10 Record Breaking

Eco-Anxiety, Tipping Points, and Futures Un/Known

In a July 2023 Wall Street Journal article, editorial board member Allysia Finley suggests it is “alarmist stories about bad weather” that are “fueling mental derangements worthy of the DSM-5 [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders]” rather than “the warm summer air itself.” In her op-ed “Climate Change Obsession Is a Real Mental Disorder,” she writes that while “anyone who suffers from mental illness . . . deserves to be treated with compassion,” she ultimately concludes that “there’s nothing normal about climate anxiety.” Finley’s op-ed appeared just days after the “climate solutions” reporter for The Washington Post published a story outlining how four “small gradual exposures to heat . . . can help the human body build tolerance to rising temperatures” and “adapt to endure it better” (Chiu 2023). These pathologizing and individualizing responses to what was then “shaping up to be the Earth’s hottest month in recorded history” (Chiu 2023) occurred alongside a weeks-long heatwave in Phoenix, Arizona, where residents required hospital admission and surgeries after suffering heat shock and third-degree burns from falling down onto blistering hot pavement or from coming into contact with searing hot steering wheels, doorknobs, or “near boiling” garden hose water (Rachini 2023). Also that summer, across the ocean, unprecedented rain and flooding occurred in Delhi and Beijing, causing landslides, the closure of flooded water-treatment plants, and the collapse of housing and other structures, all the while abnormally warm winter temperatures baked the South American Andes Mountains (Borenstein 2023). As we saw in chapter 8, extreme weather puts enormous stress on power grids, transportation infrastructure, ecosystems, bodies, and lives. “Subway stations, sewers, roads, bridges, transmission cables, and foundations are all designed with a tolerance level. Supercharged with carbon, nature breaks our engineered world” (Mackenzie and Sahay 2023). As thresholds of tolerance are surpassed, infrastructure melts, crumbles, and collapses. Decades of socioeconomic abandonment alongside the wholesale neglect to stave off the mounting and projected effects of climate change on our infrastructures and ecologies has led to disasters that expand exponentially and that break us unevenly.

Finley isn’t alone in thinking that climate anxiety is the result of an individual’s disordered thinking rather than a normal response to the material conditions of human-caused global warming. While eco-anxiety does not (yet) appear in the DSM-5, it is rapidly emerging as a key popular and clinical mental health term. As early as 2005, environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht described eco-anxiety as a form of solastalgia, a “psychoterratic” mental illness “where people’s mental wellbeing (psyche) is threatened by the severing of ‘healthy’ links between themselves and their home” (Albrecht et al. 2007, 95; Albrecht 2005). Here, one’s earthly home becomes not only unrecognizable but also hostile, undermining “a personal and community sense of identity and control” (Albrecht 2005, 46). In 2017, the American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica offered the first definition of eco-anxiety as a “chronic fear of environmental doom” (Clayton et al. 2017, 68). Since then, there has been a rapid increase in coverage about the issue in the media and a proliferation of self-help books offering readers advice on self-regulation and self-improvement to ease eco-anxiety (Baudon and Jachens 2021). Risk spectrums have also been mobilized to capture the phenomenon using various metrics, tracking tools, and scales that describe and quantify shifting states of cognitive-emotional and functional impairments and behavioral responses. Studies tracking climate anxiety at the individual level demonstrate how eco-anxiety can deeply affect a person’s performance at work or school, as well as their ability to concentrate, sleep, and find pleasure in day-to-day life (Clayton and Karazsia 2020). Indeed, the Mental Health Commission of Canada’s resource Understanding and Coping with Eco-Anxiety offers a list of individualized strategies to help “manage” symptoms, including avoiding “doomscrolling” and “dwelling on ‘what if’ scenarios” (MHCC 2023, 2). “To get back a sense of control,” the resource suggests, “focus on the actions you can personally take to reduce your own carbon footprint” (2).

Medicalizing solastalgia, climate grief, or eco-anxiety approaches the ruination of safer living conditions from a particular vantage point, typically offering self-regulation as the goal. Many agree that medicalizing or pathologizing climate-change-induced anxiety is inappropriate or at least unhelpful insofar as it is an affective experience that “stems from an accurate understanding of the severity of our planetary health crisis” (Wray 2022, 21). Others, however, suggest that without medicalizing or pathologizing this “essentially normal human response to crisis,” it is not possible “to offer appropriate care to people in distress” (Van Valkengoed 2023, 386). For example, the controversial decision to make prolonged grief into a disorder in the DSM-5 resulted from the recognition that intense grief lasting longer than a year has significant impacts on people who could greatly benefit from psychological care (386). While climate anxiety and eco-anxiety can be “functional, fueling action and motivating us to address problems head on,” they can also be debilitating, an unrelenting source of anguish and suffering that can profoundly and negatively affect day-to-day life (387). In this way, the medicalization of eco-anxiety may, for some, be necessary and beneficial. However, as Britt Wray (2022, 224) points out, neither medical diagnoses nor therapeutic responses are sufficient: “One-on-one therapy sessions and hospitalizations simply cannot scale up to meet the scope of psychic damage that the planetary health emergency is causing.”

Treating eco-anxiety as an individual medical issue in need of a range of personal therapeutic and self-help solutions also diverts attention away from the root causes of climate catastrophe, shielding those most culpable for exacerbating the crisis from much-needed responsibility and accountability. Although all humans contribute to climate change, culpability is not evenly spread across populations and geographical regions. According to the United Nations (n.d.) Climate Action website, three-quarters of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions come from fossil fuel industries such as coal, oil, and gas, which are often directly subsidized by governments. Moreover, emissions in North America are double the global average, while emissions in the African continent are half the global average (IPCC 2022). Disaggregating this data even further, a mere 10 percent of the world’s population is responsible for half of all greenhouse gas emissions: “This is not simply a rich versus poor countries divide,” writes Lucas Chancel (2021). “There are huge emitters in poor countries, and low emitters in rich countries.” And so, while therapeutically oriented behavioral modifications such as reducing dependency on single-use plastics and choosing seasonal fruits and vegetables may indeed help to reduce one’s carbon footprint—and may even provide individuals with a sense of agency amid the unfolding crisis—these behaviors and lifestyle choices only contribute to a very small fraction of global carbon emissions.

As we train ourselves to manage our climate anxiety symptoms, as we modify our mindsets, adopt more sustainable behaviors, and increase our tolerance levels to “adapt better,” the spectrum of what constitutes “normal living conditions” expands. The “strongest hurricanes will come more often, and we’ll have to invent new categories with which to describe them; tornadoes will grow longer and wider and strike much more frequently, and hail rocks will quadruple in size,” writes David Wallace-Wells (2017). “The Earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters,” he contends, “that we will just start calling them ‘weather.’” Yet, just as some suggest that planetary instability and extreme weather is becoming a kind of “new normal” (Paddison 2023), others emphasize that there can be “no return to normal” with climate breakdown and ecological alteration (Blyth 2021). For example, scientists report that microplastic pollution has been detected in human blood (Leslie et al. 2022), a result of what Max Liboiron (2021, 5) names as the ongoing violence of colonial land relations that have enabled “plastics’ global distribution and full integration into ecosystems and everyday human lives.” “You can’t ‘clean up’ plastics because they exist in geological time, and cleaning just shuffles them in space as they endure in time,” Liboiron writes. “You can’t recycle them out of the way, because it means ever more will be produced, and there is no ‘away’ at any rate” (16–17). That there is no “away” means that there can be no return to a world without microplastic pollution. This reality extends beyond plastic pollution and is a reminder that “‘the environment’ is not located somewhere out there but is always the very substance of ourselves” (Alaimo 2010, 4). For example, studies show that it is no longer safe to drink rainwater anywhere on earth due to the presence of forever chemicals like PFAS that do not break down and have been linked to numerous health issues, including increased risk of some cancers, altered metabolism, and reduced immune system functioning (NIH 2024). PFAS have nonstick or stain-repellent properties and are found in everyday items like food packaging, electronics, cosmetics, and cookware (Cousins et al. 2022). Other studies show that air pollution is slashing up to six years off people’s lives largely due to coal and other fossil fuel burning, as well as due to an increase in the scope, size, and frequency of wildfires (Carrington 2021). Harkening back to chapter 1, whether we understand this conjuncture as the new normal or as the impossibility of returning to normal, what we must attend to are the underlying structures and practices that contribute to ecosystem alteration and how to build disabled kin relations with unfixable environments.

