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Assessment 1 Reflective Journal 

The purpose of this assessment exercise is twofold: first, it aims to get you to think critically 

about several key issues raised in your readings and the accompanying lectures; second, it aims 

to get you to begin using the critical terminology you have encountered in your readings and the 

accompanying lectures. Thinking critically means thinking in a way that demands and seeks 

clarity of ideas, precision with definitions, and an understanding of key presuppositions. 

Presuppositions are in many ways the most important focus of what critical thinking entails 

because it essentially demands that we interrogate what we take for granted, i.e., that which we 

don’t think about but nonetheless think with. Critiques of ‘white privilege’, ‘gender bias’, 

‘homophobia’ and so on are all critiques of presuppositions, assumptions that are made about 

the world that aren’t factored into thought. When we think or say, ‘that’s no job for a woman’ 

(as people have said in the past about a range of professions) we are presupposing a set intrinsic 

limits and restrictions relating to our understanding of what being a woman entails. Overturning 

those assumptions has been a century long labour of critical thinking and activism. 

Taking that same critical mindset of refusing to accept assumptions at face value, your task with 

the following questions is to write short critical responses (250 words per question) that address 

the critical issues they raise. I have added a brief outline of the issues that I think these questions 

raise, but you should feel free to add your own, and to respond selectively (I don’t expect you to 

respond to all the issues). 

Question 1 (week 2) 

According to Nixon, we lack the representational means to represent slow forms of violence to 

ourselves. Why is this a problem? 

Issues to consider: 

• What does Nixon mean by representational means? 

• What makes slow forms of violence particularly resistant to representation? 

• How would things be different if we did have adequate representational means? 

Question 2 (Week 3) 

Birch says we need to need to nurture places where connection and ethical dialogue can take 

place. Why is this important?

Issues to consider: 

• What does Birch mean by place? 

• What does Birch mean by ethical dialogue? 

• What does Birch mean by connection?

• What will happen if we don’t nurture such places? 

Question 3 (Week 4) 

What does Moreton-Robinson mean by white sovereignty? 

Issues to consider: 

• What is meant by the term ‘sovereignty’? 

• Why does Moreton-Robinson use the term ‘white sovereignty’ rather than settler sovereignty, 

or colonial sovereignty? 

• Why is the issue of sovereignty a central concern for Moreton-Robinson? What other concepts 

does it displace or replace? 

Question 4 (Week 5) 

According to Danowski and Viveiros the anthropomorphic worldview is more respectful of the 

other-than-human world than the anthropocentric worldview.

Issues to consider: 

• What do Danowski and Viveiros mean by worldview?

• What is the difference (according to Danowski and Viveiros) between the anthropomorphic and 

the anthropocentric worldviews? 

• Why (according to Danowski and Viveiros) are they dialectically opposed and not simply 

opposites? 

• What is the significance (according to Danowski and Viveiros) of the difference between the 

anthropomorphic and the anthropocentric worldviews?

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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Slow Violence and the

Environmentalism of the Poor

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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Slow Violence and the

Environmentalism of the Poor

R o b N i x o n

h a r v a r d u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2011

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

a l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nixon, Rob, 1954–

Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor / Rob Nixon. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-04930-7 (alk. paper)

1. Commonwealth literature (English) —History and criticism. 2. American literature—History and criticism. 3. Ecology in literature.

4. Environmentalism in literature. 5. Human ecology in literature. 6. Postcolonialism in literature. 7. Colonies in literature. 8. Ecocriticism. 9. Human security. 10. Poor—Developing countries. 11. Imperialism—

Environmental aspects. 12. Globalization—Environmental aspects. I. Title. PR9080.5.N59 2011

820.9’36—dc22 2010049797

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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F o r A n n e

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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Contents

Preface ix

Introduction 1

1. Slow Violence, Neoliberalism, and the Environmental Picaresque 45

2. Fast-forward Fossil: Petro-despotism and the Resource Curse 68

3. Pipedreams: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Environmental Justice, and Micro-minority Rights 103

4. Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor 128

5. Unimagined Communities: Megadams, Monumental Modernity, and Developmental Refugees 150

6. Stranger in the Eco-village: Race, Tourism, and Environmental Time 175

7. Ecologies of the Aftermath: Precision Warfare and Slow Violence 199

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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c o n t e n t s

[v i i i ]

8. Environmentalism, Postcolonialism, and American Studies 233

Epilogue: Scenes from the Seabed and the Future of Dissent 263

Notes 283

Acknowledgments 339

Index 343

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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Preface

