ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the rich entanglements between ecocriticism and critical disability studies that arise when we address the representations of environmental experience by writers with bodily and neurological difference. It also considers how the various subgenres of nature writing, and in particular walking literature, may be enriched by considering the complexity of human embodiment. Two recent memoirs that describe experiences of complex embodiment, by way of their autism, and cross-species identification, are explored in some detail. The chapter argues that in their awareness of their marginalised social status due to their autism, Chris Packham and Temple Grandin have an enhanced awareness and empathy for the vulnerability of all species, including the human. This is particularly relevant to nature writing and walking literature when they reproduce outdated and ableist ethics. Packham’s memoir, in turn, develops the genre of autism biographies with new literary techniques that suggest empathy towards other lives. This study is used to develop an outline for how the many forms of walking literature might encompass multiple forms of embodiment and knowledge. It also hints at the ways humanist scholarship, even in its most environmentalist forms, overlooks the complexity of all our interactions with the non-human world. By foregrounding sensory experience, non-normative cognition, difference, empathy, vulnerability and dependence (including on other species), these memoirs pave the way for a more thoroughly intersectional walking literature.
