Quotations from: Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: First Harvard UP, 2011.

“By slow violence I mean 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. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings — the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s aftermath or climate change — are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.” (2-3)

“Politically and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft. Falling bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches […] have a visceral, eye-catching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even centuries, cannot match.” (3)

“In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time.” (3)

How can I take this problem and turn it into a piece… how to represent the notion of “slow violence” in art?

“This book’s second, related focus concerns the environmentalism of the poor, for it is those people lacking resources who are the principle casualties of slow violence.” (4)

Yes, and After the Storm was able to draw attention to this tragic unfairness. It’s just so hard to represent this situation without risking being viewed as the “white saviour” or tourist.

“…this books’ third circulating concern — the complex, often vexed figure of the environmental writer-activist.” (5)

“In this book, I have sought to address our inattention to calamities that are slow and long lasting, calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans—and outside the purview of a spectacle-driven corporate media. The insidious workings of slow violence derive largely form the unequal attention given to spectacular and unspectacular time. In an age that venerates instant spectacle, slow violence is deficient in the recognizable special effects that fill movie theaters and boost ratings on TV” (6)

“Consequently, one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust our rapidly eroding attention spans to the slow erosions of environmental injustice? (8)

~about how short-sighted politicians are, and the “yes, but not now, not yet” attitude. “How can leaders be goaded to avert catastrophe when the political rewards of their actions will not accrue to them but will be reaped on someone else’s watch decades, even centuries, from now?

Note: So true — reminds me of the conversation I just had with Conservative MP Warren Steinley.

We need to make the effects of climate change relevant to people today. How do we do this? Many use the “do it for your children” claim, but even that doesn’t work well. We are procrastinating ourselves to extinction. How can I show that to my viewers, and how can I do so with some level of “hope” built in as well?

“To address the challenges of slow violence is to confront the dilemma Rachel Carson faced almost half a century ago as she sought to dramatize what she eloquently called ‘death by indirection'” (9)

“Carson herself wrote of ‘a shadow that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure'” (10)

It’s really time I read the Carson…

“So, too, feminist earth scientist Jill Schneiderman, one of our finest thinkers about environmental time, has written about the way in which environmental degradation may ‘masquerade as inevitable.'” (11)

“The explicitly temporal emphasis of slow violence allows us to keep front and center the representational challenges and imaginative dilemmas posed not just by imperceptible violence but by imperceptible change whereby violence is decoupled from its original causes by the workings of time.” (11)

Paul Crutzen (coined the term “Anthropocene”), Will Steffen, and John McNeill coined the term “The Great Acceleration, a second stage of the Anthropocene Age that they dated to the mid-twentieth century. [They] noted how ‘nearly three-quarters of the anthropogenically driven rise in CO2 concentration has occurred since 1950 (from about 310 to 380 ppm), and about half of the total rise (48 ppm) has occurred in just the last 30 years.'” (12)

So, since I was 13 years old, we’ve seen levels rise 48 ppm (actually more than half of the increase since 1950). People have caused this massive spike in my adulthood.

“If an awareness of the Great Acceleration is (to put it mildly) unevenly distributed, the experience of accelerated connectivity (and the paradoxical disconnects that can accompany it) is increasingly widespread. In an age of degraded attention spans it becomes doubly difficult yet increasingly urgent that we focus on the toll exacted, over time, by the slow violence of ecological degradation.” (13)

“So to render slow violence entails, among other things, redefining speed: we see such efforts in talk of accelerated species loss, rapid climate change, and in attempts to recast “glacial” — once a dead metaphor for “slow” — as a rousing, iconic image of unacceptably fast loss.” (13)

Yes! So how can I do that…?

“It is here that writers, filmmakers, and digital activists may play a mediating role in helping counter the layered invisibility that results from insidious threats, from temporal protractedness, and from the fact that the afflicted are the people whose quality of life — and often whose very existence — is of indifferent interest to the corporate media.” (16)

From “The Environmentalism of the Poor and Displacement in Place”:

official landscape vs. vernacular one

“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.” (17)

“I would argue, then, thaat the exponential upsurge in indigenous resource rebellions across the globe during the high age of neoliberalism has resulted largely from a clash of temporal perspectives between the short-termers who arrive (with their official landscape maps) to extract, despoil, and depart and the long-termers who must live inside the ecological aftermath and must therefore weigh wealth differently in time’s scales” (17)

“refugees in place” and “displacement without moving” (19)

“…the resistance posed by nature itself should not be overstated. The recent turn within environmental studies toward celebrating the creative resilience of ecosystems can be readily hijacked by politicians, lobbyists, and corporations who oppose regulatory controls and strive to minimize pollution liability. Coopting the ‘nature-and-time-will-heal’ argument has become integral to attempts to privatize profits while externalizing risk and cleanup, both of which can be delegated to ‘nature’s business.'” (21).

If I want to give a positive “spin” to the situation, I need to ensure I’m not in any way inadvertently furthering this “nature can heal itself” idea.

(to be continued)