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.
Introduction
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Rob Nixon coined the concept slow violence to describe injurious effects imposed on others in an incremental manner—effects not befitting conventional media and political attention. 1 Slow violence is characterized by ambiguous but not absent outcomes, a dearth of spectacular visual images, and uncertainty with regard to the geographical and biophysical boundaries of impact. 2 Conventional conceptions of violence embody intentional acts, demarcated in space and time, and targeted at select individuals or groups. Nixon explains, “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.” 3
Nixon admits pairing “slow” with “violence” appears “oxymoronic.” 4 However, the negative rebound effects of science, technology, and industry that so readily elude visibility, despite lingering over an extended period of time, arguably demand an equally paradoxical descriptor. As such, it is a concept with the potential to shed light on problems that might otherwise remain unseen or appreciably unrecognized.
The intent here is to introduce and expand upon Nixon's scholarship. Many issues of environmental inequality in society mirror the characteristics bundled together under the idea of slow environmental violence. This includes the incremental onset of deleterious effects, diffuse boundaries between those affected and those unaffected, and, as a consequence, a comparative social and scientific nonvisibility. The effort to recognize and rectify issues of environmental inequality, in turn, can benefit from explicit consideration of slow environmental violence. 5
Time, Scale, and Salience
There are a variety of issues that could be defined as slow environmental violence: Agent Orange persisting for decades in rural areas in Vietnam and the bodies of American soldiers, Gulf War Syndrome today, pesticides banned in the industrialized countries but exported elsewhere, toxic chemicals at Love Canal, radionuclides engulfing Europe in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, the BP Deepwater Horizon debacle, “Cancer Alley” between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a rising tide encroaching upon the Maldives Islands, illicit shipments of electronic waste, e-waste, from the industrialized countries to middle- and low-income countries, Union Carbide and Bhopal, India, an exclusion zone around the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Nixon articulates three essential characteristics of slow environmental violence. 6 They include incremental onset, ambiguous boundaries, and lack of salience. The problem, in combination, is that such characteristics are lacking in a disruptive, trigger event forcing a shift in frame of reference or lens through which a situation is interpreted. Adopting Nixon's concept, moreover, arguably necessitates a number of definitional considerations. First, slow environmental violence is predicated upon organizational decision-making or failure to make key decisions. It does not presuppose malicious intent but is more often perpetuated through heedless disregard for others. Slow violence, then, is a situation that could have been otherwise but for the decisions and/or nondecisions of organizational actors who possessed the latitude and some degree of empirical evidence from which to improve the situation but failed, for various reasons, to do so.
Incremental onset
This includes temporal distance or the gap between exposure and the expression of adverse consequence as well as temporality or the pace of change. There are at least three key considerations in this regard. 7 They include the normalization of incremental change, obfuscation of cause and effect relationships, and the representational challenges of depicting attritional dynamics before a broader audience.
Material and biophysical cues impinge upon how people give meaning to a situation, but less so when cues trickle in. People living among deteriorating surroundings often engage in the normalization of contamination and do not fully appreciate the extent of change over time 8 ; contamination becomes the new normal. As Beamish illustrates, there is also a tendency among workers and managers in an organization perpetuating environmental pollution as well as regulatory officials to lapse into the normalization of contamination amid incremental change. 9
For nearly 40 years, Unocal drilled and spilled at Guadalupe Dunes, a scenic expanse of land paralleling the ocean near San Luis Obispo, California. It was not a “tanker on the rocks” event but attritional processes between 1953 and 1990 constituting one of the largest oil spills in U.S. history. 10 Over time field workers, Unocal management, as well as state and federal regulators operated from an interpretive framework through which contamination was a routine by-product of drilling. 11 Much of the spillage occurred underground, but the smell of petroleum and oily sheen upon the water served as cues suggesting problems were mounting. The “tipping point,” at which the gravity of the situation became widely recognized and prior interpretive understanding irreparably breached, occurred only after an estimated 20 million gallons of oil had leaked into the surrounding environment. 12 From this vantage point, the question then arose as to how such a situation could arise. As Beamish notes, a “preoccupation with the ‘acute’ and the ‘traumatic’ has left us passive and unresponsive to festering problems.” 13
In a context of slow environmental violence, the analytical focus hinges on better understanding the dynamics contributing to or inhibiting a tipping point 14 ; a disruption and, therefore, change of direction in terms of interpretive understanding. Things previously unseen or unappreciated become progressively apparent, and existing frames of reference are less stable and taken for granted. A tipping point amid a succession of empirical cues suggesting an ongoing and accumulating problem, in turn, comprises a shift such that a full retreat to the prior point of view is problematic, if not impossible altogether. With slow-onset violence, however, a tipping point may take years to arise or may only arise after the injurious activity has long ceased. Regardless, once a decisive disruption occurs, there is generally shock and bewilderment as what was there all along is suddenly apparent.