Data from the World Meteorological Organization and European Union–funded Copernicus Climate Change Service shows not only new climate extremes but the persistence of these record-breaking conditions (WMO 2023). In the absence of radical change fueled by collective efforts, climate scientists warn that the planet will reach (or, in some cases, already has breached) a series of boundaries and tipping points. In climate science, the concept of planetary boundaries aims to identify a “safe operating space for humanity” (Steffen et al. 2015, 736). Climate scientists have identified that six out of nine planetary boundaries “that are critical for maintaining the stability and resilience” of human life on earth have already been transgressed, marking our planet as “outside of the safe operating space for humanity” (Richardson et al. 2023, 1). These broken boundaries risk further changing earth’s physical, biological, and chemical life support systems, bringing us to a series of planetary tipping points.

The tipping point metaphor gestures toward a critical threshold that, once transgressed, will tip our ecological systems into an entirely new and different state, potentially triggering irreversible and catastrophic consequences for the planet and those who live here. As a linguistic device, the idea of tipping is useful in clarifying the temporal disruption and nonlinearity of the potential changes with which we are faced. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2022), there are more than a dozen natural systems that are currently at risk of transgressing their tipping points and moving to new and irreversible states. Transgressing tipping points will trigger sudden, unpredictable, and cascading effects and feedback loops that will have dire consequences not only for the natural system in question but for the planet as a whole and all who depend on it.

Climate change is advancing at a quicker pace than initially predicted, causing concern about tipping points arriving sooner than previously expected (Ripple et al. 2023). As the impacts of global warming are increasing in severity, scenarios like global societal breakdown are becoming closer to reality than dystopian fiction, while at the same time, they are disturbingly understudied. Climate breakdown is, as Mark Blyth (2021) describes, “a giant non-linear outcome generator with wicked convexities. . . . It’s one way traffic into the unknown.” This unknown—so often experienced by humans as a personal loss of control and, as such, a major source of eco-anxiety—is as much about our future on this planet as it is a haunting of our past. “Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future,” notes Wallace-Wells (2017). Moving forward, “we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past.” Indeed, because “greenhouse gases can linger in the atmosphere for thirty years or more before their effects are realized, we are already committed to a certain level of climate change in the future,” writes Kim Q. Hall (2014, 218). In this sense, according to climate scientist Michael E. Mann, the notion of a new normal “wrongly conveys the idea that we’ve simply arrived in some new climate state and that we simply have to adapt” (quoted in Paddison 2023). In truth, the situation is far more dire.

At a press conference in July 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the current climate catastrophe in apocalyptic terms, declaring that the era of global warming has ended and “the era of global boiling has arrived.” “The air is unbreathable,” he said, “the heat is unbearable, and the level of fossil fuel profits and climate inaction is unacceptable. . . . Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning.” He concluded with an appeal for immediate, collective action. “Accelerating temperatures,” he finished, “demand accelerated action.” Faced with broken boundaries and tipping points of no return, we are better to acknowledge and even embrace uncertainty rather than deny it, to act based on what we know instead of operating as if the world is somehow other than what exists (Blyth 2021). It is deeply stressful to live in and navigate a time of compounding crises where world-altering boundaries have been or will soon be crossed. More than stressful, it is also haunting, as Wray (2022, 1) explains, “to connect the dots between imperialism, colonialism, genocide of Indigenous peoples, racial capitalism, industrialism, and extraction.” Such connections highlight how, as Dean Spade (2023) points out, “The coming disasters are an intensification of the familiar.” For as much as warnings of our imperiled future detail the coming collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems, when we confront “unbearable heat, frequent extreme weather events, food and fresh water shortages, rising seas, more emerging diseases, and increased social unrest and geopolitical conflict,” we know that “suffering due to climate change is already here” (Ripple et al. 2023, 849). Socioeconomic abandonment and oppression precede disaster, affecting already-marginalized and -vulnerabilized communities most forcefully. As Naomi Klein (2019, 215) puts it, “We learn the same lesson over and over again: in highly unequal societies, with deep injustices reliably tracing racial fault lines, disasters don’t bring us all together in one fuzzy human family. They take pre-existing divides and deepen them further.”

It may be comforting for some to turn away from the magnitude of the crisis that is already with and before us, to find relief in the pleasures of the fantasy of a limitless now, to “fuck hope” and just build casino hotels in the Arctic. It may likewise be helpful for some to medicalize eco-anxiety, to limit information intake, and make personal changes to one’s routine or behavior to mitigate suffering and anguish. Yet, we also need other less individualizing ways of confronting the breaks of planetary damage already done, the grief over the changes that are now irrevocably with us, and the profound uncertainty and fear over changes yet to come. As the Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (2023) notes on social media, “From the war in #Gaza to the #ClimateCrisis, hunger and deadly outbreaks—the only way for humanity to prevail is through solidarity.” Yet, solidarity, similar to the making of disabled kin, is a practice and emerges out of social struggle. Moving in solidarity with Black, Indigenous, low-income, and disabled people who are among those most affected by the climate crisis and its entanglement in larger structures of economic, racial, and ecological violence, the struggle for better in our profoundly broken world must be a collective struggle for not just the betterment of some but for the flourishing of all. This involves a revaluation of all human and more-than-human life away from capitalist logics, as well as a clear acknowledgment of complicities, forgoing purity, and working with altered limits rather than overcoming them.

Disability scholars, activists, artists, and cultural workers have, for decades, been building an archive of what it means to live with loss, incapacitation, vulnerability, trauma, and (unjust) injury, about the necessity and value of interdependence, adaptation, and moving together with the most affected among us. Disabled people also know something about the unpredictable: about unstable bodily responses and energy levels, unreliable supports and infrastructures, and uncertain futures. Those navigating severe, degenerative, and life-limiting conditions also know about transitioning to undesired and unknown futures not independently but interdependently. In what follows, we look to the insights and strategies emanating from disability communities to learn more about how to sustain life and build disabled kin in inhospitable and even hostile environments.

Building Disabled Kin in Inhospitable Environments

As the planet heats up, surpassing boundaries and nearing tipping points sooner than initially predicted, many are turning to metaphor to make sense of the complexity of the various and intersecting crises unfolding and to explore potential responses. Within popular culture and environmental activism, we observe the use of metaphors depicting planetary illness, incurability, or nonrecovery. Often, the earth itself is anthropomorphized, depicted as a patient burning up with fever: hot, sick, and dying. Figure 31 shows a video still of a protester in a white coat performing CPR on a miniature planet earth at the 2023 COP28 UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai while others shout, “Climate crisis is a health crisis.” Above this is a World Wildlife Federation poster titled Lungs, originally circulated in France in April 2008. The poster depicts two forested areas shaped like human lungs, where a portion of the right lung has been razed to the ground. The message is both powerful and clear, the decay of the forest—the “earth’s lungs”—diminishes the oxygen we need to breathe and thrive.

This idea that the earth is like a sick person ignores the many ways human, more-than-human, and planetary life are enmeshed, often obscuring how debilitation and disability are not properties residing in discrete siloed bodies but rather how they form in and through relation. For example, Sunaura Taylor (2024, 5) contends that “environmental destruction is a story of disablement. . . . What we live with, in the present, and will for decades to come, even under the best-case scenarios, is mass ecological disablement of the more-than-human world.” Taylor makes this observation as she researches the origins of an environmental injury that she believes caused her own disability, when “various defense contractors and electronics manufacturers began disposing of barrels full of toxic chemicals in open-air pits dug straight into the desert ground of Tucson’s southside” (5). In the Southwestern United States, beneath the Sonoran Desert, Taylor writes, “thousands of years of geologic history composed of sediments and waters were forever altered by the detritus of the war industry—including the chemical trichloroethylene (TCE), an industrial solvent that would become synonymous with the pollution of the southside” (5). Harm to the land is inseparable from harm to its many inhabitants. Once the aquifer beneath Tucson’s desert became polluted, “so did the drinking water of those living above” (6). Taylor notes that “humans and our own health are bound up in relational networks with land and other species, which themselves are shaped by inequality and power structures. When one aspect of these relational networks is harmed, it can have a ripple effect,” leading to “a cascade of injury to complex webs that include biotic and abiotic bodies: humans, birds, fish, insects, trees, cacti, moss, mountains, valleys, soil, air, water” (15).

