Literary and postcolonial studies have ignored the environmentalism that often only the poor can see
Why does he use the word "violence" to think about environmental problems?
How does he argue that temporality is a crucial lens through which to understand the "environmentalism of the poor"?
What structures prevent us from understanding and seeing environmental injustices over the long-term?
What new ways of understanding environmental problems is Nixon asking us to explore?
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| Long-lasting effects of the dropping of Agent Orange on Vietnam |
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| "Slow violence" helps us think of externalized costs as a form of violence |
First off, this might be my favorite read of this class so far. It has inspired a tangle of different thoughts and ideas. This, combined with the late hour and my over-caffeination will most likely lead to a scattered post. My apologies in advance.
ReplyDeleteWhen reading chapter 6, I saw so many similarities to tourism, ecological wealth, adventure culture and modernity in Juneau and Alaska. Tourists in both the game reserve and expedition style tours here seek pristine wilderness, emanate danger, charismatic megafauna and no people to ruin that experience. The canned lion description perfectly describes the ironic search for authenticity. And the exclusion of indigenous people from the reserve (dictating that white people knew how to better take care of the land) reminded me of Ernestine Hayes story of illegally hunting deer with her uncles in Juneau. The Ultimate Safari was a wonderful explanation of the opposite ends of the "why people travel" spectrum. All of these stories create a wonderful visual of the complex and great separation of people traversing South Africa.
The next chapter describes a disheartening look at what structures prevent us from seeing and understanding environmental injustices over the long-term. Chapter 7 talks mostly about the repercussions of Operation Desert Storm for people in Kuwait, Iraq, US soldiers and other places where DU is used. Depleted uranium is convenient for the military in that it takes radioactive waste from nuclear weapons in the US and deposits it in other far away countries. It is a "humane" and "efficient" killing device, better than free of charge. However, the long-term health effects to people who come in contact with it are devastating. And it practically will never go away. The environmental damage is critical and will have effects on unknown amounts of people for generations to come. And the government doesn't want to admit this in order to keep manufacturing and using this weapon. This is one example of why we are oblivious to environmental injustices. We are far away from the immediate effects, the people who are being affected don't have the knowledge or the means to prevent it, and our government and military don't want to take the blame nor want the public to know.
Through reading this book, environmental films that we watched, and thinking about our friend's death, I was thinking about what we can do or what we should do to make a better life and place for the future. This book and the one we read last week (Environmentalism in pop culture) emphasizes how social injustice in developing countries and environmental issues ties together and why we have to fix those issues at the same time.
ReplyDeleteNuclear power-plant issue in Japan is a good example of slow violence, because you can't see or smell radiation, so you don't know where it is and whether you are in the safe place or not, you don't know whether food you eat has radiation or not. Symptoms of disease from radiation comes slowly so people don't notice it until you get serious symptoms. Same as Mexican people who live in the small town next to big factories where factories waste toxic water into the river without treatment or purification. Inupiat people in Shishmaref is another example of slow violence. Its not disease but their beaches are slowly eroded by unpredicted weather and climate chance and they lose their living space slowly.We as people in developed countries don't see many changes of our lives or environment through climate change, but those who live in the nature, especially indigenous people or people in developing countries witness their life changes, and sometimes it affects their lives.
So our biggest question is, what we can do? I think what I learned from this class and environmental film, and meeting filmmaker of Being caribou is, those type of media and materials which doesn't often showed on media, really changed my way of thinking about world because it shows "reality" which government doesn't what us to see or know, and its usually not biased and tell us the real story. I believe those issues that people doesn't wanna face should expose more to the media, so that we start thinking about and start acting do fix those issues seriously. It doesn't mean we should be a movie maker, but I believe spreading those true stories and facts that we saw through reading books, watching movies or traveling around the world is what we can do for the better future.