Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

“The representational bias against slow violence has, furthermore, a critically dangerous impact on what counts as a casualty in the first place. Casualties of slow violence—human and environmental—are the casualties most likely not to be seen, not to be counted.”

One of Nixon’s key themes is the narrative monopoly that economically developed countries have on the climate crisis. Part of the reason for this monopoly is that people in these countries can easily ignore the plight of vulnerable communities when the violence unfolds slowly. Slow violence results in both human and environmental casualties. These casualties occur over time, often years after the occurrence of the catastrophic environmental event (e.g., an oil spill). As a result, these casualties are often not considered casualties. By highlighting writers from around the world who document environmental violence against vulnerable communities, Nixon hopes to demonstrate to readers the need to ensure that these communities are able to participate in the narrative around the climate crisis.

“More than material wealth is here at stake: imposed official landscapes typically discount spiritualized vernacular landscapes, severing webs of accumulated cultural meaning and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn, and the animate deceased.”

In this passage, Nixon highlights the differences between short-term and long-term views of environmental injustices. Governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and corporations often view landscapes as official landscapes. They care only about what they can extract from the landscape for profits. For this reason, they have a very short-term perspective. They do not understand the cultural significance that particular landscapes have to generations upon generations of residents living within them. What happens to the land after they mismanage it is of no concern to them. In contrast, people who live within communities care deeply about the landscapes they have shaped (vernacular landscapes). Community members recognize that their survival is tied to the overall health of the landscape. As such, they care deeply about what happens after governments, NGOs, and corporations mismanage the environment.

“Within ten days of the Chernobyl explosion, the Soviet authorities had mobilized thousands of Ukrainian coal miners to help with remediation work at the disaster site. One of them, Dmytro, who labored at the site for a month, was later afflicted with pulmonary, cerebral, and cardiac disorders and found to have chromosomal aberrations. In an interview, he portrayed his body’s radiation load as a ‘foreign burden.’ He was referring—as his interviewer notes—to the sense of harboring an alien, unnatural, and disquieting force within.”

“Foreign burden” represents a key concept in Chapter 1. As described in the passage, it has two meanings. The first relates to the radiological toxins that burden the human body and environment due to the Chernobyl disaster. The second has a geotemporal component. Within a few years of Chernobyl, Ukraine became an independent country. Despite its independence, Ukrainians were and continue to be afflicted by a ghost—the Soviet Union. Although their bodies exist in a post-Soviet age, they are still being impacted by the Soviet Union’s mismanagement of the nuclear plant.

“We all inhabit multiple temporal orders that often coexist in frictional states, shifting and sliding like tectonic plates.”

Where people live impacts their relationship to environmental time. People who live where the environmental catastrophe took place are haunted by the event through time. They must deal with the initial day when thousands are killed as well as months and years after when their family and friends continue to die from the invisible toxic burdens. In contrast, those who live far away from the catastrophe might only pay attention to the event’s first few days when there are visual markers of the event (e.g., fires, bodies, etc.). Their attention to the event wanes shortly after, despite the continued impacts of slow violence. Nixon urges readers to think critically about their own perceptions of environmental time and whether they are turning away from environmental catastrophes too soon.

“In doing so, the poor face the double challenge of invisibility and amnesia: numerically, they may constitute the majority, but they remain on the margins in terms of visibility and official memory.”

Nixon explores the relationship between the environmentalism of the poor and time. People not impacted by the catastrophe can dismiss it as an accident, relegating it to memory. Over time, they forget this memory (often intentionally, if they were responsible for the incident). Yet vulnerable communities, who are already often invisible to the dominant power, are not able to forget the event. They continue to face the impacts of the toxic poisoning for years and generations. These double challenges—invisibility and amnesia—make it even more difficult for vulnerable communities to get compensation and help after the catastrophe.

“In this interregnum between energy regimes, we are living on borrowed time—borrowed from the past and from the future.”

