers started their blogs, i guess.) So i'm now going to attempt to write an introduction to the concept of "biodiversity", and how i see that as relating to disability and the other stuff i'm interested in. Please forgive me for the clunky writing and tendency to waver between the painfully tentative and the pompously would-be-messianic in this post... it's become obvious while writing it that my writing style needs some serious work, which this blog will hopefully provide...

A year or so ago, i was thinking about how strange and disparate my various (online and offline) interests are: disability (including both impairments and social aspects of disability), anarchism, (trans)gender and sexuality issues, ecology, animals/wildlife/zoology, music, literature (each of the latter categories itself subdividing into several different and arguably very disparate subcategories), new social movements, forteana/unexplained phenomena, etc... in an attempt at self-analysis, i pondered how and whether these things were all connected, and whether there was in fact a single, potentially cohesive identity* that i could bring out of all of them.

After pondering this question "What am I?", or perhaps more accurately "What would someone add my various online and offline "identities" up to?", the phrase came to me "I am a lover of biodiversity in all its forms" - that the thread that tied together most, if not quite all, of my interests/obsessions/perseverations was some fundamental love of the diversity of life - both human and nonhuman - a desire for life to be diverse, and to be accepted as such - a love of the unlimited possible forms and processes of life. This concept stayed brewing in the back of my head for quite some time, gradually forming a framework to tentatively hang other thoughts on, until i eventually had it formulated enough to bring up in a conversation with another disability rights activist, not long after i had managed to finally come into contact with other people within that movement.

Until then i had pretty much thought of the "biodiversity as overarching concept" idea as just one of my wild flights of fancy, something on a level with my little personal hybrid theologies/mythologies that in geeky, and often stoned or drunken, conversations with friends more knowledgeable than myself i had made up out of existing belief systems - but his very positive reaction to the concept made me realise that i might actually be on to something here...

The context in which biodiversity is usually understood is a biological and ecological one. Wikipedia says that the term was coined in 1985 and defined as "variation of life at all levels of biological organization"; of course, this is generally applied to the non-human world. My use of "biodiversity" as an umbrella concept, which could potentially cover just about all equality and identity issues, is in taking that and applying it to the human world (which parallels my personal desire to apply concepts and methods of activism and social movement organisation learned from the environmentalist movement to the disability movement): bringing together biology and ecology with sociology. Disability, gender identity, sexuality, race/ethnicity, etc can all be seen as elements of the biodiversity of the human species...

One of the key claims of social ecology is that the same systems and ideologies which lead to the domination, exploitation and oppression of humans by other humans also lead to the domination, exploitation and degradation by humans of nature. Ecofeminism, the product of feminists bringing social ecology together with feminism, is based on the idea that the oppression of women is linked to the domination of nature by linguistic and cultural equation of women with non-human nature: this is also true of the historical and current treatment of disabled people, sexually diverse people, people of minority ethnicities and all other groups of people who are seen to differ from a culturally defined "fully human" norm. The same systems of domination - the triple alliance of capitalist monopoly, statist centralisation and patriarchal social segregation - that threaten ecosystems and natural biodiversity through monoculture farming, exploitation of non-renewable resources and unsustainable economic growth also threaten human biodiversity by oppressing, exploiting, discriminating against and attempting, by methods ranging from enforced proletarianisation of peasant cultures to institutionalisation and eugenic abortion or sterilisation of disabled people in developed countries, to eliminate "abnormal" human beings.

The ecological, anti-war, anti-nuclear etc movements, the feminist movement, the various anarchist or libertarian socialist movements (including co-operatives, social centres, etc), the postcolonial liberation movements and the rights/freedom movements of disabled people, queer people, trans people, and any other minorities, can thus be seen as (although it has to be said they don't all necessarily see themselves or each other as) part of an overall movement in defence of biodiversity (in all its contextually overlapping definitions) against monoculture (in all its contextually overlapping definitions). In this blog, my aim is to draw together and make connections between all these movements, and in doing so demonstrate, in my own small way (as all the people i link to here do in their own large or small ways) biodiverse resistance...

(*I understand that many people will strongly dispute that one's interests either are the source of, or add up to produce, one's identity. The concept of "identity" for me is a complex one, and there are ways in which i believe that, for me (and possibly other autistic people) it actually is significantly different than for most people - that it's possible i/we actually lack some kind of "core" identity that many/most other people have, and thus need to piece together a (no less "real", just differently constructed) "identity" from other things. I'm probably going to blog about this at some point in more detail...)