Moving from the Sonoran Desert in the US Southwest to the mountains of the mid-Atlantic, Kathryn Jane Finneran’s (2022) research on the deindustrialization of the Appalachia region similarly highlights how it is no coincidence that extractive capitalism has both disabled the land and enacted slow violence on the people who live there. She traces how deeply “exploitation and environmental catastrophes are folded into the landscape,” such that “the perception of extractive capitalism eventually becomes as much of a natural process as soil erosion” (13). Appalachia has been central to “a steady conveyor belt of natural resource extraction—first with salt, iron, and timber then coal, oil, and now gas” (9). This region is marked by centuries of violent dispossession from the colonization and theft of lands stewarded by multiple Indigenous nations, including the Seneca, Shawnee, Delaware, and Cherokee, to decades of invasive settler drilling and profiteering, to the resultant devastation, debilitation, and loss of countless people, plants, trees, and species.

While profit alone is often a sufficient justification for disabling land, Finneran (2022, 8) notes that “the secondary human impacts of extraction required a much more sophisticated campaign in order to obfuscate and justify the profound effect that extraction levied against human health, culture, and agency.” This includes Appalachian stereotypes rooted in pathologizing ableist and racialized perceptions of poverty that, as Rebecca Eli Long (2020, 1) unpacks, cast “its inhabitants as both physically and mentally deviant.” Indeed, Appalachia has the highest rates of disability in the United States, alongside low birth weights and the highest rates of infant mortality and “diseases of despair” such as liver disease (Finneran 2022, 18). Writes Finneran, “Appalachians have been pushing forward in a state of survival for so long, rebounding again and again from boom to bust, passing down a shared and sustained sense of fight or flight through each generation. This recycling of intergenerational trauma has been the bedrock for lauding the Appalachian people for having a particularly mythological measure of resilience—and has subsequently been repeatedly weaponized as the justification for continued extraction and exploitation” (20). Such disablement of the people and environment through exploitation and resilience was “pivotal in enabling the United States to modernize into the 20th and 21st centuries,” yet both the people and the environment are left abandoned (21). The damage done to the Appalachian people and landscape through centuries of fossil fuel extraction is directly tied to the well-being of those outside the region, and grappling with the deindustrial aftermath of this particular ecology provides a window into the future. Indeed, while “Appalachia is often thought of as being left behind” through extractive abandonment, in many ways it actually “represents the future” of climate alteration, debilitation, and multispecies disability (205).

These examples help illuminate how human health and vitality are materially enmeshed and formed in relation with the health and vitality of the natural environment and its many and diverse nonhuman life-forms. Environmental injury harms us all—and some of us more grievously—creating an expansive, uneven, and deeply unjust “web of injury,” or what Taylor (2024, 7) terms a “disabled ecology.” As we’ve seen in the previous examples and throughout this book, whether discussing lands that are (often unjustly) wounded or bodies violently debilitated, under the eugenic logics of racial capitalism, naming something or someone as broken or damaged routinely rationalizes and even normalizes further harm, as well as socioeconomic forms of abandonment. This is as much true of landscapes rendered uninhabitable or extracted to the point of collapse as it is of other debilitated life-forms and lifeworlds, including disabled human life.

To express this conjuncture, many disabled people, particularly people with chronic and chemical illnesses, mobilize the metaphor of the canary in a coal mine to describe the relationship between debilitated bodies and toxic environments and atmospheres. The canary metaphor references the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century practice of lowering these chemically sensitive sentinels into mines as a means of detecting the deadly atmospheric presence of carbon monoxide (CO). If the caged songbird went silent in the mine, or if their small body collapsed, this alerted the (less sensitive) human miners to the presence of gas, prompting them to evacuate or put on respirators before the CO increased to levels dangerous to humans. Relationally more vulnerable to and sickened by their environment, we situate the canary in the coal mine as disabled kin (Figure 32). “For some of us, the crisis isn’t coming,” writes disabled performer Hanna Cormick (2020), “it’s here: air we can’t breathe, water we can’t drink, food and resource scarcity, sun that blisters our skin, pollution so thick that everything becomes a poison.” She continues: “I have been living inside a sealed room for five years, disabled by the environment that we have created through our actions. I have a rare immune disease, but the systems of my body are not wildly different from a regular person, just accelerated, amplified. My cells, ravaged by the effects of humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, have mutated, and through the damage done to my body by the toxic environment we have created around us, I feel the damage we do to the planet.”

In her theater piece explicitly engaging with the canary, Cormick (2020) has another body stand in for her own, prompting “the audience to be aware of their complicity and their responsibility in making the space inaccessible for me and those like me.” Weaving together her own medical story alongside “a revenge-fantasy uprising of coal-mine canaries,” Cormick draws attention to “those we have relegated to being our early warning signal, the climate casualties who pay for our safety and convenience with their lives.” Cormick importantly notes that while she may be “in the vanguard for humans,” she exists in relation to “a host of other early climate casualties . . . animal and insect species going extinct, glaciers melting, coastlines disappearing, and bushland aflame.” Here, the canary in the coal mine defines the experience of many nonhuman relations too. As Damian Carrington (2022) notes, the global population of birds might too be described using the metaphor of the canary in a coal mine. He writes: “Bird populations are also affected by all the damage caused by human activity, from the destruction of wild habitat, the climate crisis, and pesticides and other pollution, to over-hunting and impacts of alien species and disease.” This, he suggests, “makes them the best living indicators of global change.” There are about eleven thousand species of birds around the world, and about half of them are declining. The canary’s peril is differentially upon us, and we humans are both the bird and the cage.

Similarly mobilizing the canary metaphor, Mordecai Cohen Ettinger describes their body as “a planetary whistleblower . . . highly attuned to toxins and air pollution” (quoted in Darrow 2020). In a podcast interview, Ettinger laughs while explaining, “I’m such a fine barometer. . . . I know now what the air quality is before I even look at the readings, you know, because my body, my body keeps the score.” Keeping score for Ettinger means “bearing the burden, our bodies are the evidence.” Ettinger’s neighborhood of East Oakland has some of the highest levels of lead in the United States. Of this Ettinger states: “It’s like you see the entanglements of systemic ableism and disablement, environmental racism, and classism and injustice.” Drawing on insights from disability justice activist Patty Berne, Stacey Park Milbern (2019b) deploys the canary metaphor as a means of understanding not just how disabled embodiments are often innately vulnerable to hostile environments but also how disabled people and disabled kin are disproportionately and often brutally made vulnerable through ableist structural violence. “Whether it is fascism or environmental climate crisis created by greed,” notes Milbern, “disabled people—especially disabled people of color—are . . . the canary in the coal mine.” Here, multiply marginalized disabled folks are distinctly positioned to bear the brunt of entangled environmental, social, and political toxicities. “How we are treated is often an indicator that there is a big problem,” writes Milbern. Indeed, in times of crisis, as notes disabled performer Nomy Lamm, “crip bodies and crip lives are the ones that are least tended to” (Berne and Lamm 2024, 48).

