Environment L – no solvency

Restoration As an ideology seeped into every corner of Western thought and culture, cure rides on the back of normal and natural. Insidious and pervasive, it impacts many, many bodies. In response we need a politics of cure: not a simple or reactive belief system, not an anti- cure stance in the face of the endless assumptions about bodily difference, but rather a broad- based politics mirroring the complexity of all our bodies and minds. The American Heritage Dictionary defi nes cure as “restoration of health.” In developing a politics of cure based on this defi nition it would be all too easy to get mired in an argument about health, trying to determine who’s healthy and who’s not, as if there’s one objective standard. As an alternative I want to bypass the questions of who defi nes health and for what purposes. So many folks are working to redefi ne health, struggling toward a theory and practice that will contribute to the well- being of entire communities. But I won’t be joining them with a redefi nition of my own. Instead I want a politics of cure that speaks from inside the intense contradictions presented by the multiple meanings of health. Today in the white Western world dominated by allopathic medicine, health ranges from individual and communal bodily comfort to profound social control. Between these two poles a multitude of practices exist. Health promotes both the wellbeing sustained by good food and the products sold by the multimillion- dollar diet industry. It endorses both effective pain management for folks who live with chronic pain and the policed refusal to prescribe narcotic- based pain relief to people perceived as drug seeking. It both saves lives and aggressively markets synthetic growth hormone to children whose only bodily “problem” is being short. Rather than offer a resolution to this whole range of contradictory, overlapping, and confused meanings of health, I want to follow the word restoration. To restore an object or an ecosystem is to return it to an earlier, often better condition. We restore a house that’s falling down, a prairie that’s been decimated by generations of monoculture farming and fi re suppression. In this return we try to undo the harm, wishing the harm had never happened. Talk to anyone who does restoration work— a carpenter who rebuilds 150- year- old neglected houses, a conservation Notes on Natural Worlds 247 biologist who turns cornfi elds back to prairie— and she’ll say it’s a complex undertaking. A fl uid, responsive process, restoration requires digging into the past, stretching toward the future, working hard in the present. And the end results rarely, if ever, match the original state. Restoring an ecosystem means rebuilding a dynamic system that has somehow been interrupted or broken, devastated by strip mining or clear- cut logging, taken over by invasive species, unbalanced by the loss of predators, crushed by pollution. The work is not about re- creating a static landscape somehow frozen in time but rather about encouraging and reshaping dynamic ecological interdependencies, ranging from clods of dirt to towering thunderheads, tiny microbes to herds of bison, into a self- sustaining system of constant fl ux. This reshaping mirrors the original or historical ecosystem as closely as possible, but inevitably some element is missing or different. The return may be close but is never complete. The process of restoration is simpler with a static object, an antique chair, or old house. Still, if the carpenters aren’t using axhewn timbers of assorted and quirky sizes, mixing the plaster with horse hair, building at least a few walls with chicken wire, and using newspaper, rags, or nothing at all for insulation, then the return will be incomplete, possibly sturdier and defi nitely more energy effi cient but different from the original house. Even though restoration as a process is never complete, it always requires an original or historical state in which to root itself, a belief that this state is better than what currently exists, and a desire to return to the original. Thinking about the framework of restoration, I circle back to the folks who offer disabled and chronically ill people prayers, crystals, and vitamins, believing deeply in the necessity of cure. A simple one- to- one correspondence between ecological restoration and bodily restoration reveals cure’s mandate of returning damaged bodies to some former, and nondisabled, state of being. This mandate clearly locates the problem, or damage, of disability within individual disabled or chronically ill bodies. To resist the ableism in this framing a disability politics has emerged in the past forty years. It asserts that disability is lodged not in paralysis but in the stairs without an accompanying ramp, not in blindness but in the lack of Braille. Disability itself does not live in depression or anxiety but rather exists in a whole host of stereotypes, not in dyslexia but in teaching methods unwilling to fl ex, not in lupus or multiple sclerosis but in the belief that certain bodily conditions are a fate worse than death. In short, disability politics establishes that the problem of disability is not about individual bodies but about social injustice. But for some of us, even if we accept disability as harm to individual bodies, restoration still does not make sense, because an original non- disabled body does not exist. How would I, or the medical establishment, go about restoring my body? The vision of me without tremoring hands and slurred speech, with more balance and coordination, does not originate from my body’s history. Rather it arises from an imagination of what my body should be like, some defi nition of normal and natural.