Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

by Rob Nixon

Multinational oil corporations, seeking a pliable workforce, prefer to import laborers from rival communities or distant lands rather than create jobs for communities most immediately affected by extraction operations.

Given this history—given the outsize characters, bloated dreams, unscrupulous alliances, double crossings, insurrections, and repressions, given the soaring and plummeting fortunes, one would have expected that the titanic drama of the resource curse would by now have generated a substantial, ambitious literature.

Leopold’s ethic was circumscribed, in some ways, by the particularities of America’s Jeffersonian traditions; he did foresee, however, that to live as an American in the American century was to be a consumer of historically calamitous proportions.

“When I submit these thoughts to a printing press, I am helping to drain a marsh for cows to graze, and to exterminate the birds of Brazil. When I go birding in my Ford, I am devastating an oil field,

that most deep-seated rationale for war—be expanded to include threats to the nation’s integrity from environmental assaults.

To reframe violence in this way is to intervene in the discourse of national defense and, hence, in the psychology of war.

from elsewhere in the global South, most strikingly to Vandana Shiva’s advocacy for soil security as a form of environmental justice.

and it was at those junctures that the Green Belt women found a way to exert their collective agency. As the drivers of the nation’s subsistence agriculture, women inhabited most directly the fallout from an environmental violence that is low in immediate drama but high in long-term consequences.

American agronomist Wes Jackson, “soil is as much a nonrenewable resource as oil.”

Assaults on a nation’s environmental resources frequently entail not just the physical displacement of local communities, but their imaginative displacement as well,

Chixoy Dam forcefully illustrates this. To quell opposition to the dam and to speed up the clearing of the submergence zone, in March 1980 Guatemalan paramilitary units conducted a series of massacres, slaughtering 378 Maya Achi Indians. The brutality took a bloody, local form, but the decisive players were the invisible, bloodless transnational collaborators with the Guatemalan dictatorship: the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank who buttressed the dam with their loans.

India had become the world’s third most prolific dam builder. Roy sought to expose the collusions between a fascist strain of Hindu nationalism at home and neoliberal globalizers,

notably the megadam boosters at the World Bank and in the Western-based dam industry that, one notes, like the tobacco industry was shifting its exploitative center of gravity to the global South, where huge profits could be accumulated in conditions where health, safety, and environmental regulations were absent, lax, or poorly enforced.

Roy opposed were located in rural areas densely populated with subsistence farmers, areas quite unlike the thinly peopled hinterland of the American West.

When Roy writes that the Narmada dams were causing the “submerging of culture,” she refers to the inundation of densely populated village cultures inextricable from flood-plain ecosystems in “the only valley in India, according to archaeologists,

contains an uninterrupted record of human occupation from the Stone Age.”

By pairing her essays on India’s nuclear tests and the Narmada Valley dams, Roy sought—controversially—to bring big dam building into the domain of violence.