In writing this book, I have returned repeatedly for inspi- ration to three towering fi gures. Edward Said, Rachel Carson, and Ramach- andra Guha are a diverse and unlikely triumvirate, by training a professor of literature, a science writer, and a sociologist respectively. Yet all three exemplify an ideal of the public intellectual as someone unafraid to open up channels of inquiry at an angle to mainstream thought; unafraid more- over to face down the hostility that their unorthodoxy often prompted. In ranging from archive-driven scholarship to the public essay to op-ed polemics, Said, Carson, and Guha all have demonstrated a communicative passion responsive to diverse audiences, indeed a passion that has helped shape such audiences by refusing to adhere to conventional disciplinary or professional expectations.

The beauty of the teaching life is this: the possibility of setting a life on course with nothing more complex than the right reverberation struck at the right time. Said had that kind of impact on me in the mid-1980s when I was a graduate student at Columbia. There I had found myself confronted with two unappetizing options: to follow either the fusty old formalists, with their patched-tweed Ivy League belle-lettrism, or the hipper new for- malists, whose lemming run toward the palisades of deconstruction was then in full spate. To a young man, an unsettled greenhorn in America with a twinned passion for literature and world politics, Said offered a third way,

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encouraging me to reconcile those passions and fi nd a voice in which both could be articulated. I felt emboldened by Said’s determined search for a style—or rather, a whole repertoire of styles—equal to his wide-ranging commitments. He thrived on intellectual complexity while aspiring to clar- ity; he taught and wrote as if—and I know this should sound unremark- able for a literature professor—he yearned to be widely understood. His approach felt fervent, luminous when measured against the alternatives: close readings sealed against the world or deconstructionist seminars in which the stakes were as obscure as the language, as we poked at dead-on- delivery prose in the hopes of rousing enough life from it for our exertions to qualify as “play.” Said, by contrast, was alive to the high-stake worlds of persuasion and coercion, alive to political doublespeak and to the worldly costs of verbal camoufl age. As a reader, he believed in context—historical, political, and biographical context—all of which was material to him.

Said’s vocal fl exibility amplifi ed his intellectual reach: across disciplines, continents, and all forms of the media. He scorned the cult of diffi culty, the notion that leaden writing signals weighty intelligence. He understood that it is far more diffi cult to theorize with the cunning of lightness than it is to fob off some seething mess of day-old neologisms as an “intervention.” His devotion to style became integral to his political idealism and inseparable from his belief in an insurrectionary outwardness.

As an environmentalist one must ask: what place for earthliness in Said’s worldliness? In 2003, a month before his death, Said concluded an essay for Counterpunch with a yearning for a future informed by “alternative commu- nities all across the world, informed by alternative information, and keenly aware of the environmental, human rights, and libertarian impulses that bind us together in this tiny planet.”1 Despite this late acknowledgment, one would be hard-pressed to call him, in any conventional sense, environmen- tally minded. However, it is quite possible, indeed probable, that as the ener- gies of the transnational environmental justice movements I discuss in this book permeated the humanities more deeply, Said would have recognized their pertinence to his own work on bulldozed olive groves, land rights, and water politics, issues that come alive, most graphically, in After the Last Sky.

If Said was dismissive of what he called “the petty fi efdoms within the world of intellectual production,” such impatience is equally evident in the writings of Rachel Carson, an even more maverick fi gure.2 Carson believed

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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that the mission of the public intellectual included exposing the euphe- misms and bromides promulgated by cold-war America’s military-indus- trial complex. As she famously insisted, herbicides and insecticides should be unmasked as biocides: those supposedly precise weapons in the “war” on pests targeted nothing more precise than life itself. Almost two decades before neoliberalism implemented breakneck deregulations, Carson fore- warned that, if left unchecked, capitalism’s appetite for the unregulated, spe- cialist consumer product would leave behind a trail of nonspecialist fatalities.

Carson redirected some of the national anxiety away from the Red Peril to the aerosol can of Doom perched on the kitchen shelf. By reveal- ing how small, domestic choices can help secure a more inhabitable world, Silent Spring altered the landscape of fear and, crucially, fear’s time frame as well. The book, which appeared just weeks before the Cuban Missile Cri- sis, exhorted an America awash with paranoia to take charge of its fears by changing the way it lived in the short term to reduce long-term catastrophic risk. Carson’s extended view of risk’s time frame encouraged citizens to campaign for more stringent environmental legislation, in America and nations beyond. In so doing, Carson gave us pointers on how to hope and act across domains large and small.

