On June 21 of this year, the Tucson Airport Remediation Project (TARP), a twentyseven-year-old water treatment facility, was shut down. The area’s municipal water company, Tucson Water, was facing the reality that the system was soon to be overwhelmed by chemicals it was not designed to treat. The contaminants headed toward the facility were a family of chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), known also as “forever chemicals” because they don’t degrade or break down under natural conditions.
The TARP system was built during the mid-1990s, a decade defined by climate denial. It was designed to treat contamination of industrial solvents discovered in the 1980s, when fossil fuel industry leadership first planted plans for that denial. The contamination itself took place between the 1940s and 1970s, during a time of mass industrial contamination, but before the atmosphere of our planet had been drastically altered—before climate change was widely known to be an existential threat. This pollution is old, nearly eighty years old, hardly a crisis that feels urgent in an era when our newsfeeds are filled with new climate catastrophes every day.
Yet, here in Tucson, deep under the record heat waves cooking the saguaros and coyotes and people, lies an aquifer existing with chronic contamination, which will require likely indefinite treatment for the original contamination that took place half a century ago. The people who live with this aquifer, a largely Mexican American community on Tucson’s south side, are also still in need of medical care and supports for the impairments and illnesses that the previously discovered contamination caused.
I have been researching this particular treatment facility and the contamination that led to it being built since 2017, and it is clear to me that the shutdown of TARP exemplifies a larger issue: the reality that treating environmental harm and its multifaceted effects on the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems is a long-term, enduring, and at times incurable process. It is a reminder that, for many ecosystems, creatures, and people on this planet, the coming decades of environmental crises will stretch not only toward death or health, but also something else—something impaired, precarious, dependent, filled with loss and struggle, requiring assistance, accommodation, and creative forms of care.
As a disabled person I recognize this as disability. Although past environmental movements in this country often focused on the protection of landscapes understood as pristine, untouched, and wild, today those fighting for the environment work with an understanding that nature has been altered and damaged in profound and serious ways. 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, a disablement that is utterly entangled with the disablement of human beings. Given this,
