I used to think inclusion was about kids with disabilities getting into mainstream schools, full employment for handicapped people, and wheelchair friendly buildings. Now when I think about inclusion, I think about the new “keystone species” theory.
A keystone species is one whose presence is crucial to a particular ecosystem and whose destruction can damage it irreparably. Keystone species are seldom the ones we think of. Lions, tigers and elephants are not on the list. Keystoners are more likely to be the spotted owl, the brine shrimp or the humble lichen. The kind of creatures you don’t notice until they’re gone.
The lichen, a colonizing organism which can revitalize soil devastated by volcanic ash, fix its own nitrogen and even disintegrate rocks, may seem dispensable – it’s only a fungus, after all. But without it, the ecosystem of the Arctic region would suffer cataclysmically and the entire planet would be affected.
We share the world with a staggering array of life forms, each important in its own way. Saying we are all interconnected is not a platitude, it is a fact. While inclusion has been packaged as the path of virtue, it is really just plain common sense – even self-interest. We exclude at our peril.
But this utilitarian view of inclusion is a narrow and limited one. Beyond it is yet another: one which revels in the sheer variety the earth contains and celebrates life for its own sake, not for what it does for us. It’s a wonderful world, unpredictable and full of surprising twists and turns. Intellectual capacity and physical independence are not the beginning and the end. And the keystone species theory, while fun for the way it turns accepted wisdom on its head, is just another more sophisticated form of exclusion: what about the poor old lion, now that the spotted owl is lord of the jungle?
People with disabilities enrich our lives in ways we cannot begin to fathom and those of us lucky enough to be ecologists in this particular ecosystem can make grateful lists of rocks they have disintegrated and nitrogen they have created from thin air. But that’s a bonus. Like the rest of us, they’re here because God made them. There is no need for them to justify their existence. For just as “every cubic inch of space is a miracle”, so every single species is a keystone species.
This year, we celebrate inclusion in its most spacious sense – the universe and all it contains: people, animals, poetry, song, lichens, spotted owls. Damn everything but the circus!
-–Jo Chopra
