In 2018, Global Greengrants Fund, a leading funder of grassroots environmental justice movements, began a new initiative to support work at the intersection of disability rights and environmental justice.
This initiative was supported by The Ford Foundation, as well as Yolanda Muñoz, a previous Program Officer with the Disability Rights Fund, who offered her experience supporting disability rights, gender equality and Indigenous movements around the world.
Over the past two years, Global Greengrants has supported more than 60 grassroots organizations in 30 countries working to engage persons with disabilities in environmental justice action.
In this conversation with Yolanda and Peter Kostishack, Global Greengrants Vice President and Director of Programs, the two reflect on what they are learning about the connections between disability rights and environmental justice and what it takes to build more inclusive movements.
Why has environmental justice historically not had a disability lens?
Yolanda Muñoz (YM): From my perspective, environmental justice is not the only field of social justice that has fallen behind the inclusion of disability in their agenda. It is actually very rare that environmental justice and climate action movements include people with disabilities in their strategies, because they have very low expectations about our potential to contribute to the community. For many centuries, disability was considered something bad, tragic and sad that needed to be hidden in institutions, and many folks do not wish to talk or think about it because everybody knows that it can happen to everyone at some point. In many cultural settings, it is still considered shameful or a bad omen. Frequently entire families are ostracized because they have a disabled member.
Global Greengrants Fund has been successful in incorporating disability rights into their grantmaking because the team has been receptive to break their own assumptions about disability. They have learned with enthusiasm about ableism and how to dismantle the structures of power around body functions through knowledge, critical thinking and a humble acknowledgement that they need to be inclusive if they wish to be coherent with their ideals of social justice.
Peter Kostishack (PK): I agree that the environmental movement has an inclusion problem when it comes to disability. From our experience funding grassroots environmental justice work internationally, we rarely see explicit efforts in include persons with disability. Only recently, did we make a deliberate effort to reach organizations of disabled people in our programs.
We have a participatory grantmaking model that involves leaders from environmental justice movements around the world, and when we finally reached out to them about supporting work on disability and environment, their response was enthusiastic. But many also responded, quite honestly, that it was a challenge because they weren’t connected with organizations or activists working on disability rights. The movements are disconnected.
Since we began taking a deeper look, we now see many areas of intersection between environmental problems and disability: lack of clean water, pesticide poisoning, air quality, oil spills, silicosis, worker safety in extractive industries, climate induced migration, to name a few. In the places where the environment has been degraded the most, such as industrial sacrifice zones and oil contaminated communities in the Amazon, rates of disability are remarkably high, and not coincidentally, so is poverty. Climate change and loss of land, water, and clean air threaten the rights of people with disability to enjoy safe and productive lives. If the environmental justice movement doesn’t incorporate the struggle for disability rights, we aren’t doing enough to seek justice. Given this, the fact that disability has been so absent from environmental agendas has a lot to do with this systemic discomfort and stigmatism about disability.
What are some of the strengths and experiences that disability rights movements can bring to advancing the environmental justice agenda?
YM: People with disabilities fight for their rights in very adverse circumstances. It is difficult for us to get organized and advocate in the same manner than non-disabled folks do. We use alternative modes to voice our concerns and fight for our rights.
However, we are creative problem solvers. We can bring to the conversation why and how emergency preparedness and response must meet the different ways people perceive and process information, and how to react to it.
Effectively tackling environmental justice implies a deep reflection on the complexities of the social fabric. Not everyone has the same strength, speed or ways of perceiving information. Measures to enhance the dialogue on body diversity benefit everyone
Working towards environmental justice implies the need of thinking about inclusive communities in order to build resilience. We all need to act together to find effective ways to stop overexploitation, pollution and all the effects it will have in the way we relate to the planet. Besides, environmental degradation and its impact on climate change might become the cause of impairments that can result in long-term disabilities.
PK: When communities are displaced by hydropower projects or mines, the rights of people with disability are invariably violated. However, environmentalists have largely failed to understand or raise these issues. And by doing so, we not only add to the invisibility of people with disabilities, but we also miss opportunities to grow our movement, its strategies, its allies, and its legitimacy.
How has learning about ableism influenced your general vision of the struggle for environmental justice?
PK: The increased focus on disability rights has helped our organization identify a significant missing opportunity in the environmental justice movement and it has changed our overall understanding of intersectionality in environmental justice.
Because so much of the work of environmental justice is identifying and making visible impacts on people – of pollution, climate change, degradation, and loss of land – there’s a tendency in the field to draw attention to victims. Victims give a face to environmental injustice that motivates people to act and demand accountability. So disability tends to only enter the environmental justice conversation as an impact and people with disability as victims. However, this perception of persons with disabilities as victims is hugely disempowering and reinforces stereotypes and assumptions that they have no agency or ability to drive change. It also misses an opportunity to build stronger movements. We know, however, that people with disabilities have led and fought hard for social change and have experience changing structures and environments that cause barriers and discrimination.
