Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Economically developing countries are marked by lower gross domestic product (GDP), which means their economy is less sophisticated and mature. Generally, residents in economically developing countries have lower incomes and limited access to quality education and healthcare. Similar terms include Global South, Third World countries, developing country, and low-and-middle income country.

Picaresque is an episodic style of fiction that depicts the adventures of a rogue but appealing narrator who is often from a low-income background but pursuing economic mobility. There are often elements of comedy and satire in the work. This style originated during the Spanish Golden Age between 1550 and 1559. It acted as a reminder that despite the wealth of this age, the majority of Spaniards lived under abject poverty.

Indra Sinha utilizes this style in his fictional work Animal’s People (Chapter 1). Nixon argues that Sinha invents the environmental picaresque by “[bringing] into brilliant focus the environmental, epidemiological, and economic fallout of the terrors that transnational neoliberal lawlessness dispenses in cahoots with corrupt, legally immune local politicians” (56). 

Coined by Ramachandra Guha and colleagues, environmentalism of the poor is a social movement that believes in the inseparableness of human rights and the environment. NGOs, corporations, and governments often exploit and extract from environments, resulting in environmental catastrophes. These entities care only about profits. They do not care about the environment or the people living within it. People from lower-income backgrounds, on the other hand, are often on the side of environmental preservation against governments, NGOs, and corporations because their livelihood depends on the environment’s health.

A micro-minority is a tiny ethnic group that is both substantially smaller than the next larger minority group and represents a tiny fraction of a country’s overall population. Due to its small size, members of the ethnic micro-minority group are extremely marginalized and rarely have any political power. Nixon considers the Ogoni people to be an ethnic micro-minority. There are around 500,000 Ogoni people in Nigeria, a country with some 140 million citizens and 300 ethnic groups. Ken Saro-Wiwa was a member of this group. As Nixon documents in Chapter 3, Saro-Wiwa “produced tireless testaments to the devastation of his culture by the oil-driven avarice of vast forces beyond its control” (105).

The Maldives is a nation of islands located in the Indian Ocean. The islands are some of the lowest-lying islands in the world. The reefs that once protected the islands from storms are dying. The country is extremely small with densely populated urban areas. It also is a low-income country with a per capita GDP of less than $5,000. Due to these factors, the country has contributed little to the climate crisis, yet these same factors make it one of the nations most vulnerable to climate change. Nixon uses President Nasheed’s “ghostly sea-bottom scene” (264), in which he held a cabinet meeting underwater, to demonstrate how the slow violence of the climate crisis, particularly rising sea levels, threatens the existence of the most vulnerable people.

More economically developed countries have higher GDPs. Their residents generally have higher incomes and access to quality education and healthcare. Less than 20 percent of the world’s total population lives in more economically developed countries. Terms with similar meanings include the Global North, industrialized country, developed country, rich nation, or high-income country.

Governments, corporations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) create official landscapes. This landscape type is “bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction-driven” (17). It is not created by community members within the landscape, in contrast to vernacular landscapes. 

Nixon was the first to coin the term slow violence. He defines it as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). He contrasts it with violence, which is “an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and [that erupts] into instant sensational visibility” (2). The slow but catastrophic impacts that environmental injustices have on the most vulnerable populations occur because humans give more attention to sensational violence than to slow violence. In the book, Nixon provides numerous examples of writers from around the world who have found creative ways to draw attention to slow violence from environmental mismanagement in their communities.

Parochialism occurs when one focuses on one part of an issue rather than considering the issue within its larger context. Nixon takes the term even further by adding superpower. Here, he is referring to the failure of American writers, especially in environmental literary studies, to discuss head-on the impacts of American foreign policy on environmental injustices in other parts of the world. He notes that “a combination of American insularity and America’s power as the preeminent empire of the neoliberal age [has ruptured] the lives and ecosystems of non-Americans, especially the poor, who may live at a geographical remove but who remain intimately vulnerable to the force fields of U.S. foreign policy” (34).