A growing body of literature documents the ways more than an estimated one billion disabled people, 80 percent of whom live in low-income and middle-income countries, are currently made increasingly vulnerable as a result of the structural violence embedded within climate change, whether from insufficient planning or from a lack of access to resources. From floods to fires to earthquakes to hurricanes, we already know many of the ways social and ecological breakdown leaves disabled people behind, especially for people unable to easily evacuate an area. “There are endless stories,” write Vanessa Raditz and Patty Berne (2019). “During Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, queer and trans communities lost access to medical necessities such as psychiatric medicines and hormones, and many faced discrimination and violence. During the fires in Northern California, a black queer environmental justice activist with asthma went into respiratory distress and now lives with permanent brain injury. From homeless encampments to local jail cells, the social, political, and economic disparities among disabled queer and trans people of color put our communities at the frontlines of ecological disaster.” In climate-related human-made emergencies, people who need life-saving medicines will find their existence hanging in the balance of disrupted supply chains. In heat waves, people who live alone, are sick or bedridden, or have no social contacts nearby, or don’t have an air conditioner, or those whose neighborhood street life deters them from leaving the house will be the most likely to die. Heat waves will become more frequent and unbearable, and when they occur, people who rely on antipsychotic medicines will be put at increased risk because such medicines can impair the body’s ability to regulate temperature (Wray 2022). In the aftermath of a disaster, disabled people are also disproportionately affected as a result of displacement intersecting with poverty. They may lose adequate and accessible housing; lose access to adaptive equipment and service animals, medical care and support, and personal care workers; have to stop medical treatments; experience food shortages, water scarcity, and a lack of electricity; and have negative health effects from increased stress and vulnerability in crisis situations (Jodoin et al. 2020; Stein et al. 2024).

In her speech at the Pacific Gas & Electric headquarters during the same California wildfires and blackouts (discussed in chapter 8), Milbern (2019b) gestures toward the Hurricane Katrina disaster (discussed in chapter 7): “Right now when there is a climate emergency, people who live in nursing homes and institutions get left behind. Often times staff, families and community members want to rescue them, even physically fighting nursing home administrators, but are barred because of policy. It is not uncommon for people in institutions to die because they were not rescued.” Or as Q, a disabled person, said to media in the context of experiencing heart problems from exposure to wildfire smoke in British Columbia, Canada: “We really do get left on the sidelines. The greatest effects (from wildfire smoke) are against the people who are not cared for and not remembered by most of society” (quoted in Daflos 2021). While disability can certainly amplify risk and vulnerability during a crisis, neither disability nor vulnerability are apolitical. In connecting these metaphors and struggles, we contend that it is through forging disability kin that we can engage in the necessary collective political and ecological work of antiabandonment.

Spectrums of Abandonment

In ableist ecologies, abandonment is put forward as a logical response to irresolvable debilitation and disablement. Like other systems of oppression, ableism extends beyond the human world, instantiating hierarchies that calculate and organize the perception, valuation, and treatment of our ecological and material relations: land, water, animals, matter. With this in mind, there is yet another way the canary in a coal mine metaphor is most poignantly apt. As noted in our Introduction, M. Murphy (2017) offers the concept of alterlife as a prompt for thinking with and through life that has already been altered by having its composition changed but that is nonetheless open to further alteration. To study alterlife, they write, requires “bursting open categories of organism, individual, and body to acknowledge a shared, entangling, and extensive condition of being with capitalism and its racist colonial manifestations” (498). Such attention to enmeshments and exposures is also as much, they say, “about figuring life and responsibilities beyond the individualized body as it is about acknowledging extensive . . . relations” (497).

Alterlife pushes us to reconsider kin-making with other disabled beings in the more-than-human world, as well as with ecological systems, viewing such beings and systems not merely as resources for human pleasure or to support human well-being but as interdependent elements in a shared existence. In the depths of the mines, for example, the canary’s body—their breathing—is sensitive to the toxic CO atmospheres of the underground tunnels, rendering the bird more vulnerable in relation to the human miners. Indeed, scientists “justified the use of the canary as an animal sentinel by invoking a constitutional susceptibility that they projected onto both humans and canaries,” notes Sophia Jaworski (2022, 9) in her article on the entanglement of the canary with racial capitalism, resource extraction, and infrastructure development.

Of course, this relational embodied vulnerability is only part of the story. Confined within a cage and lowered into a dangerous environment, the canary is first deemed available for injury for the purposes of capital and profit. In the for-profit infrastructure of the coal mine, both canary and miner are situated along a racial capitalist spectrum of life and value, where the canary’s sacrifice (or injury) is made legible and reasonable as the bird’s life is determined to be worth less than the lives of its human miner counterparts. A life marked as less vital, the canary in the coal mine is typically used and discarded or else revived and recuperated to prolong its use value.

Canary–miner relations show us that where one falls along the spectrum of racial capitalist and eugenic determinations of vitality very often determines who lives and who dies in dangerous environments. Differentially situated as they are at the “sharp end” (Crow 2015) of colonial and racial capitalist values of extraction, productivity, and independence, the fates of disabled people and disabled kin are most often tied to the matter of gradation. To what degree is one incapacitated? How intense are their symptoms? How restricted is one’s mobility? How clear is their speech? As we’ve seen throughout this book, the gradations and boundaries of health and vitality are meticulously surveilled and measured, heavily policed, and often violently enforced. Under neoliberalism, disabled lives are organized and arranged along a continuum or scale that transforms a degree relation into a kind of fluid and flexible hierarchy. The organized social abandonment of disabled, debilitated, and discardable kin in times of (endemic or acute) crisis is mediated not only by where our bodies and minds are made to fall along a neoliberal continuum of (extractable) life but also by our social mobility, by our capacities to adapt and move toward and not away from normative colonial and capitalist norms and ideals. There is a real and very material cost and danger that come from occupying a “fixed” disabled state on this vital scale (i.e., bodyminds that are interpreted as permanently broken or incurable), particularly if one finds oneself fixed to the most normatively disruptive or “severe” end of a neoliberal spectrum of valued capacities. But the neoliberal spectrum of vitality also promises the possibility of mobility—a pathway, however inaccessible, to move back into the fold of respectability and social protection that hinges on one’s capacity to adapt and change, to be altered, enhanced, or rehabilitated.

To return to the example of canaries and coal mines, Jaworski (2022) draws our attention to the ways coal mining culture celebrated not only the most robust or resilient canaries but also the technology that enabled their use. For example, in the late 1890s, some mines shifted away from the traditional canary cage to an elaborately designed box made of metal and glass that was affixed with an oxygen tank. This box, shown in Figure 33, is named after its designer, British physician and tinkerer John Scott Haldane. The oxygen tank aimed to revive a sick bird after CO exposure. “The circular door would be kept open and had a grill to prevent the canary escaping,” explains Lewis Pollard (2018), curator at the National Science and Media Museum in the United Kingdom. “Once the canary showed signs of carbon monoxide poisoning the door would be closed and a valve opened, allowing oxygen from the tank on top to be released and revive the canary.” Jaworski (2022, 10) reports that a 1914 Baltimore Sun article lauded how canaries that were “refreshed with oxygen” following their “initial droop” went on to save “five thousand miners during the first few years of their use.” A 1917 New York Times article similarly celebrates a canary named Goldie as a “living instrument . . . having saved scores of lives.” Such articles hail the birds as “heroes,” framed as “stoically” risking their “naturally” or intrinsically more vulnerable and less valuable lives to protect the more valuable lives of the robust miners. Such an overcoming narrative diverts attention away from how the birds and the miners were not freely working in solidarity with each other but instead in the service of capitalist extraction and profit. As Jaworski posits, “the technoscience of animal exposure was refined enough to maximize the labor value of coal miners” (10).

While the spectrum of vitality in the coal mine promises escape—robust birds treated “humanely” with life-saving oxygen tanks and celebrated as heroes alongside sure-footed miners leaving toxic undergrounds for cleaner atmospheres above—the story of the canary and the miners show us how racial capitalism’s vital spectrums provide no escape. After all, the lives of the human miners were not deemed as intrinsically valuable per se; rather, miner life was placed higher along a racial capitalist spectrum of vitality only insofar as their escape from the mine permitted them to labor again. Not unlike the revival of the canary in the oxygen tank, saving the miners was not benevolent but practical: life in the service of capital. In the end, like the canary, miners too became disposable when they were no longer able to overcome the danger of their environments. When age, disability, debilitation, or illness rendered them unable to continue laboring, they too were abandoned by industries in favor of fitter replacements.

