ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the premise that Western orientations towards our perceptions of the 'environment,' 'ecology,' 'nature,' and 'wilderness' are synonymous with many of our societal perceptions of disability. Though tension between current discourses of disability cultures and environmental restoration remains, people with disabilities are actively positioned to advocate on behalf of variance, deviance, and mutability. There is a tendency for non-disabled environmental justice advocates to highlight the disabling impacts of resource extraction or contamination in ways that treat the tragedy of disabled bodies as self-evident. The social interpretation of disability advocates through disability studies for an embracing of the disabled person into the social/built environment as a recognised necessary phenomenon on a continuum. The effects of the climate crisis have quite possibly forced the need for an exaggerated form of performance – an acceleration of the improvisatory – unto the more-than-human world: inextricably a co-performative paradigm.
