56 pages • 1 hour read
Rob NixonSlow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 7-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Ecologies of the Aftermath: Precision Warfare and Slow Violence”
Chapter 7 examines the slow violence of “depleted uranium conflict” (201), which first began during the 1991 Gulf War. Depleted uranium (DU) can be highly toxic to both the human body and the environment. Nixon begins by underscoring that military terms like “‘precision’ warfare, ‘surgical’ strikes, ‘depleted’ uranium, and ‘miracle’ drones” (200) lull the public into assuming that modern warfare will be shorter and result in less casualties. Because powerful entities, like the Pentagon, are behind these claims, the public often assumes that they are telling the truth. As Nixon illustrates throughout this chapter, this is far from true.
Nixon contrasts the experiences of two individuals, both of whom traveled the Highway of Death. The highway was given its name after the US bombed retreating Iraqi tanks and trucks during the Gulf War, destroying nearly 3,000 vehicles. Writer Michael Kelly traveled the Highway of Death simply to record “the physical realities of war, glutted with the evidence of slaughter and victory” (203).
First Sergeant Carol Picou traveled down the highway the same week as Kelly. The difference between Picou and Kelly is that Picou was a nurse working with a mobile hospital unit. For 15 days, she helped retrieve the Iraqi and Bedouins who had died in the US bombing from the destroyed vehicles, as well as treat the survivors. Nixon notes:
Within days of her departure from the scene, Picou’s skin started to erupt in black spots; soon she lost control of her bladder and her bowels. She came to depend permanently on a catheter and diapers. After her return to America, over the months and years that followed, she developed thyroid problems and squamous cancer cells in her uterus; she developed immunological dysfunction and encephalopathy. Three years after her stint on the Highway of Death, tests found dangerously elevated levels of uranium in her urine. Not until a barrage of afflictions had jeopardized her life did Picou first hear the phrase ‘depleted uranium’ and begin to learn of the threat its residues could pose (204).
The Department of Defense eventually terminated Picou, noting that her illnesses were not combat related. The experiences of Kelly and Picou differ drastically. Kelly assumes that the highway represents the last of the war’s fatalities, with the US victory being imminent. He ignores the chemical and radiological aftermaths that the Iraqis will face. For Picou, the highway was only the beginning of the bodily damage she would sustain.
Despite the evidence from the Gulf War that depleted uranium had adverse impacts on the environment and the human body, the Pentagon continued to use it in the Iraq War (2003-2011). Nixon suggests that the damages done in the Iraq War might far exceed those in the Gulf War, given the Iraq War’s duration and its location in an urban environment where the attacks were more concentrated. Training manuals during the 2003 war included information about the dangers of DU. However, the US still spreads false narratives about the threat and uses weapons made from this material in war. Iraqi civilians have never received an official warning about DU from the US government. The US government has also not offered to compensate the country for damages done to the environment and its people. Iraqi citizens are left alone to deal with the slow violence of DU.
Nixon also discusses landmines and cluster bombs, the latter of which have attracted far less public attention than the former. Countries have signed treaties prohibiting the use of landmines but not cluster bombs. The cluster bomb “has become a pivotal actor in the story of smart warfare’s shadow casualties—casualties that result from what one might call precision’s death lag” (221). The cluster bomb is a misnomer. It is not actually one single bomb, but hundreds of mini-bombs (bomblets). When these bomblets explode, they release sharp metal that can injure or kill people at distances up to 150 yards. Even if the cluster bombs do not explode on impact, they are still dangerous and become like landmines. Children will accidentally touch them, thinking they are fruit because the bombs are brightly colored. It costs millions of dollars to remove unexploded landmines. Since the countries with the most landmines are generally economically developing countries, it is difficult for them to cover the costs of this cleanup.
The Pentagon claims that its military ventures are intended to liberate and democratize countries. However, its continued use of ammunition made of depleted uranium and cluster bombs has instead instilled in people around the world “a material dread that outlasts the bounds of victories and defeats” (229). Nixon calls on readers to rethink their definition of survivors and security. How can people be called survivors of war when they face the less visible environmental and human impacts for years to come? How does war make some people more secure when it rips communities apart and sows distrust among countries? Nixon strongly believes that if Americans continue to ignore war deaths, they will face increasing rage from civilians all around the world.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Environmentalism, Postcolonialism, and American Studies”
Nixon address the question “What would it mean to bring environmentalism into a full, productive dialogue with postcolonialism?” (233). Environmental and postcolonial studies represent the most dynamic literary fields to date; yet scholars in these fields rarely collaborate or move between the fields.
