2:36am April 24, 2012

What do I mean by part of the natural landscape?

I’ve written about seeing disability as part of the basic natural landscape that makes up human variation. That pissed some people off. I suspect that’s because people have a romanticized view of what the natural landscape means.

As is obvious from my tumblr, I love looking at pictures of trees and rocks and fungi and caves and lakes and a lot of other stuff most people call natural. I will spare you a rant on what most people mean by that word. Please understand I’m only using it because of word finding issues and a foggy head. I hate disclaimers. Anyway.

I think though that my relation to such things is quite different from the average “nature lover”. And I certainly have no illusions about what nature can actually be like.

Avalanches. Floods. Poisonous mushrooms. Steep dropoffs in the mountains with rain making the ground slippery near the edge. Blizzards. Stinging nettles. Plants that easily cut through leather. Volcanic eruptions. Predators capable of killing human beings. Poison oak. Undertow. Cave-ins. Widowmakers. Sunstroke. Drowning. Hypothermia. Giardia. Earthquakes. Acidic lakes. Rapid river currents.

And that’s off the top of my head. Those things range from nuisance to deadly and they’re all what a lot of people would call natural. So when I say anything like that, consider that I might have something else in mind besides this weird idea that nature is entirely calm and serene and benevolent.

Because what most people call nature… it’s often beautiful, and it’s often terrible. It inspires awe but also fear, and both are legitimate. As are the entire range of human emotion from laughter to agonizing grief.

Why I don’t like the way most people use the word nature, by the way, is that they generally see it as something separate from humanity and the changes we make to the world. When actually we are as much a part of nature as any other animal, and we forget it at our peril. Extreme, species-wide peril. Because our relationship with this “nature” thing that we are a part of, is rewarding but also demanding, intense, and potentially quite harsh.

So FFS don’t ever decide that my comparisons of disability to the natural landscape mean that I think being disabled is all happy fluffy bunnies or something.

What I actually mean? Disability is deeply ingrained in the human condition. Whether we love it or hate it or are indifferent or have a complicated relationship with it, it’s a part of what being human is for most people. That goes whether you embrace it or want nothing more than to get rid of it. Or both at different times. Or neither.

Most people I’ve encountered believe something entirely different about disability. They believe that there is an actual thing called a healthy normal body(*). And that certain variations tacked onto or removed from a healthy normal body are disabilities. And disabilities are not ingrained deeply into what being human means, but rather these weird extra things on the side. This isn’t about how much a person likes being disabled, it’s about whether they buy into this idea of a normal body and variations on a normal body.

It’s incredibly hard to explain the difference without running into even more misunderstandings, though. Basically I think that, however we feel about being disabled, the way our bodies are configured is a part of human variation like all other parts. I’m too tired to get into what separates disability from other kinds of variation. Any way I could summarize would be misleading to anyone who didn’t already know what I meant.

.

(*) That includes the brain. Don’t go there.

13 notes