Like Said, Carson voiced a profound suspicion of the certifi ed expert whom she saw as implicated in the economics of professional capitula- tion in ways that jeopardized society’s capacity to sustain uncompromised research. Carson had almost nothing to say directly about empire, class, and race, yet her work speaks powerfully to the environmentalism of the poor because she was passionately concerned with the complicity of the military- industrial complex in disguising toxicity, both physically and rhetorically. Her approach, moreover, helped hasten the shift from a conservationist ide- ology to the more socioenvironmental outlook that has proven so enabling for environmental justice movements. Above all, Carson was a renegade synthesizer: her gestures toward the big picture challenged institutionalized defi nitions of what constituted originality. In exposing the dubious funding of partitioned knowledge—and its baleful public health implications—she recast herself as an insurrectionary generalist.

It is a measure of how tentative the rapprochement between postcolonial and environmental studies is that Said never mentions Carson in his work.3 (It is a measure too, one should add, of Said’s persistent, baleful indifference

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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to any ascendant female voice.) Yet Carson in crucial ways anticipated Said’s skepticism toward compartmentalized expertise, toward the pol- luted funding structures of research, and toward obfuscatory language. She too mistrusted academic endeavor that, cushioned by corporate fund- ing, feigned objectivity; she also mistrusted scholars interested in talking, undisturbed by inexpert audiences, always only to themselves. For Carson the culture—and cult—of the specialist was, as Said would later recognize, intellectually debilitating and ethically lamentable, entrammelled as it was in cold-war geopolitics.

Ramachandra Guha is the third unclassifi able fi gure from whom I have drawn particular inspiration. A sociologist by training, an environmental historian by instinct, a journalist, opinion maker, and sports writer, Guha is a man who, in his own judgment, decided to be “methodologically pro- miscuous.”4 Like Carson, Guha chose the complex mix of freedoms and risks that arise from working outside the tenured security, obligations, and compromises that university positions entail. Equally discomfi ted by dis- ciplinary and national chauvinisms, he has arguably done more than any intellectual to dispel the myth that environmentalism is “a full-stomach phenomenon” affordable only to the middle and upper classes of the world’s richest societies.5 He has drawn on—indeed, drawn out—neglected strands of American and European environmental thought while refusing them a global centrality.6 As far back as 1989, he dismantled the well-intentioned but ultimately counterproductive project of deep ecology that, while pos- ing as planetary, was at root profoundly parochial.7 Guha underscored the need to keep environmentalism connected to global questions of distribu- tive justice, connected as well to the unequal burdens of consumption and militarization imposed on our fi nite planet by the world’s rich and poor, in their capacity as individuals and as nation-states. While unearthing tena- cious traditions of environmental thought and activism among the poor, Guha has resisted sentimentalizing “traditional” cultures as peopled by “natural” ecologists.

Guha has sought out collaborators who complement his expertise, nota- bly the Indian ecologist and anthropologist Madhav Gadgil and the Catalan economist Joan Martinez-Alier. Together they have generated an indispens- able vocabulary that informs this book (and many others across an array of disciplines). Terms like “the environmentalism of the poor,” “ecosystem

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people,” “omnivores” (those wealthy consumers who overstrain the planet), and “socioenvironmentalism” were all brought into circulation by Guha and his collaborators.8 Several of these terms have gone on to achieve trac- tion in the broader worlds of the media and public policy. That success is testimony to Guha’s rhetorical adaptability as he strives to be innovative yet accessible, alert to the opportunities on offer across occasions, geographies, and genres. Extrainstitutional by instinct, disciplined yet never ploddingly disciplinary, Guha is an indispensable exemplar of what used to be called the free-fl oating intellectual.

Writing outside the mainstreams of both Marxism and 1980s Western environmentalism, Guha had to weather, on the one hand, scorn from third-world radicals who dismissed environmentalism as reactionary, self- indulgent frippery and, on the other, from deep ecologists who charged him with being anti-ecological and anti-American.9 Yet over the long haul his writings have decisively reshaped many debates that animate the environ- mental humanities and social sciences.10

It is from these three diverse, unclassifi able intellectuals—a Palestinian literary scholar exiled in America, a marine biologist with roots in rural Pennsylvania, and a social scientist from Dehra Dun in the Himalayan foot- hills—that I have drawn particular inspiration, as much from their opposi- tional examples as from the tenor of their thought.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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Slow Violence and the

Environmentalism of the Poor

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=3300958. Created from uow on 2022-03-28 09:10:17.

