Rob Nixon, "Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor"

 In his introduction to Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon coins the term “slow violence” to describe environmental catastrophes like climate change, deforestation, oil spills, and radioactive contamination that are caused by humans, and in turn, threaten humans. Slow violence, according to Nixon, is 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 not typically viewed as violence” (2).

Because the effects of environmental catastrophes may not become perceptible for decades, even centuries, society does not usually recognize them as threats. A melting iceberg may signal a danger far more grave than the planes that collided with the Twin Towers on September 11^th, Nixon claims, yet society seems only capable of considering violence in its most immediate and sensational forms.

We also ignore, Nixon argues, the interrelated problem of environmental poverty. The military-industrial complex, which perpetuates acts of slow violence, also appropriates the resources of marginalized groups in Third World countries. These groups lose their homes, their livelihood, and their cultural history in the name of globalization. Like the casualties of slow violence, however, they exist in the shadows; their story is not part of any cultural narrative that is powerful enough to make society realize the injustice of their situation.

Because the media ignores both the victims of slow violence and environmental poverty, Nixon concludes that a primary concern in this situation is representation: “How to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects?” he asks (3). His conclusion is that since mainstream discourse ignores slow violence and environmental poverty, writers and scholars must assume the responsibility of making these concerns evident to the public.

To describe the relationship between the humanities and environmental justice, Nixon borrows the term “ecotone” from biology. An ecotone is a place where organisms from two supposedly discrete ecosystems coexist. In Nixon’s opinion, writers and scholars have been insulated too long from the social concerns that are, so to speak, invading their ecosystem. They have promoted “literary studies uncoupled from worldly concerns” and a fetishism of form” (31) that elevates aesthetic concerns over social engagement. But this must end. Given the gravity of the environmental threats we face, Nixon concludes that writers and scholars must create discourses that can make society recognize the threat of slow violence and the injustice of environmental poverty, a task that contemporary discourse has failed to accomplish.

Nixon’s call for writers and scholars to become activists, to create a literary-intellectual discourse that makes invisible dangers visible to the public, seems to echo Wordsworth and Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads. Though the preface to Lyrical Ballads asserts that the poems are “experiments” to determine how suited middle- and lower-class language is for conveying “poetic pleasure” (47), Wordsworth and Coleridge clearly considered poetry a vehicle for social justice. By presenting figures like the Female Vagrant and the Leech Gatherer as worthy subjects for poetry, they assigned dignity and worth to the disenfranchised groups that these figures represented. By writing about common subjects in a common language, Wordsworth and Coleridge presented the possibility that those who existed on the margins of English society possessed aesthetic merit and, by extension, social value as well.

If the project that Nixon calls writers and intellectuals to undertake is similar to Lyrical Ballads, can we predict its likelihood of success by considering the success – or failure – of Lyrical Ballads? Though Lyrical Ballads was a revolutionary force in English power, its transformative power seems to have ultimately been aesthetic, not social. Lyrical Ballads casts nature as a cure for the problems of civilization, yet Wordsworth and Coleridge’s nature poetry resulted in the vogue of the picturesque and the consumption of nature that we examined in Sense and Sensibility and Bates’ article.  Lyrical Ballad treats lonely and oppressed individuals as worthy poetic subjects, but did it ultimately alleviate the conditions of disenfranchised groups?

Using Lyrical Ballads as a model, what can we say about a mission for social justice that depends on literary and artistic representations? Will it draw attention to social injustice and motivate activism, or will it ultimately reinforce with Nixon despises: the fetishism of aesthetic works that are ultimately disconnected from social reality?