Science is the dominant epistemology of modernity, but long-onset, attritional processes pose numerous problems for scientific inquiry and, in turn, norms of legal accountability. It is difficult to disentangle cause and effect when the effect lags behind the original cause and there is plenty of time for confounding and intervening influences to arise. It is challenging, moreover, to conduct laboratory or experimental studies replicating the long-onset dynamics at play in the real world. In turn, time often serves to indemnify polluters from accountability for their actions. Nixon argues, “Violence, above all environmental violence, needs to be seen—and deeply considered—as a contest not only over space, or bodies, or labor, or resources, but also over time.” 15
Ambiguous boundaries
The scale of slow environmental violence can be expansive and difficult to clearly pinpoint in geographical and biophysical terms. 16 There are, then, enduring uncertainties as to the boundaries, and this uncertainty only compounds the difficulties endemic to making sense of the issue. Epidemiological research is based on examining those ostensibly affected by environmental contamination relative to the expected background rate of a given disease. If morbidity or mortality is higher than expected, inferences are made to arrive at an assessment of whether contamination is a likely contributor. Such research is complicated but particularly when it is unclear which segments of the population have and have not been exposed.
Rachel Carson sketched out the characteristics of slow environmental violence in the pages of Silent Spring, published in 1962. 17 She sought to alert the public to hazards unknown to previous generations, maddeningly diffuse, and increasingly ubiquitous. 18 The focus was dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and other synthetic chemicals, but her critique highlighted a whole new class of contaminants. Carson observed:
The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings…Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world. During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. 19
Slow environmental violence does not always involve novel substances and materials, however. An example is ongoing at Libby, Montana. A town of about 2700, at least 200 residents have died of asbestos-related disease and hundreds more exhibit disease and disability. 20 From the 1920s until 1990, vermiculite was mined in the area. Vermiculite is a mineral that expands when heated, like an accordion, and primarily used as insulation in residential buildings around the country. Vermiculite, however, was contaminated with tremolite asbestos. In turn, disability and early death have been a chronic reality in Libby for decades among workers, the family of workers, and even those unaffiliated with mining and milling in the area 21 ; contamination so widespread as to blur the distinction between an occupational and environmental hazard. Few materials, of note, exemplify slow violence as predictably as does asbestos. 22
It is not clear when the disaster at Libby will end given the long latency period of asbestos exposure. From 1963 onward, W.R. Grace & Co. owned the mine, and there is evidence that company officials as well as state and federal regulators clearly recognized asbestos accompanied vermiculite and, in turn, constituted a health hazard. 23 The violence continued despite scientific studies confirming the presence of asbestos in vermiculite ore as well as asbestos-related disease among miners and millers. 24
The tipping point came in 1999. A reporter from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer “broke” the Libby story, and the publicity garnered regional and national attention. 25 State officials and the Environmental Protection Agency then mobilized the will, the expertise, and the resources to begin remediation efforts in and around Libby; remediation efforts spurred not by abject suffering or scientific evidence so much as the provocative articulation of suffering and statistical significance at Libby. And although Libby is ground zero, vermiculite was shipped to secondary processing facilities around the country and handled by insulators and other workers for decades. 26 Vermiculite laced with tremolite, moreover, remains a loose fill attic insulation in millions of homes. 27 A precise tally of the health effects due to vermiculate mined near Libby, in turn, would be difficult if not simply impossible to calculate.
Nonvisibility
Slow, incremental onset and ambiguous boundaries are a recipe for social, political, and scientific nonvisibility. 28 Slow environmental violence, in turn, comes with demanding representational challenges. 29 A dearth of salient cues does not necessarily imply the absence of effects, but it does suggest social consensus, a broad base of agreement, is likely difficult to achieve. Furthermore, attritional violence does not generally fit what the mass media is looking to sell to the public. In news stories, framing entails the selection and presentation of some aspects of perceived reality while neglecting or downplaying other interpretive possibilities. 30 Particular aspects of the world become more salient as do particular ways of thinking about that which is rendered more prominent, but whatever the framing employed drama is the over-arching element journalists are seeking.