To Nixon, modern life straddles between two worlds: the first still depends on oil, despite the known adverse impacts it has had on the environment, and the second is frantically trying to devise energy solutions to the climate crisis. He argues that we borrow from the past because oil literally comes from the past: it is the remains of ancient plants and animals that have been compressed for millennia deep underground. Human civilization for the last 200 years has depended on fossils to fuel its consumption and growth. However, the continued use of fossil fuels could also spell the end of the human species, meaning humanity is borrowing time from the future.

“Here the bogeymen of authenticity and progress narratives both rear their heads again: Updike’s proprietary ‘we’ casts Munif as an uncomprehending outsider, a peripheral to the central narrative of the novel’s development. This Arab is a neophyte, he may get there, but not yet.”

This passage points out the ugly nature of narrative monopolies held by developed Western cultures. John Updike, an American writer, criticizes Saudi Arabian novelist Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt because it does not follow the style of traditional (that is, American) frontier novels. Updike’s critique ignores the visionary aspects of the work simply because the writer was not an American.

“The future eating that accelerated during the ‘American century’ was unevenly spread between centers of consumption and extraction, an unevenness that intensified inequities, fomented violence, and solidified structural repressions.”

Aboriginal Australians used the term “future eaters” to describe European colonizers because of their excessive consumption practices. Nixon extends this image to the 20th century, which was the height of the oil age and American imperialism. During this century, resource depletion was spread unevenly across time and space. More economically developed countries exploited natural resources from economically developing countries. They exported these resources back to their homeland, where their citizens consumed them. Citizens in the economically developing countries often did not consume their own natural resources. As a result, the economic differences and structural inequities between the two types of countries continued to grow.

“Shell is by far the largest foreign stakeholder in the Nigerian economy, owning 47 percent of the oil industry. Its joint venture partner in the petroleum business during Nigeria’s most draconian years was the Abacha regime. Yet Shell representatives have repeatedly declared that they exercise no control over Nigeria’s rulers; Europe’s largest oil corporation has thereby ducked behind the brutalities of its militaristic financial partners.”

Transnational oil companies are complicit in the human and environmental rights violations committed against vulnerable communities all around the world. They pretend to respect national sovereignty to hide their complicity. For example, Shell paid the Nigerian army under the Abacha regime to stop anti-Shell rallies and quell local dissent. Shell eventually had to pay nearly $16 million for its role in the murder of Saro-Wiwa and for the injustices they helped perpetuate against the Ogoni people. Despite this, the company continued to declare its innocence.

“A micro-minority was powerless to influence national events, particularly in a society run on principles of kleptocratic militarism. The wealth that flowed beneath Ogoniland was wealth in name only: historically, it brought poverty, injustice, and death, as outsiders stampeded for oil.”

This passage supports Nixon’s notion of displacement without moving, which he presents in the Introduction. While the Ogoni people were not forced from their land, they lost access to the land and resources under their feet. Transnational oil companies and the Nigerian regime made billions of dollars from oil in the Niger Delta, but the Ogoni people never saw a single cent. Instead, they watched their quality of life decline as their land was poisoned because they lacked political power and constitutional protection.

“Saro-Wiwa understood far better than his adversaries that you can’t crucify ideas, that there are some things which cannot be resolved by a show of force.”

Nixon introduces the concept of the writer-martyr. Saro-Wiwa knew it was highly likely that the Nigerian regime would kill him. He also understood that his words would outlive his death, which is what happened. Through his execution and martyrdom, the Nigerian regime unintentionally brought local, national, regional, and transnational attention to Saro-Wiwa’s writings and campaign for justice.

“Early on, Maathai alighted on the idea of tree planting as the movement’s core activity, one that over time would achieve a brilliant symbolic economy, becoming an iconic act of civil disobedience as the women’s efforts to help arrest soil erosion segued into a struggle against illicit deforestation perpetuated by Kenya’s draconian regime. Neither soil erosion nor deforestation posed a sudden threat, but both were persistently and pervasively injurious to Kenya’s long-term human and environmental prospects.”