In their work on Appalachia discussed in the previous section, Long (2020, 14) shows us how “class and power relations suppressed the ability to provide effective disease recognition and treatment for miners.” Bill Worthington, president of the Black Lung Association, describes the exploitation and treatment of disabled miners as follows: “Our people were dying. They weren’t getting benefits. Coal companies were making millions of dollars off of us, and then, when we got too sick to work, they said we had ‘miner’s asthma’ for which there’s no compensation. You were just out. You went to the poor house or started begging” (cited in Long 2020, 10; see Figure 34). Used, discarded, replaced, and occasionally recuperated or enhanced for profit—embedded in the same system of capitalist extraction, and both situated within dangerous and hostile environs, the canary and their debilitated human counterpart are disabled kin, rendered variously as less or more valuable depending on how well they are, at any given moment, understood to be contributing to the demands of capital and, as such, always at risk of becoming expendable within imperial and colonial quantifications and calculations of life. We draw out this connection to articulate the ways that disabled kin are not simply found but must be made through an antiabandonment politics that forefronts interdependence. Here we highlight how the spectrum allows us to identify interdependent relational experiences that call us to solidarity.

As we have seen in the preceding section, and indeed throughout this book, disabled and debilitated people and kin are consistently left behind during times of crisis and emergency (see also chapter 8). As temperatures rise and weather patterns become more volatile, as infrastructure continues to deteriorate and societal fabrics fray, such instances of neglect and abandonment are poised to become more frequent. Yet, as Catherine Frazee (2009, 2022) so compellingly shows us in chapter 7, not all disabled people are rendered disposable in times of crisis, or at least this classification is not meted out evenly. Ableist neoliberal requirements of mobility promise to shield certain (flexible, resilient, mobile, and adaptable) disabled people and kin from the certainty of abandonment. Just as industrialism celebrated the least susceptible and most resilient canaries (the birds that were able to live on despite the abuse and sickness wrought by their exploitation), neoliberalism too embraces upwardly mobile disabled people—the heat-sick body that can effectively adapt to 122-degree Fahrenheit summers by “increasing its heat tolerance” through “gradual exposures” (Chiu 2023) or the anxious mind that “take[s] back a sense of control” through “symptom management” practices by throwing away the “what if scenarios” and limiting their doomscrolling (MHCC 2023). Such requirements for adaptability, mobility, and resiliency extend beyond animate life to the infrastructural and ecological. To cope with rising temperatures, individuals and governments are advised to protect property by enhancing building insulation and adopting more efficient cooling technologies like adding green roofs. Vis-à-vis rising sea levels, coastal communities are advised to construct seawalls and levees to help limit flooding and create forms of stormwater drainage to help keep communities safer during heavy rains. In their Homeowner’s Guide to Retrofitting, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA 2014) suggests “six retrofitting methods” to protect one’s house from flooding, all requiring substantial access to capital. For example, they suggest taking an elevation tactic such as raising one’s house “so that the lowest floor is above the flood level” or relocation, suggesting that people should move their houses “out of the floodplain to higher ground where it will not be exposed to flooding.” They also suggest demolition, “either rebuilding properly on the same property or buying or building a house elsewhere.” Capitalizing on crisis and collecting its spoils, developers tout technological innovations from smart rooftops to living seawalls while marking up environmentally sustainable retrofits or pitching floating homes and neighborhoods and other adaptive experiments in climate defense that promise to save the day. Yet, the entanglements between public crisis and private profit run deep, risking the ongoing investment in, and perpetuation of, environmental disaster and the (always) uneven distribution of harm and debilitation.

To be clear, it is neither our intention nor our desire to dismiss the need or wish to adapt so as to mitigate or lessen vulnerability, debilitation, and disability, be it human, more-than-human, or planetary. We are nevertheless alert to the mobilization of adaptation in the service of capital and to the tension between adaptation and normalization, between the need to navigate profound disablement and debilitation through flexibility, relationality, and adaptation and the danger of the normalizing fantasy of individual overcoming that will most certainly leave many of us behind. Adaptive overcoming narratives often individualize and privatize resilience—increase your tolerance, they say, enhance your capacities, manage your symptoms, retrofit your homes—moving away from commitments to collective care, access, and protection and, often, toward the recuperative private interests of capital. A kind of upward mobility, individualized overcoming narratives work to normalize and obfuscate the abandonment of lives, lands, and structures unable to acclimate to increasingly hostile environs: the canary that succumbs, coastal life washed to sea, the snap of aging infrastructure, the disabled person that can’t make their way through rising waters, or the (planetary) home that burns too hot—marking the most and multiply marginalized as worthy of abandonment and disposal. This kind of abandonment has most certainly been the case as wildfires rage all around the world. According to the World Wildlife Federation (2020), 3 billion animals were harmed in the bushfires that tore across Australia between June 2019 and February 2020, including 143 million mammals, 2.46 billion reptiles, 180 million birds, and 51 million frogs. Likewise, Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland and one of the most biodiverse places on earth, housing “a host of vulnerable and endangered species, including giant river otters, giant armadillos, and hyacinth macaws,” was devastated in 2024 by unprecedented fires (Barber 2024). Luka Moraes, a veterinarian, told The Guardian, “In one week I have already seen hundreds and hundreds of dead animals, maybe thousands. Reptiles, snakes, frogs—all the animals that cannot run—they do not stand a chance” (quoted in Barber 2024).

Yet even as notions of adaptation, resilience, and overcoming have become effective tools of neoliberal responsibilization and self-management, we are not prepared to toss these ideas out altogether. We instead move to center diverse interdependent practices of collective care, access, and abolition created and adapted by multiply marginalized communities seeking to nurture and support the flourishing of disabled lives, lands, and the infrastructures we collectively depend upon, across spectrums of debilitation, injury, and harm. Disability routinely and disproportionately affects already and multiply marginalized peoples, produced through environmental and medical racism, war and genocide, through capitalist health care and insurance industries, through lack of access to clean water, housing, electricity, sanitation, and education. So often the result of organized socioeconomic abandonment, disability then serves as a rationale for further social, political, and economic abandonment. Whether arising from slow, endemic environmental emergencies like toxins leached into soil or microplastics in drinking water or exacerbated from acute climate disasters such as wildfires or hurricanes, disabled and injured life is deeply entwined with environmental in/justice. The same ableism that marks disabled, injured, and debilitated bodies as not worthy of saving in a crisis also marks marginalized people as unworthy of protection from disability, sickness, injury, and debilitation in the first place. Drawing on the work of Taylor (2019) and Eli Clare (2017), Long (2020) highlights that disabled people and ecologies are often used as rhetorical props and cautionary tales, using the cultural fear and hatred of disability to argue against pollution, environmental degradation, and profound ecological alteration. “While remaining critical of the violence that produces disability, disabled lives nonetheless have value,” Long writes (33). “Disability may stem from injustice, but it is not itself injustice” (34). As Alison Kafer (2013, 159) points out, we need an environmental politics that does “more than cast disability and disabled minds/bodies as tragedies or aberrations,” asking “how can we continue the absolutely necessary task of challenging toxic pollution and its [disabling] effect[s] without perpetuating cultural assumptions about the unmitigated tragedy of disability?” To this, Taylor (2024, 13) asserts that disability “is not just a noun, it is also a verb. . . . Disability can, and often does, emerge from profound injustice. Yet at times, disability can also help make the world anew.”

