Rethinking Sustainability: A Critical Disability Perspective on Environmental Psychology

Thomas P. Dirth, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology, Bemidji State University

Rebekah Asp, M.A., Accessibility Services Coordinator, St. Olaf College

In the Minnesota State Transfer Curriculum, goal area 10 is called People and the Environment. I have taught the ‘Psychological Perspectives’ edition of this course for 8 years, often in an interdisciplinary team format. A key question is: how can people live well while respecting the ecological limits of the planet? My role is unsurprisingly to bring the ‘psychological perspectives’ to elucidate the “human problems and solutions” in the climate emergency.

And yet it should be noted that my specialization is a bit afield from a psychology of sustainability (see Amel et al., 2026). It is more so at the nexus of Disability Studies and Social Psychology. Consequently, my teaching this curriculum has begged two scholarly curiosities: 1) What assumptions about the ideal ‘abled’ human being are embedded in our sustainability efforts? And 2) Why is disability (both subjectivities and perspectives) almost entirely absent from this subject matter?

Critical Disability Studies (CDS) helps answer the first question. CDS unsettles taken-for-granted “valued abilities” (e.g., mobility, autonomy, self-reflexivity) by revealing how they are culturally constructed and reproduced through systems that make particular ways of being possible (see Dirth & Adams, 2019). These ability ‘scaffolds’ are often built upon infrastructures dependent on resource extraction and environmental destruction. This matters for sustainability psychology, where the ideal “sustainable citizen” is often imagined as someone able to independently change their lifestyle, reduce consumption, and adapt to climate change. Rather than investing in efforts to overcome barriers to realize this fictive ideal, CDS invites us to reimagine the sustain-able citizen as embedded, constrained, and dependent upon the social and material conditions that make particular forms of ability possible.

To the second question: it depends on where you look. Disabled people are ever-present in the human costs of climate change (see Stein et al., 2024). Inaccessible evacuation systems, information barriers, mobility constraints, and economic and housing vulnerabilities interact with devastating impact. Likewise, the precarity of impairment conditions means that extreme changes in temperature (i.e., heat waves) and air quality (i.e., wildfire smoke) are not an inconvenience but life-threatening. Lastly, disability is revealed in the slow effects environmental violence (e.g., pollution, toxic waste, chemical runoff, etc; Nixon, 2011).

Those questions point toward an opportunity for sustainability psychology. Rather than viewing disability as a special case to accommodate within existing sustainability frameworks, we can treat it as a generative perspective for rethinking them from the ground up. A psychology of sustainability that centers disability would recognize that humans are embodied, dependent, vulnerable, and shaped by the environments and relationships in which we live. Flourishing depends not on overcoming these limits but on creating social and ecological conditions in which people can live with and through them. Such an approach foregrounds Disability Justice principles of interdependence, accessibility, and care alongside traditional concerns of environmental behavior and well-being. Ultimately, if the goal of the ‘People of the Environment’ course is to ask how humans might live well within ecological limits, disability offers an important and unexplored place from which to begin answering that question.

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