Slow Violence and the Challenges of Environmental Inequality

Abstract

Abstract

Slow environmental violence is a concept with the potential to illustrate the challenges confronting those working for environmental justice and highlight rhetorical strategies of resistance and empowerment. Rob Nixon coins the notion in his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, and the intent here is to expand upon Nixon's discussion. Slow-onset contamination and attritional injury in tandem with ambiguous boundaries of impact amid expansive scale are at the core of slow environmental violence, and together such dynamics contributes to social, political, and scientific nonvisibility. As opposed to violence as sudden, obvious, and bounded in space and time, Nixon argues for an expanded view more in sync with a litany of hazards imposed upon marginalized communities. Time often serves to insulate powerful actors in society from past decisions and nondecisions impacting the health and well-being of others. Furthermore, slow environmental violence suggests a reconceptualization of organizational “disaster” as necessarily acute, accompanied by spectacular images that solicit sustained media attention, and bounded in space and time. Many organizational disasters are accompanied by slow environmental violence rather than abrupt collapse, collision, or explosion. This comparative nonvisibility does not imply a lack of harm, but it often does not incite the media attention necessary to provoke political responsiveness. Striving to recognize environmental and biophysical harm inflicted slowly, in turn, and devising rhetorical strategies for giving form to the diffuse and incremental is a crucial step in combating nonvisibility.