Disability culture teaches us that it is not technological feats or individual resiliencies that make disabled life livable—although these can certainly aid with living well. Rather, it is, largely, dependable care relations, forms of accessibility, practices of collectivizing risk, and robust community supports that allow for flourishing. We close this chapter by making room for disabled kin in broken worlds. This is crip maintenance for severe futures and incurable ends, a solidarity politics that is not contingent on a redemptive fix—whether that be a clean break, a triumphant cure, or a radical recovery—but instead turns on moving with, learning from, and tending to altered life and relations (human, nonhuman, planetary) marked as broken, as well as to the vital ecologies, objects, and infrastructures that support this life. Above all, it is a politics that refuses to abandon life such as it is. This should not be mistaken for resignation or acceptance of broken conditions. Quite to the contrary, such a radical recognition of vitality, value, and deservingness of protection across vital spectrums of health and capacity acknowledges that there are other and better ways of living and moving together as we face limits—both our own and those of our disabled kin. While we recognize that the entwined debilitation of people and ecologies often stems from injustice—and as we make room for the sorrow and rage that must flow from brutalities that differentially harm—disability culture importantly teaches us that disability is not injustice itself. As Clare (2017, 56) asks, “How do we witness, name, and resist the injustices that reshape and damage all kinds of body-minds—plant and animal, organic and inorganic, nonhuman and human—while not equating disability with injustice?” As we fight against and indeed seek to abolish injustice and its uneven material consequences—rooted as it is in a desire for less multispecies debilitation, sickness, madness, and injury violently inflicted upon us and our shared ecologies and environs—we ask, how can we preserve and protect the disability and injury that is already with us and learn from the critical knowledge and ways of being that flow from navigating (hostile) life in this way? Politically linking with disabled kin can help to forge better living conditions that reduce some of the challenges of disabled living in an ableist, sanist, audist, neurotypical, compulsory sighted world. It is to forge community across difference that can support the recognition of our entangled oppressions so as to fight for more just cohabitation conditions. We embrace, following Jack Halberstam (2011, 89), “not some fantasy of an elsewhere” but rather the pursuit of “existing alternatives to hegemonic systems”—alternatives staunchly committed to moving with the most and multiply affected: those who are critically endangered, terminally ill, profoundly depressed, severely disabled, and unjustly and irrevocably injured. Far from pushing us into further despair and detachment, we turn to how this desire to move with our disabled kin from where we are, just as we are, might aid us, following Métis scholar Kristen Bos (2024), “to go forth without conquering,” to build without abandoning, and to “connect and create with each other” as we endeavor to more justly and more generously navigate the troubled times to come.

Palliation for Severe Futures and Incurable Ends

“Let us sit with the idea, for a moment, that we have lost,” writes Natalie Osborne (2019, 145). “Change is here. The Great Barrier Reef is dying. We’ve already lost untold, uncounted species to extinctions, and for many more the ‘slow unraveling’ . . . is underway.” Osborne—who describes herself as “politically depressed”—admits that she used to find comfort in “the ‘late’ of ‘late capitalism,’” at least insofar as the term gestures at an end to the brutal racial capitalist times under which we differentially live (145). For Osborne, the breakages of this world nevertheless lead to a kind of hope for something better: “As the fissures and contradictions of neoliberalism rendered themselves more obvious,” she discloses, “I took heart, thinking (to paraphrase Arundhati Roy) another world—our world—was on her way” (145). Osborne’s (and Roy’s) articulation of the possibility of something better returns us to a hopeful abolitionist stance that says that, while we can’t fix these broken-by-design colonial, racial capitalist, ableist, eugenic systems, structures, and the bad relations they reproduce, we can embrace alteration and make a break to build other worlds.

Yet, as we’ve seen throughout the book, breakage is not always or only redemptive, and sometimes we are faced with hard limits—our own embodied limits and those of our more-than-human disabled kin. Sometimes the broken conditions under and with which we live cannot be overcome. Here, the common abolitionist saying “We will win”—which seems to imply an overcoming of our broken worlds—sits in tension with Osborne’s (2019, 145) call to acknowledge that “we have lost.” “Capitalism’s self-destructive nature is not necessarily our victory,” Osborne comes to realize. “Whole ways of living and dying have passed and are passing from this Earth, we have lost futures, and the basics of a good life are still denied to most” (145–46). Or, as Isabelle Stengers (2015, 10) writes in In Catastrophic Times, “There isn’t the slightest guarantee that we will be able to overcome the hold that capitalism has over us. . . . Nor do we know how, in the best of cases, we might live in the ruins that it will leave us.” “Perhaps,” writes Osborne, “we are past the point at which we could revolution our way out of this mess,” and, instead, we need to sit with worst-case scenarios: “Perhaps release may come from considering that we are not in the midst of a desperate, heated, chaotic battle to save The World. In fact, we lost that battle, lost that future, lost that world. We. Have. Lost. Take a breath. Now what?” (145, 146).

Osborne, Stengers, and Murphy push us, as abolitionists, to engage deeply with this tension between overcoming, limit, and altered life-forms and lifeworlds. Despite extractive capitalist fantasies of boundlessness and no limit, there is always finitude—an end to the exploitation of our shared landscapes and natural resources, to the debilitation of land and bodies and the profiteering off vibrancy and injury. It is an end that might very well also be our end, just as it has already been the end for countless human and more-than-human lives, ways of living, life-forms, and lifeworlds already lost. “When something can’t be fixed,” writes Black abolitionist writer and organizer Mariame Kaba, “then the question is what can we build instead?” Figure 35 shows an image created by visual artist Micah Bazant in collaboration with Kaba as part of Interrupting Criminalization’s (2023) Abolition Imagination Cards series. Kaba’s words appear on the card adjacent to Bazant’s drawing of a geode split in two. The rock’s hard gray exterior has been broken open, revealing a majestic interior of sparkling blue crystals. Made of centuries-old layers of sedimented minerals forged underground through turmoil, magma, water, and ice, the geode is revealed when the earth that surrounds it—that which has shaped it—decomposes or falls away. The geode is a lasting record of its own historical and material contexts. In our reading, Kaba and Bazant’s piece tethers an acknowledgment of the finality of some losses with still-possible and as-of-yet unknown futures. How do we care for this irrevocably altered world, hard, broken, and beautiful as it is?

At this juncture, we look for alternative ways of acknowledging, embracing, and caring for our world such as it is, turning to disabled and other marginalized knowledge and practices engaging in how to “attend and nurture tiny growing entanglements in wastespaces and ruins” (Osborne 2019, 148). For despite great loss, and more loss to come, writes Osborne, “there are still possible worlds, still possible shared futures. . . . And some of them are worth having” (148). Like the canary and the miner, we are all debilitated by late capitalism, dangerous atmospheres, settler colonialism, and so on, albeit differentially. While this debilitation has individual effects, it is also a broken-by-design structure that demands the abandonment of people, the destruction of ecologies, and the deaths of many. Confronting abandonment by design is not to reassert neoliberal overcoming or innovation discourses but about building alternative infrastructure. In a queercrip twist, we find ourselves agreeing with Junior from the opening of this chapter who wants to “fuck hope” and instead “build.” What we are building, however, must be, following Kaba and Bazant, not in the service of returning us to the same but toward creating social and material infrastructure that can collectivize risk, refuse abandonment, and better sustain interdependent relations of care, access, and abolition.

Taking up care, for example, Christina Crosby (2016), in her book A Body, Undone, reflects on her experience in the days and months following a catastrophic bike accident that broke her spine. Unlike Clare’s disavowal of brokenness (see the Introduction), Crosby understands herself differently. A “broken body,” she writes; an “upended life” (36). Yet broken for Crosby is not a fixed state, and neither is it awaiting the redemption of the fix. Instead, Crosby names the body as undone, unfixed, an unstable state that invokes a practical and ethical need for being and moving together. Crosby recalls a moment in the aftermath of the accident where a friend and former student stayed with her while she recovered in hospital. She writes: “Waking in a haze of pain and confusion, I would find her quietly beside the bed, watching over me, waiting, sometimes writing in a spiral-bound notebook.” Crosby continues: “Anything can happen, at any moment—a trance of glitter, a rush of injury—and we must live with one another and our unhoused selves. Simply live with. You can’t always be intent on protecting yourself or fixing someone else, always looking for some way to ‘make it better.’ My friend offered her open, loving proximity, the gift of her presence. I fell asleep, and awoke, and she was still with me” (8–9). This caretaking for disabled kin is a kind of crip maintenance (see also chapters 5 and 8) that resonates with practices of palliation, naming this as a form of disabled tending to alteration relations that can better respond to planetary ruin.