Given temporal distance, imprecise spatial and biophysical boundaries, and absence of stark visibility, both social and scientific, slow environmental violence is particularly subject to differential interpretive power or the capacity to dictate how the situation is given meaning discursively. Power generally intervenes in the social negotiation and definition of the situation, but more so when the material and biophysical cues are vague and imprecise; however, the benefits of the activity for some privileged segments in society are abundantly clear.
Sustained media attention amid slow environmental violence is difficult to achieve even with the aid of scientific evidence illustrating a problem is underway. It is particularly difficult in communities already ignored by the broader society due to dynamics related to race and/or class; slow environmental violence is often intertwined with the unique characteristics of marginalized segments of society. It is not impossible. Decades of agitation and mobilization in marginalized communities throughout the United States have contributed to a greater recognition of environmental inequality, but the representational challenges persist and, as Nixon notes, must often be confronted in novel ways. 31
As an exemplar of transcending representational challenges, Nixon points to the success of Silent Spring in reshaping the dialogue and debate over chemical contamination. 32 One of Rachel Carson's talents was the synthesis of scattered scientific reports into a focused critique, but the other entailed the ability to give form to slow environmental violence so that her readers would embark upon their own tipping point. Absent efforts to rhetorically make visible slow violence powerful actors will continue to possess the latitude to foster doubt, diversion, and denial—complicating broader recognition of contamination.
Conclusion
Nixon's articulation of slow environmental violence is evocative, and he goes some distance in sketching out the value of such a contradictory concept. 33 He argues that incremental, attritional assault is often ignored, given it is out of sync with broader cultural assumptions as to causation and culpability. 34 Different issues and events rank higher or lower on these characteristics, but those exhibiting long-onset, expansiveness amid uncertain boundaries, and a lack of immediate visibility more closely approximate the unique characteristics slow environmental violence attempts to highlight. As at Libby, too often it is only after the injurious effects have accumulated to better “fit” prevailing conventions of the dramatic and the violent that an issue elicits sustained media and political attention. The intent behind explicit consideration of slow environmental violence is to better see, evaluate, and confront such issues before they have reached such a point. The objective is to highlight and challenge broader cultural assumptions depicting violence as exclusively sudden, spectacular, and bounded in geographical and biophysical space to better recognize environmental inequality in society.
The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power reactor in 1986 is easily recalled, but the consequences of radioactive contamination are less clear. So, too, the chemical leak at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984, is remembered for the low-lying cloud engulfing surrounding shanty towns and killing more than 3500 people and causing tens of thousands of disabling injuries. 35 In the decades since, however, it is estimated thousands more have died prematurely due to ailments linked to the gas exposure. 36 It is hard to forget the Exxon Valdez running aground in 1989 and spilling millions of barrels of crude oil in Prince William Sound, Alaska. It is harder to make sense of the protracted ecological, social, and human health effects occurring for years afterward.
Of note, slow environmental violence suggests a reconceptualization of organizational disasters as exclusively acute and readily visible. In contrast, there are arguably three types. First, there is sudden onset crisis accompanied by acute injuries and damage—the conventional definition of a disaster. They often produce significant destruction but it is delimited temporally and spatially. The break up of the Challenger Space Shuttle upon ascent, destruction of the Hindenburg, and the sinking of the Titanic are prominent examples. Second, there are organizational disasters with an abrupt crisis point and both acute- and slow-onset effects. The commencement reverberates in institutional and public memory, but attritional destruction seems less and less real the longer it persists. Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Fukushima Daiichi are exemplars. Third, there are crescive organizational disasters in which there is no sudden and readily salient crisis point signaling the onset of disaster and forcing a re-interpretation of the situation. This type is lacking a definitive beginning, readily visible destructive effects, and an identifiable conclusion. Guadalupe Dunes and Libby, Montana, are examples of this third category.
Researchers have studied acute organizational disaster with acute destruction, are increasingly focusing on sudden disaster with acute- and slow-onset injury, but rarely examine in-depth crescive organizational disasters accompanied exclusively by slow environmental violence. This third variant, then, is clearly deserving of greater attention and is often at the core of the imposition of environmental contaminants upon marginalized communities in society.
Personal testimonies of living amid contamination and rhetorically giving form and character to diffuse and attritional assaults can serve as resistance and empowerment. 37 Rather than letting time indemnify past and present activities of powerful actors in society, those burdened by environmental inequality can illustrate for a broader audience slow environmental violence. Nixon argues, “Writing can challenge perceptual habits that downplay the damage slow violence inflicts and bring into imaginative focus apprehensions that elude sensory corroboration. The narrative imaginings of writer-activists may thus offer us a different kind of witnessing: of sights unseen.” 38
Footnotes
Author Disclosure Statement
No competing financial interests exist.