Central to the Green Belt Movement is tree planting. This activity has both practical and symbolic purposes. Trees needed to be planted because the Kenyan authoritarian regime was plundering forests. The removal of trees partly caused soil erosion, which negatively impacted the economic and social lives of rural Kenyan women as well as the overall security of the country. Trees came to also symbolize the movement’s focus on community sustainability, a notion that stood in stark contrast to the government’s selfish view of the land and other resources. Long-term deforestation and soil erosion was bad for the country. Maathai used the symbol of the tree to show how Kenya’s political elite did not truly care about the long-term prospects of the country.

“In ecological as in human terms, Maathai’s angle of approach was not top down: instead of focusing on the dramatic end of the biotic chain—the elephants, rhinos, lions, and leopards that have preoccupied colonial hunters, conservationists, and foreign tourists—she drew attention to a more mundane and pervasive issue: the impact of accumulative resource mismanagement on biodiversity, soil quality, food security, and the life prospects of rural women and their families.”

Colonialism heavily influenced conservation, especially the concern around large fauna, likely due to European men’s fixation on hunting. Maathai did not focus on large animals alone. Instead, she focused on the invisible elements of the food web (e.g., soil quality) and how their mismanagement impacts both humans and biodiversity more broadly.

“Maathai was one of seven women who founded the Green Belt Movement, yet in Unbowed the other women never achieve any definition as characters. I observe this less as a criticism than as a way of signaling the intractable dilemmas that attend the movement memoir.”

Nixon blames transnational publishing companies for the shortcomings of the movement memoir. These companies have certain assumptions when it comes to this type of literary work, including that the work should focus on one individual. Western readers are more likely to respond to stories that focus on the triumph and challenge of one leader rather than a collective group. As a result, Maathai is solely credited with work that required the efforts of many people working together.

“While traveling through southern Utah, 150 miles east of the Nevada Test Site, Solnit encounters a downwinder, Janet Gordon, who has lost many family and friends prematurely to cancer. The area Gordon and her family inhabited was largely Native land. Yet in the build-up to the nuclear explosions, this land was officially declared ‘a virtually uninhabited area.’ ‘We became,’ Gordon observes in a mordantly resonant phrase, ‘virtual uninhabitants.’”

This passage introduces a key concept in Chapter 5: virtual uninhabitants. As Janet Gordon’s story illustrates, developers, government officials, and corporations have the power to make people invisible when it suits their self-interest by claiming that a piece of land is empty of human culture, even when it is not. Developers deploy this strategy in communities that do not have official deeds to their land. By forcing a Western concept of land ownership on these communities, developers can claim that the people do not actually own their land, making it freely available for their economic development projects.

“When Roy writes that the Narmada dams were causing the ‘submerging of culture,’ she refers to the inundation of densely populated village cultures inextricable from flood-plain ecosystems in ‘the only valley in India, according to archaeologists, that contains an uninterrupted record of human occupation from the Stone Age.’”

Arundhati Roy’s criticism of megadams sharply contrasts with that of most American writers during the 20th century. American writers felt that dams corrupted the natural beauty of the West. They were less concerned about displacement because the West was relatively sparsely populated at this time. In contrast, Roy was deeply concerned about displacement. People had inhabited the Narmada River valley for thousands of years. Thus, the dams would not just submerge the landscape but also rich human culture.

“The construction of the Sardar Sarovar, Roy argues, involves ‘an unacknowledged war.’ Symptomatically, no official figures for the casualties of this war exist. The problem is not that such people have been reduced to statistics but that they’ve been reduced to nonstatistics, a whole different level of dehumanization—indeed, one definition of surplus people.”

A key claim in this chapter is that officials from more economically developed countries and their local collaborators will intentionally make entire communities invisible. The casualties of this invisibility include entire communities and cultures being submerged by water. Yet, because these inhabitants were invisible, their casualties do not count as actual casualties. This further dehumanizes vulnerable communities who already had limited political power and constitutional protection.

