Accessible Activism
There is a superb piece on HuffPo I share a lot that responds to criticism of pre-prepared, plastic wrapped fruit. It illustrates a much wider and really important point about the relationship between activism, especially environmental activism, and disability.
A lot of us who are disabled care desperately about making the future better. We are very used to the fact that the present sucks and the future needs to do better, and we have the altruism to understand that applies to more issues than simply our own. We are a natural base demographic for eco campaigning. Indeed, climate change and clean oceans are two of the foundational wicked problems I have committed to deal with through my work and research.
But the problem is that many of the campaigns we see directly exclude us, and our needs. Pre-prepared fruit wrapped in plastic is a great example of something where well-meaning activists see only wanton waste but many disabled people see “the only way I can eat fruit”.
Another obvious one is anti-car campaigning, of which we see a lot in Oxford. For many with mental health conditions and neurodivergences public transport simply cannot be accessible for us because of that word — “public”. If we cannot travel by car, we cannot travel.
We know that these exclusions are not the result of intention. Bu they are genuine, and they make it less likely that we will participate in campaigns whose aims we really support.
So my question to campaigners is — are you interested in seeing things through our eyes? Would you like to have the unintended consequences of your campaigns pointed out? It may be that excluding us is a price that you consider worth paying (this is one reason I have issues with the otherwise very interesting effective altruism movement). In which case, we’d like to know. Or it may be that actually you, like us, are altruistic along more than one axis and actually want a world that is, as a whole and for all, better. In which case, we can help.
To return to the examples, instead of campaigning against prepared food, why not campaign for more investment in better, sustainable and degradable, materials such as those made from alginate? And why not support a full range of sustainably charged electric vehicles?
These are actually better than creating exception cases for us because:
- would you like to be singled out as an exception every time you do something?
- exceptions are expensive. Life already costs us more in both time and money than it costs many.
- if you’re like us you want better, global solutions to problems not solutions that tackle one bit not another.