Our funding at this intersection of disability rights and environmental justice has compelled us to be more conscious of different systems of social oppression and how they rationalize environmental injustice through extractivism, colonialism, sacrifice zones, and other models of “development,” which often happen to also be root causes of disability.
This work has helped us take a deeper look at how we think about identity and inclusion throughout our work – that people in environmental justice movements carry a lot of identities, some of them then not seen, and that these identities not only affect how they experience injustice and opportunity but also inform perspectives that must be included in the visions and solutions that movements develop and advance. Environmental justice advocates need a lot of lenses to understand the obstacles facing people in the communities in which we work.
YM: Global Greengrants Fund has made a tremendous effort to get rid of these learned prejudices through accepting, first, that there is a socially constructed problem behind this invisibility; stigmatization of people with disabilities as subjects of pity, charity and shame is very old. It is hard to fight against deeply rooted assumptions that include low expectations and the idea that we are a burden to our families and the society in general.
PK: It’s also important to recognize that the culture of environmental philanthropy can be very ableist and discourages new actors and perspectives. It has many systems – programs, guidelines, strategies, and metrics – designed to limit access and to pick the “strongest” groups with the greatest “ability.” Just as discouraging are philanthropic approaches that look at disability from a perspective of charity, seeking to help those most in need but not viewing people with disabilities as agents of social change. The biggest environmental problems, such as climate change, require fundamental social change, and funding the same environmental NGO’s alone will not be enough to make this happen. The social, political, and narrative influence needed for this type of change will come from social movements with diverse leadership that can make these challenges real for all people and organize them to act.
What do you think it will take for disability rights movements to take on an environmental justice agenda?
YM: Many people with disabilities do not know their rights and their potential to promote social change. I believe that the first step is to make sure that everyone -including those with disabilities- learn about ableism and how it creates the misconception that exclusion is a “natural destiny” for someone who lives with an impairment. At the same time, people with disabilities need to feel welcome in a movement that involves the whole community. This implies the production of easy-to-understand information in accessible formats, as well as a deep commitment from all the stakeholders to build capacity of DPOs on the subject.
To promote a constructive dialogue, people with disabilities and environmental justice promoters need to learn from each other’s agenda to determine the main common areas of interest.
PK: In many parts of the world where we work, there is a lack of accessible information about the issues and the pathways to influence then. This is complicated by a long history of excluding people with disability from educational opportunities and decision-making spaces. We have been impressed to see disability rights organizations and environmental justice groups in Africa and Latin America using grant funds to develop informational materials and conduct outreach to persons with disability on climate change and environmental justice. This work will prepare the next wave of organizations and leaders to join and expand the movement.
What are anti-ableist practices that you have identified in working at this intersection?
PK: We are still new at this, and we need to remain honest with ourselves about our lack of knowledge and capacity to work at this intersection. One of the first steps we had to take was to recognize that people with disabilities weren’t a conscious part of our agenda and to ask ourselves why they weren’t. This absence was a result of our own ableism that we didn’t recognize.
Another key step – in which we have a long way to go – has been to look at our funding process from a perspective of accessibility, which is both technical and practical issue but also, at the grassroots level where we work, a question of building new and stronger relationships. The advisor network that leads our grantmaking has spent a lot of time over the past couple of years getting to know disability rights organizations and looking for common issues and efforts where we can collaborate.
As we have learned from Yolanda, it has also been important to take a rights-based approach in this work. This establishes a common connection between disability and environmental justice movements, which are both skilled at identifying and addressing inequalities and changing systems. It also roots the work in global principles and human rights instruments that can bring additional tools and weight to environmental justice struggles.
YM: Global Greengrants’ Regional Program Coordinators have a key role in this mission of breaking the taboos and prejudices against the inclusion of people with disabilities as passive recipients of help. Over the past two years, they have learned more about disability rights and have understood that people with disabilities can play a key role in designing effective and fully inclusive strategies to stop environmental degradation. At the same time, they have encouraged organizations of people with disabilities around the world to learn about the topic and have stimulated these organizations to meaningfully engage in the dialogue about what needs to be done.
Probably one of the most important takeaways is that transitioning towards a more just and environmentally responsible culture requires to avoid working in silos: disability rights are also environmental rights. But ultimately, the narrative we have pushed regarding disabled people is one of transition from victims to leaders. This is extremely important to highlight for many reasons but mostly because it is an effective counter-narrative to disability stigma.