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Introduction

I think of globalization like a light which shines brighter and brighter on a few people and the rest are in darkness, wiped out. They simply can’t be seen. Once you get used to not seeing some- thing, then, slowly, it’s no longer possible to see it.

—Arundhati Roy

I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. . . . I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly ineffi ciently low compared to Los Angeles. . . . Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty indus- tries to the Least Developed Countries?

—Lawrence Summers, confi dential World Bank memo, December 12, 1991

When Lawrence Summers, then president of the World Bank, advocated that the bank develop a scheme to export rich nation gar- bage, toxic waste, and heavily polluting industries to Africa, he did so in the calm voice of global managerial reasoning.1 Such a scheme, Summers elaborated, would help correct an ineffi cient global imbalance in toxicity. Underlying his plan is an overlooked but crucial subsidiary benefi t that he

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[ 2 ]

outlined: offl oading rich-nation toxins onto the world’s poorest continent would help ease the growing pressure from rich-nation environmentalists who were campaigning against garbage dumps and industrial effl uent that they condemned as health threats and found aesthetically offensive. Sum- mers thus rationalized his poison-redistribution ethic as offering a double gain: it would benefi t the United States and Europe economically, while helping appease the rising discontent of rich-nation environmentalists. Summers’ arguments assumed a direct link between aesthetically unsightly waste and Africa as an out-of-sight continent, a place remote from green activists’ terrain of concern. In Summers’ win-win scenario for the global North, the African recipients of his plan were triply discounted: discounted as political agents, discounted as long-term casualties of what I call in this book “slow violence,” and discounted as cultures possessing environmental practices and concerns of their own. I begin with Summers’ extraordinary proposal because it captures the strategic and representational challenges posed by slow violence as it impacts the environments—and the environ- mentalism—of the poor.

Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my con- viction that we urgently need to rethink—politically, imaginatively, and theoretically—what I call “slow violence.” By slow violence I mean a vio- lence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruc- tion that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacu- lar nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic chal- lenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnifi cation, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable represen- tational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or

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introduction

[ 3 ]

climate change—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.

Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional defi nitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxic- ity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conven- tional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we per- ceive and respond to a variety of social affl ictions—from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferat- ing confl icts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded.

Politically and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft. Falling bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches, volca- noes, and tsunamis have a visceral, eye-catching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even centuries, cannot match. Stories of toxic buildup, massing greenhouse gases, and accelerated species loss due to ravaged habitats are all cataclysmic, but they are scientifi cally convoluted cataclysms in which casualties are postponed, often for generations. In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the mak- ing, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant politi- cal intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time?

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s l o w v i o l e n c e a n d t h e e n v i r o n m e n t a l i s m o f t h e p o o r

[4 ]

This book’s second, related focus concerns the environmentalism of the poor, for it is those people lacking resources who are the principal casual- ties of slow violence. Their unseen poverty is compounded by the invisibil- ity of the slow violence that permeates so many of their lives. Our media bias toward spectacular violence exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosys- tems treated as disposable by turbo-capitalism while simultaneously exac- erbating the vulnerability of those whom Kevin Bale, in another context, has called “disposable people.”2 It is against such conjoined ecological and human disposability that we have witnessed a resurgent environmentalism of the poor, particularly (though not exclusively) across the so-called global South. So a central issue that emerges is strategic: if the neoliberal era has intensifi ed assaults on resources, it has also intensifi ed resistance, whether through isolated site-specifi c struggles or through activism that has reached across national boundaries in an effort to build translocal alliances.

“The poor” is a compendious category subject to almost infi nite local variation as well as to fracture along fault lines of ethnicity, gender, race, class, region, religion, and generation. Confronted with the militarization of both commerce and development, impoverished communities are often assailed by coercion and bribery that test their cohesive resilience. How much control will, say, a poor hardwood forest community have over the mix of subsistence and market strategies it deploys in attempts at adaptive survival? How will that community negotiate competing defi nitions of its own poverty and long-term wealth when the guns, the bulldozers, and the moneymen arrive? Such communities typically have to patch together threadbare improvised alliances against vastly superior military, corporate, and media forces. As such, impoverished resource rebels can seldom afford to be single-issue activists: their green commitments are seamed through with other economic and cultural causes as they experience environmental threat not as a p



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