Vis-à-vis the stark and material reality of a planet on the edge of multiple tipping points, many have been thinking about notions of environmental or planetary palliation. For example, Julia D. Gibson (2023) describes environmental palliation as an ethical caretaking framework aimed at addressing the injustices and impending multispecies extinctions caused by environmental degradation. Gibson writes, “With the conservation paradigm geared primarily toward pausing (via the preservation of so-called wilderness) or rewinding (via restoration-as-reversal) the ecological clock, the question of what is owed directly to the unjustly dead and dying is undertheorized and under practiced in mainstream environmental discourse” (208). Acknowledging the impossibility of some forms of repair without accepting decline or hastening breakdown, environmental palliation emphasizes the ethical imperative of providing compassionate caretaking responses, making room for the provision of “good or better deaths for particular entities under specific conditions of injustice” in the face of intractable environmental deterioration. Similarly acknowledging the impossibility of a restorative environmental repair, Debbie Horsfall et al. (2014) emphasize the entanglement of human and more-than-human life within evolving planetary systems. The authors argue that environmental palliation practices—from collective risk mitigation practices to art-making as a survival strategy—not only are about acknowledging and accepting the undesirable changes to, and potential endings of, planetary life but also inherently involve sustainable interspecies forms of mutual care: laboring to ensure particular forms of caretaking for ourselves and our disabled kin.

The palliative concept offers a generative framework with which to consider the ethics and practicalities of living, dying, and caring in inhospitable climates more generally. Woven into common understandings of palliation as “the alleviation of a disease or its symptoms without curing it” (OED 2025c) is a generative tension between concealment and exposure. On the one hand, the word palliate is derived from the Latin pallium, which references “a garment worn by Greeks made from wool, flax, or cotton” (Meghani 2004). To palliate is, in one sense then, to hide, lessen, or suppress: “that which cloaks or conceals” (OED 2025c). Lou Tam (2023) takes up this sense in their articulation of “palliative states” of migrant health care, highlighting the suppressive danger of palliative praxis as “a form of reasoning, mode of intervention, and experience of subjectivation” within neoliberal necrocapitalism. Tam argues that migrant mental health care often functions to palliate or “temporarily suspend suffering and death” in such a way that conceals, covers over, or otherwise draws attention away from the deeper structural violences of settler colonialism and racial capitalism and their debilitating effects. Tam argues palliation becomes a kind of “salvage mentality” or a “traumatic response to resuscitate life through [individualized] system navigation and emotional adaptation.” Tam shows us how such an enactment of palliation results in the suppression of trauma and its necessary and disruptive responses and, ultimately, in the “optimiz[ation] of capitalist systems.”

On the other hand, palliation also bears etymological ties to that which protects or shields, as in an animal pelt and, more generally, skin (pellis) (Meghani 2004). Focusing in on the word’s protective connotations, Jana Melkumova-Reynolds (2024, 35) posits palliation as an ethical framework, one that offers an alternative analytic to what Kafer describes as the curative imaginary—“an understanding of disability that not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention.” Melkumova-Reynolds argues that palliation offers a time in which to exist and respond that isn’t contingent upon the purity of redemption or the resolution of absolute remedy. “The time paradigm of palliative care is clearly different from that of the curative model,” she notes, “because it is not underpinned by the idea of progress” (37). Instead of focusing on curative recovery or return—on “making the subject fundamentally ‘better’ in the future”—palliation “focuses on making their lived experience (ultimately, of living towards death) more tolerable in the present” (37). Face-to-face with the queercrip prospect of “no future,” palliation moves us “beyond the familiar tropes of purposeful linear development and growth allowing for stillness and repetition,” inviting alternate temporal modalities of care—for example, in the words of psychoanalyst Lisa Baraitser (2017, 2), “modes of waiting, staying, delaying, enduring, persisting, repeating, maintaining, preserving and remaining”—that might occasion new ways of being and moving together.

Crip philosopher Joshua St. Pierre (2021) recounts how the concept of palliation guided him away from a teleological and anthropocentric narrative focused solely on planetary restoration—on a normative return, saving, or cure. Instead, the framework of palliation allowed him to repurpose his ecological despair into the labor of caring about and for a future that may or may not include a human “us.” “After all,” St. Pierre notes, “we are not living in ‘End Times’—as in some kind of eschatological period of apocalyptic horseman and messianic returns—but we are most surely navigating ‘a time of ends.’” “With or without us,” writes St. Pierre, “there are other worlds to come.” The palliative acknowledgment of an end of one or more worlds, and the possibility of other worlds yet to come—of life-forms, lifeworlds, and futures beyond us and, perhaps, without us—does not fix in a way that conceals or suppresses damage, injury, symptoms, or otherwise turns away from or abandons the catastrophe of this world such as it is. Instead, we read palliation as protective, a balm that squarely attends to and traces out the genealogies of harm and offers protection and care vis-à-vis such brutal exposures. Indeed, as James Berger (1999, 219) notes, to understand a world as post/apocalyptic “is to recognize its formative catastrophes and their symptoms, and to identify the ideological sutures that hide the damages and repetitions.” To palliate at and for the end of broken worlds is to engage in a kind of nonlinear care work that facilitates life-affirming support and comfort for the sick, traumatized, debilitated, injured, and dying who live in the midst of incurable ends. Palliation “demands neither a giving in nor a giving up,” contends Deborah Cowen (2023), as it can “remin[d] us that the most devastating loss can germinate the most extraordinary practices of care and collaboration,” iteratively altering our composition.

Engaging palliation in relation to the severely disabled, whether human, more-than-human, or severe planetary disability, highlights how “the work of care, community organising, community support, and the practicalities of living and surviving and beyond in a world not meant for you, that is hostile to your existence, is work already underway” (Osborne 2023, 242). We follow Robert McRuer’s (2006, 306) provocative reading of the term severely disabled, which, he contends, “reverse[s] the able-bodied understanding of severely disabled bodies as the most marginalized, the most excluded from a privileged and always elusive normalcy,” instead asserting that it is precisely disabled bodyminds coded as severe “that are best positioned to refuse ‘mere toleration’ and to call out the inadequacies of compulsory ablebodiedness.” Calling out inadequacies, refusing toleration or abandonment, and advancing care practices is work that is already “being done by First Nations Peoples, people of colour, disabled people, queer people and many others who have never been able to rely on the State to care for them, keep them safe, or keep them alive” (Osborne 2023, 242). In working with what we have from where we are, palliation encourages crip maintenance practices of harm reduction and abolition to reduce suffering and make a difference in the short term that can affirm life as it is.

Abolition necessarily attends to how we care for one another, specifically seeking to move away from punitive approaches to care that often include control, surveillance, and forced confinement, toward more just care relations. For example, the Palliative Education and Care for the Homeless (PEACH) program does outreach and advocacy with, and provides palliative care for, sick and disabled people with life-limiting illnesses who are also experiencing housing instability and vulnerability in Toronto, Canada. Founded in 2014 to address how mainstream palliative care services were not meeting the needs of people experiencing homelessness, the program practices new ways of being in relationship with each other by meeting people where they are—in shelters, on the street, in parks or forested areas—rather than only operating out of a central location, clinic, or hospital. PEACH seeks to reduce suffering and improve quality of life through building direct relationships with people that lead to nonjudgemental and practical interventions, including safer substance use support. The PEACH program works with partners to offer hospice care in downtown Toronto that can enable more dignified and supportive end-of-life care for sick and disabled people. The PEACH program also facilitates access to necessities, aids with funeral arrangements, connects people with loved ones, and holds grief circles (Buchanan et al. 2023).

Palliative practices offer one way of living now and recomposing ourselves toward collective risk mitigation, interdependent care, access, and abolition. In what follows, we conclude with how disabled kin-making builds disability culture and knowledge in ways that orient us to the unknown, seeks adaptation without normalization, invokes solidarity, collective access, and antiabandonment in moving together, all the while confronting limits and ends.

