Slow Violence: Nixon and environmental justice

Rob Nixon's brand-new book is groundbreaking.  Elsewhere, he writes,

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?

Long-lasting effects of the dropping of Agent Orange on Vietnam

"Slow violence" helps us think of externalized costs as a form of violence

Queering Ecology and Greening Queer Politics

What a text!  Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson's collection is one of the most recent major contributions to ecocriticism, along with Alaimo's Bodily Natures and Nixon's Slow Violence.  The field has fully embraced--with lots of people kicking and screaming against it-- cultural studies, including queer theory, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and media studies.  Queer Ecologies is testament to this kind of work, and certainly a fantastic barometer of the "state of the field."

In Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson's introduction, they describe the project as interested in how understandings of nature inform sexuality and how sexuality shapes both material nature and our understandings of nature.  They want to queer ecology and to green queer politics.

What does this mean?  Why is it important?

For the purposes of this post, please unpack an idea that you had never thought of before reading these chapters. Even though I am immersed in this scholarship (indeed, this book is making very similar arguments I make in my own book about the relationship between corporeal fitness and environmental discourse), many of the ideas I am reading in Queer Ecologies are blowing my mind!

I look forward to what jumps out and grabs you about the relationships between sexuality, desire, and nature explored in these pages...