Nixon sets out to describe why there is mistrust between the two fields. He identifies four main divides. The first is that environmental studies are traditionally concerned about wilderness purity, whereas postcolonialism is grounded in “hybridity and cross-culturation” (236). Second, writing in the postcolonial field focuses on displacement, while environmental writing focuses on place. Third, environmental studies have long ignored non-American writers. This has led the field to focus more on domestic issues than transnational ones, while postcolonial writers prefer to focus on transnational issues. Finally, the disciplines take different approaches to history and the past.
Postcolonial pastoral, which is “writing that refracts an idealized nature through memories of environmental and cultural degradation in the colonies” (245), represents one attempt to bridge the gap between environmental and postcolonial studies. Nixon believes this approach is viable because it shifts focus away from the assumption that environmentalism is only for citizens of the West. Nixon points to the writings by Caribbean-American postcolonial writer Jamaica Kincaid (1949- ) as an example of this theory in action.
Nixon also describes the parallel development of these two fields. Of particular interest is how “American environmentalism incrementally retreated from a vision of a global human ecology premised on the notion of a viable environment as a fundamental human right” (252). Nixon suggests that the American obsession with war explains why the environmental movement did not take the same shape as it did in economically developing countries. Major figures from the American civil rights movement were also not engaged in the environmental movement. The low point for the field seemed to be around the time of the inaugural Earth Day (1970), when American environmentalism became detached from trends in other parts of the world.
Postcolonial scholars remained highly suspicious of environmental studies through the 1980s because the field refused to link American imperialism with environmental degradation in economically developing countries. Thus, American environmentalism seemed to be complicit in American imperial power.
Indigenous environmental movements across developing countries helped shift postcolonial scholars’ belief that environmentalism was “marginal to ‘real’ politics” (255). Another important development is bridging the gap between the environmental justice movement and the humanities. Nixon argues, however, that it is not enough for environmental studies simply to diversify schools of thought. Instead, he believes that people “need to reimagine the prevailing paradigms” (257). He notes that postcolonial studies could also benefit from this reimagining, since it has currently stalled.
Epilogue Summary
The subtitle of the Epilogue, “Scenes from the Seabed: The Future of Dissent,” reveals its primary aim: to visually demonstrate how the slow violence of the climate crisis is impacting the most vulnerable people around the world.
Nixon opens this chapter by describing the first “scene from the seabed.” In 2009, right before the Copenhagen Climate Summit, the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, held his cabinet meeting underwater. Nixon describes (see Figure 5 on p. 264 for a photo) how “President Nasheed and his wetsuit-clad ministers convened behind a conference table anchored to the seabed, a Maldive flag planted behind them. Oxygen mask in place, the president signed into law a national commitment to becoming carbon neutral within ten years” (262).
The second “scene from the seabed” is a Russian submarine planting a Russian flag on the Artic Ocean’s seabed beneath the North Pole. By doing so, the Russians claimed the seabed as part of Russia. Several countries, including the US, Norway, Denmark, and Canada, immediately disputed Russia’s claim with their own claims of ownership. Nixon argues that “global warming was the trigger for this militant rhetoric and these troop movements” (267). The melting of glaciers is opening new reserves of mineral and energy deposits. If the global community exploits these previously inaccessible reserves, it will lead to even more burning of fossil fuels, speeding up (rather than slowing down) global warming. The Maldives will be underwater faster than current predictions.
Nixon turns to another example, the offshore oil spill caused by the blowout and subsequent sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig, to further illustrate the impacts of slow violence. This spill occurred because of the modern “Age of Tough Oil” (269). In this new age, onshore oil fields are becoming exhausted due to human consumption. Because demand for oil and other fossil fuels has not declined, fossil fuel companies are looking for new reserves. One such reserve is tapped through offshore oil drilling, which is far more expensive and dangerous to the environment than its onshore counterpart.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill, like past oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, should have been a warning to the global community, especially wealthier countries, about the dangers of offshore oil drilling. Nixon emphasizes that this was not the case. He notes that within weeks of the sealing of the wellhead, “Greenland launched the next phase of the Artic frontier oil rush by issuing new drilling licenses in far deeper, far colder waters than the Gulf, conditions under which oil would be even more resistant to dispersal” (269). In fact, oil companies and Western governments continue to ignore the oil spill–induced environmental catastrophes and their impacts on marginalized communities in favor of profits.
