Accessing the Trail, Interpreting the Forest

Abstract

The Stephen F. Austin Experimental Forest is the site of the first ADA-compliant US Forest Service project in Texas. Offering information about the history of forest management alongside information on Pineywoods ecosystems, the interpretive trail raises questions about how access is framed across “natural” and “built” environments as well as how distinctions between nature and culture operate within US environmental imaginaries. This article draws on feminist, posthumanist, and disability studies to conduct a close reading of the interpretive trail as text. It tracks the trail’s approach to disability access as well as its presentation of forest ecology, analyzing how the ableist logic of capitalist commodification underwrites the management of multispecies actants in the woods. I read against the grain of the trail in search of feminist, crip, posthumanist configurations of interdependence and more fluid human–nature boundaries. I argue that cripping the Austin requires questioning the unevenness of disability access as well as the utilitarian ideas of nature presented on the trail while also imagining how we might access and relate to this postindustrial forest otherwise.