“Ndebele describes entering the game lodge at a dynamic moment in his society’s transformation, yet finding himself cocooned in a temporal enclave, sealed against the environment of political change. Intent on leisure, Ndebele is haunted instead by ‘the damning ambiguities of the [B]lack tourist.’”

A visit to a game reserve causes Ndebele to reflect painfully on what it means to be a Black South African tourist within one’s own country. Because the game reserve is sealed off from the surrounding political and social changes, Ndebele feels like a foreigner when his vacation becomes a spectacle for white tourists.

“When, I would add, that ‘unnatural boundary’ is marked by a national park that embodies a national culture of nature, the borderland can become a site of redoubled violence in its militarized severance of natural from unnatural and native from foreign.”

National parks act as dividers between people who belong and people who do not. It is dangerous for those who do not belong to cross into the national parks, yet staying on the outside is also not safe. These spaces, too, eventually become divided, leaving people even more culturally and territorially split.

“Such technologies, when they compromise the environment, morph into long-term killers, creating landscapes that inflict lingering, off-camera casualties. Time itself becomes the ultimate cover-up, a dependable ally in camouflaging ‘smart’ warfare’s sprawling toll.”

Nixon refers to precision warfare in this passage. Government officials reiterate the false narrative that this technology helps make war smarter and less destructive. However, toxic material from this technology seeps into the ground and into human bodies, lingering for generations. The long-term killer aspect of precision warfare is why Nixon forcefully argues for the need to rethink contemporary attitudes toward war and violence.

“Let’s do the math. Each CBU-103 contains 202 bomblets, and each bomblet harbors 300 jagged pieces. In other words, a single cluster bomb can dispatch 63,600 potentially lethal pieces driven outward by the blast wave at ballistic speed. The destructive capacity of the molten cone and incendiary fragments amplifies this threat.”

This eye-popping statistic illustrates the destructive potential of cluster bombs. However, even if they do not explode upon impact, they can explode later with the same destructive force. Thousands of children around the world have been killed or maimed by accidentally touching one of these cluster bombs. This technology reinforces Nixon’s point that war casualties do not stop after the bombs stop falling.

“A radically creative alliance between environmental and postcolonial studies can help push back against administrative and disciplinary efforts to corral for narrow ends what scholars alive to the power of word and story have to offer the wider world. What we can offer includes a belief in the value of multiple publics as we strive, among other things, to foster imaginative coalitions that may help redress environmental injustice.”

Nixon issues a call to action for postcolonial and environmental scholars. Despite their history of mistrust, Nixon believes that if the two fields can merge to create a new way of thinking, such as postcolonial environmentalism, scholars and activists will be even better poised to address slow violence. To Nixon, doing so is crucial to a more peaceful future.

“The two flags in these far-flung underwater scenes may be geographically remote from each other yet serve, as it were, as carbon copies of a common crisis. Together they remind us that the climate crisis is both indivisible and unevenly felt, experienced—especially by some of the planet’s most vulnerable peoples—as climate injustice.”

In this passage, Nixon refers to two scenes described in the epilogue. The first is President Nasheed of the Maldives holding his cabinet meeting underwater with the Maldives flag planted on the seabed; the second is the planting of the Russian flag on the North Pole’s seabed. The melting of the North Pole symbolizes the start of global warming in the 21st century as well as the greed of Western societies. Wealthy countries, like the US and Russia, are hoping to control the newly accessible mineral and oil resources in the North Pole. These are the very same resources that have caused the human-induced climate crisis. Thus, these countries’ shortsightedness will continue to exacerbate rather than slow global warming. The Maldives example shows how the most vulnerable people, who contributed little to global warming, will be impacted by the climate crisis. In this example, the flag represents a rebuke of wealthier countries’ shortsightedness. Continued burning of fossil fuels will only hasten the drowning of the Maldives under the Indian Ocean.