Nixon concludes the book by grappling with how environmental activists, writers, bloggers, podcasters, photographers, and video artists can document slow violence in an age when constant access to information through social media and the internet has further decreased attention spans. To address this issue, he begins by discussing his own experiences watching the Deep Horizon spillcam, a live feed from the spill site. He appreciated that the global community was able to watch the environmental catastrophe unfold in real time. At the same time, he understood that once the experts sealed the wellhead and shut off the spillcam, global attention would shift elsewhere because the visible evidence would disappear from sight. His fears came true, and yet the sealing of the well did not end the catastrophic impacts of the oil spill. Nixon believes that there is a place for social media and the internet, but that writer-advocates, grassroots organizers, and political leaders are still necessary to the fight against environmental injustice.
Chapter 7-Epilogue Analysis
The last section of the book reinforces Nixon’s central claim that focus on slow violence is essential. In Chapter 7, Nixon turns his attention to precision warfare. As with other forms of environmental violence, time makes political accountability extremely difficult. Political changes occur much faster than environmental changes in the aftermath of war. For this reason, administrations do not feel obligated to spend taxpayer money on cleaning up the impacts of war in another country, especially if they were not the administration that started the war. The perpetrators are also often politically and economically more powerful than the country being attacked. Thus, they are able to use science, research, and official powers to further cover up their responsibility.
One example is that of American literary scholar Elaine Showalter. Despite the mountain of evidence reinforcing DU’s catastrophic impacts on the environment and the human body, she helped promulgate the false narrative that DU was not very harmful. In fact, she believed “Gulf War syndrome” (208), which is a multi-symptomatic illness affecting military veterans who participated in the Persian Gulf War, was nothing more than “the creation of millennial panics, the mass media, and veteran hysteria” (209). Her perspective is dangerous because it continues to downplay the long-term impact of slow violence. Showalter adds support to the myth that there are only casualties of war when there are bombings. She, like many government officials, either ignores or is too naïve to recognize that war kills for a long time after the bombings stop.
Reiterating that the slow violence of war impacts the most vulnerable groups, Nixon discusses how it is more difficult to maintain distinctions between “the domestic and the foreign, home and away” (219). American and British soldiers increasingly come from lower-income backgrounds. They are now being exposed to the same poisonings as the people they are sent to fight. When they come home, they, in turn, expose their loved ones to DU. Thus, it is no longer just people in economically developing countries who are being poisoned by war, but also people from more economically developed countries. Nixon drives home the point that war casualties spread over time and space. For this reason, he asks readers, and especially Americans, to rethink their preconceived notions of war and violence. If Americans continue to ignore war as a source of slow violence, then not only will they be wrapped up in more conflicts, but they are also likely to be met with extreme hostility because of the damage their country has done to other people’s land.
Chapter 8 is direct call to postcolonial and environmental scholars to create new alliances that “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” (260). He believes that this alliance could help build never-before-seen coalitions to address environmental injustices committed on the most vulnerable populations. Nixon believes that the “prospects for postcolonial environmentalism” (261) have never been better.
In the Epilogue, Nixon presents one final dramatic image that embodies the impacts of the climate crisis on the most vulnerable: the Maldives president’s cabinet meeting, which took place underwater. The purpose of this underwater meeting was to draw attention to the impact of global warming, including rising sea levels, on the Maldives. Given the island’s small population, low wealth level, and location, it has not contributed to the climate crisis, yet this crisis severely threatens its existence. President Nasheed hoped this meeting would draw global attention to the “slow-motion urgency” (264) of his country’s future, forcing world leaders to act on the climate crisis at the Copenhagen Climate Summit. The entire population of his country could become climate refugees if the global community does not work to slow the impacts of global warming.
Nixon concludes with his belief in the potential of social media and the internet (which he calls “new media”) to enable testimonies around environmental injustices to occur more quickly and be widely available (278). These testimonies alone, however, do not guarantee a change. To Nixon, this new media needs to be coupled with political leadership, grassroots advocacy, coalition building, and broader concerns about the environment to advance environmental justice. He sees writer-activists continuing to play a key role in the fight “by drawing to the surface—and infusing with emotional force—submerged stories of injustice and resource rebellions” (280).
