As someone living with chronic illnesses, I already notice huge changes in my symptoms depending on air pressure, pollutants, and weather events. I need to lie down on days where most people can function just fine in the heat. This Guardian article and this interview give me relief in knowing that other people are paying attention to this and talking about it. I feel less alone and less despairing in my own concern. Thank you so much for the work that you do.
Having backpacked in 115-degree heat in the desert, I can confirm it does affect your brain. It felt like I was functioning on lizard brain only, with the higher functions pretty impaired.
Once again from a Gen Dread newsletter, what I am most 'alarmed by' is the uncritical ableism saturating this piece. It hinges on the idea that climate change will "impair a lot of our key brain functions: decision-making, critical thinking, emotional regulation, memory, and increased rates of neurodegenerative diseases". Not only are these 'diseases' and 'conditions' linked to medical-state frameworks steeped in eugenics, ableism, racism (and capitalist imperatives to protect the 'productivity of humanity'), but these diagnostic-political categories have also, for centuries, been used to criminalize and vilify intellectually, cognitively, and developmentally disabled people - along with racialized, queer and poor people. We have always been part of 'humanity', and our ways of knowing, being and doing have been integral to the survival of ours (and other) species through its trajectory, including multiple periods of extreme threats to collective survival. WE are not the problem. What's more, the 'higher temperature diminishes brain function' argument has been used ad nauseam by colonial powers, and more recently Neo-liberal theorists, to entrench assumptions that people living in 'warmer climates' are less 'intelligent', and/or have less political 'agency', and thus to justify systems of oppression from enslavement to radical economic inequalities and much more. The idea that the 'functions' named in this article compromise one's 'agency' is rooted in Eurocentric post-Enlightenment liberal notions of the self that were designed explicitly to exclude members of these groups in order to consolidate power amongst white non-disabled men. If you are 'frightened' by humans whose cognition is different from your own, and/or you find it find it 'hard to sit with' the (future) existence neurodivergent/disabled people, then you have more work to do beyond addressing your own climate anxiety - including your own anxiety about becoming (more) disabled. The stoking of an unchallenged and uncritical folk panic in relation to a (more) disabled future reflects, a deep-seated eugenicist trend in responses to ecological crises - including in relation to the children on behalf of whom this newsletter so often claims to advocate.
Thanks Audra. We hear your frustration and anger and appreciate you calling us in. Would you be open to a conversation or interview around this piece and the ideas you raise?
Thanks for this response. I'm definitely not angry and always open to discuss these issues. My research does relate to the the global eugenics aspect, but there are many other folks, especially in the area of disability justice, whose perspectives and on-the-ground experience are crucial to this broader issue. I wonder if a series of discussions and/or a roundtable type conversation would be a good way to foreground these perspectives?
As someone living with chronic illnesses, I already notice huge changes in my symptoms depending on air pressure, pollutants, and weather events. I need to lie down on days where most people can function just fine in the heat. This Guardian article and this interview give me relief in knowing that other people are paying attention to this and talking about it. I feel less alone and less despairing in my own concern. Thank you so much for the work that you do.
Thanks so much Erin for being here.
Having backpacked in 115-degree heat in the desert, I can confirm it does affect your brain. It felt like I was functioning on lizard brain only, with the higher functions pretty impaired.
https://www.academia.edu/118649459/Apocalyptic_Anxiety_and_Fragilification_of_Time
Once again from a Gen Dread newsletter, what I am most 'alarmed by' is the uncritical ableism saturating this piece. It hinges on the idea that climate change will "impair a lot of our key brain functions: decision-making, critical thinking, emotional regulation, memory, and increased rates of neurodegenerative diseases". Not only are these 'diseases' and 'conditions' linked to medical-state frameworks steeped in eugenics, ableism, racism (and capitalist imperatives to protect the 'productivity of humanity'), but these diagnostic-political categories have also, for centuries, been used to criminalize and vilify intellectually, cognitively, and developmentally disabled people - along with racialized, queer and poor people. We have always been part of 'humanity', and our ways of knowing, being and doing have been integral to the survival of ours (and other) species through its trajectory, including multiple periods of extreme threats to collective survival. WE are not the problem. What's more, the 'higher temperature diminishes brain function' argument has been used ad nauseam by colonial powers, and more recently Neo-liberal theorists, to entrench assumptions that people living in 'warmer climates' are less 'intelligent', and/or have less political 'agency', and thus to justify systems of oppression from enslavement to radical economic inequalities and much more. The idea that the 'functions' named in this article compromise one's 'agency' is rooted in Eurocentric post-Enlightenment liberal notions of the self that were designed explicitly to exclude members of these groups in order to consolidate power amongst white non-disabled men. If you are 'frightened' by humans whose cognition is different from your own, and/or you find it find it 'hard to sit with' the (future) existence neurodivergent/disabled people, then you have more work to do beyond addressing your own climate anxiety - including your own anxiety about becoming (more) disabled. The stoking of an unchallenged and uncritical folk panic in relation to a (more) disabled future reflects, a deep-seated eugenicist trend in responses to ecological crises - including in relation to the children on behalf of whom this newsletter so often claims to advocate.
Thanks Audra. We hear your frustration and anger and appreciate you calling us in. Would you be open to a conversation or interview around this piece and the ideas you raise?
Thanks for this response. I'm definitely not angry and always open to discuss these issues. My research does relate to the the global eugenics aspect, but there are many other folks, especially in the area of disability justice, whose perspectives and on-the-ground experience are crucial to this broader issue. I wonder if a series of discussions and/or a roundtable type conversation would be a good way to foreground these perspectives?