Disabled Kin for Hostile Climates

As we saw in this chapter, when catastrophe strikes—climate-related or otherwise—disabled people and kin are often canaries; how disabled people and kin are affected and treated are indicators of broader danger. Or, as disability writer and activist Alice Wong (2021) puts it, “My body you call broken, I call an oracle.” Wong describes disabled people as “modern-day oracles,” referring to the deep insight born of disabled people’s capacities for navigating hostile terrain. “For many disabled, sick, and immunocompromised people like myself, we have always lived with uncertainty and are skilled in adapting to hostile circumstances in a world that was never designed for us in the first place,” observes Wong (2020). “It’s time people listened to us.”

Disabled, mad, sick, and injured people and other (multiply) marginalized people have long engaged in unique ways of knowing and being: practical skills and specific capacities that emerge within and are nurtured by communities forced to (sometimes continuously) navigate worlds that are ending (Maynard and Simpson 2022). “Like every kind of oppressed people, disabled people are geniuses at staying alive despite everything,” writes disability justice activist and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2022, 51). They argue, we “are constantly creating an improbably crip future in the face of all that wants to eliminate us.” Indeed, “by nature of our continued existence in societies that oppress and exploit us,” all marginalized people “possess numerous survival skills applicable to a disaster situation,” says mad disabled activist Myriad Augustine (quoted in Pflug-Back 2019). “Every single person I know with a chronic health, mobility, and/or psychiatric issue of any kind has created adaptive tools using [the] materials at their disposal and navigated emotional crises that more privileged people have never experienced.” These disabled survival skills and knowledges are seldom innovations that can be attributed to any singular individual or group but are, more often than not, shared in community. Crip wisdom is a collection of strategies, insights, and skills—partial, fragmented, and diffuse—that are continuously being passed on, shared, hacked, altered, repurposed, and redesigned. Augustine describes this as “a certain problem-solving shorthand” that they have observed “when folks with different experiences of disability get together. We might not all know what each of us needs, but we can usually express those needs quickly and spend more time on working to meet them than on whether they’re valid or important” (quoted in Pflug-Back 2019). For example, in Notes for the Waiting Room, Canaries (n.d.)—a network of art-adjacent women and gender-nonconforming people living and working with autoimmune conditions and other chronic illnesses—produced a patient-centered resource, including a tool kit offering numerous approaches to healing, a bibliography composed of texts Canaries’ members found to be invaluable for navigating life, and a manifesto. Curating Canaries member Taraneh Fazeli invited the network to submit responses to the prompt: “How do you take care of yourself during a flare up of your symptoms?” The resulting resource promotes solidarity and lateral knowledge sharing, exchanging language and strategies for living with their conditions. It has been distributed through both medical and art institutions and even asks of its readers in the final pages to “please pass this publication on by leaving it in a waiting room.”

Disabled survival work can also take the form of mutual aid. Piepzna-Samarasinha (2022, 52) describes disabled mutual aid as “a million examples of subtle, diverse forms of disabled survival work.” Documenting some of this work at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, they show how disabled people drew on familiar ways of moving through inaccessible and hostile atmospheres to navigate a world in crisis and share insights and strategies. Writes Piepzna-Samarasinha, “Before the pandemic, disabled people with multiple chemical sensitivities/injury, asthma, and other immunocompromised conditions have been masking to stay safe—from chemicals and fragrances but also viruses—for a long time. Disabled mask users did crucial work when we shared our existing knowledge of the different kinds of masks that exist (cloth, medical, N95, P95, respirators), brands, where to get them, and how to stop glasses from fogging and preserve lipstick” (57). Much like disabled wisdoms, disabled mutual aid manifests in more formal and organized disability-led spaces as well as in small, informal pockets of disabled people engaged in information and resource sharing, collective care, fundraising, preparing and sharing, checking in, and grief work. Disabled mutual aid is “often small scale, offline, quiet and invisible (to some). . . . With disabled mutual aid, the stuff we do to help each other doesn’t look like a big deal or fall into ‘dramatic rescue of the cripples’ tropes,” they write (65). Neither curative nor focused on saving, it is often durational “checking in on each other and seeing how things are going” (65). We read disabled mutual aid as a kind of crip maintenance, a palliative tending: anticipatory, protective, and soft; “casual and loving” practices that flow from “disabled noticing and caring”; moves that work to harden our collective armor, cradle our falls, and tend to our wounds (65). And while nondisabled mutual aid often comes fast and furious only to quickly burn out, disabled communities know about hard limits and sustainability of pace. “We fed each other before COVID-19,” writes Piepzna-Samarasinha (2023). “We kept each other alive when COVID-19 led millions of people to discover the concept of mutual aid for the first time. And our crip resiliency, love, and commitment to each other will continue,” they conclude, “whether or not the rest of the world is remembering and practicing mutual aid.”

As we confront the severe question of limits, Julia Watts Belser (2023)—a disabled scholar and rabbi with a mobility impairment—notes that the disruptions, uncertainty, and often unwelcome alterations to day-to-day living that come with living in and with climate change nevertheless evoke a kind of familiarity. “For most of my life, the world has told me lies about limits,” she writes. “People take one look at my wheelchair, and they’re quick to tell me all the things I cannot do.” She continues, “Like many disabled folks, I’ve built robust armor against ableism. In a world full of naysayers, watch me has long been my touchstone.” Watts Belser goes on to identify “a second kind of lie people tell about limits,” one that confidently proclaims, “you can do anything, if you work hard enough.” This overcoming narrative has been especially harmful for disabled people, who are continuously pressured to prove that we are unaffected by pain, adversity, and environmental, political, economic, and social barriers—however harmful and unjust. “The rules of the game are brutal,” writes Watts Belser: “Never let them see your limits. Never falter.” Not only do Western ideologies of overcoming work to conceal broader systems of structural inequality—creating the toxic illusion that individual determination and positive attitude alone determine personal outcomes—they also fold neatly into broader capitalist fantasies of access to all and extraction without limitation (Jaffee and John 2018). Living on in the world as it is now—sick, debilitated, injured, disabled—and confronting “the disability to come” will require a crip mode of negotiating and addressing unique contemporary tensions between the fixed and the unfixed, normalization and flexibility, limit and possibility. Tracing a line connecting the colonial, ableist, and racial capitalist requirement for an always-adapting, upwardly mobile disabled subject to the extractivist fantasies about the limitlessness of our natural worlds and resources, Watts Belser (2023) reminds us that disability culture offers an otherwise: “To reckon well with limits, we also have to grapple with power.” While some limits are unjust and need to be broken, other limits—personal limits or boundaries, for example—must be respected. Still other limits—even despite the fiercest desire or need to break them—cannot be circumvented. Hard limits. Severe ones. Here, Watts Belser reminds us that severe limits also can be generative. Disabled people “know something about how to find beauty and claim pleasure, even when we ache. Disability is a masterclass in adaptation, an invitation to work creatively within constraint. There’s a good life here, grounded by limits.”

Faced with a world that is irrevocably altered and disabled, some are looking backward: turning away in denial from the bleak future on the horizon. Some are turning inward, living only in the now and embracing a pleasure-seeking nihilism. Others are seeking only to move forward, to overcome and triumph over the environmental damage done, pinning all their hopes and dreams on a saving fix. Still others are frozen—unable to be or move anywhere at all—overwhelmed with fear and anxiety for an unpredictable and, in all likelihood, dangerous future. Here we sit with disabled poet Naomi Ortiz (2023, 101), who identifies that disability can hone our capacity to “inhabit[ ] contradiction and ventur[e] into vulnerable unpredictability” as a way to confront and cope with uncertainty. As climate instability increasingly becomes part of our everyday, and in taking our cue from disability culture, justice, and decades of disability studies scholarship, one thing remains certain: Disabled kin “are not acceptable collateral damage” (Wong 2020). In refusing abandonment by, or recuperation into, racial capitalism, in collectivizing risk, in practicing relations of interdependent care, access, and abolition, in cultivating connections across multispecies disabled kin, in engaging in harm reduction, crip maintenance, and embracing palliation, we attune ourselves to how, despite it all, things can be beautiful here, committing ourselves to do daily what we can from where we are, such as we are, and with whom we could collectively become. Naming, witnessing, tending to disabled kin, past, present, and future, are some tools with which we can build collective capacity.