User:Allaboutrocks/Slow violence

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My edits for this section have been bolded and taken from the existing article on slow violence. The non-bolded sections are from the original article and do not have the accompanying citations.

Lead section

Energy and energy consumption are also connected with the creation and continuation of slow violence.

Definitions

Events or actions that are defined as violent often have immediate, dramatic, obvious results. Violence is therefore, as argued by Nixon, rarely recognized when it occurs slowly or larger geographical scales.

Nixon defines slow violence as "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". Thom Davies however challenges the standard that slow violence is 'out of sight', but instead could be out of sight to a particular person or people. He also states that a lack of understandings of process, interactions, and effects can result in slow violence. Shannon O'Lear provides another definition stating that slow violence is indirect and latent, and that "it can result from epistemic and political dominance of particular narratives or understandings."

In 1969, Johan Galtung conceived of structural violence. Some views include that Structural violence and slow violence are closely linked, as structural inequality can morph into forms of slow violence. However, slow violence is thought to be different from structural violence, as slow violence occurs over a period of many years or generations. Davies contrasts an innately immobile and fixed nature of structural violence with his and Nixon's ideas of a geographically and temporally dynamic movement of slow violence over time.

Examples

Slow Violence in Energy

Petrochemical infrastructure

Communities surrounded by petrochemical infrastructure endure toxic pollution, which is defined by Thom Davies as a type of violence. However, this type of slow violence is not entirely invisible to the people they impact. People subject to slow violence gradually witness the daily impacts of that violence. Davies records instances of slow violence caused by petrochemical infrastructure in Freetown, Louisiana, where 136 petrochemical plants reside. This instance of slow violence is a form of environmental racism, as it is occurring on land with a population of 95% African Americans.

Fairfield Renewable Energy Project

In 2009, a trash incinerator called the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project was set to be constructed in Maryland's Curtis Bay neighborhood. The energy the incinerator generated from burning waste and garbage would power other neighborhoods located in Baltimore and was presented as a renewable energy source. At the time, state officials were considering reclassifying incineration as a Tier 1 renewable energy source. However, Curtis Bay community members, high school students, activists, and scholar Chloe Ahmann argued that the project would also build upon the preexisting slow violence the neighborhood was facing in the form of further pollution. Curtis Bay is surrounded by various forms of industry such as parts of the petrochemical, steel, fertilizer, oil, and chemical industries, as well as medical waste incinerator and various dumps. The way the impacts of these industries and other projects have accumulated over multiple generations is an example of slow violence. As described by Ahmann, health conditions – such as gastroschisis, cancers, and fatal cases of asthma – have appeared over time, all of which are concentrated in this neighborhood. Ahmann also points out how residents’ mindsets can illustrate the impact of slow violence. Many remarked on a feeling of normalcy about these conditions – that this was how it had always been. Others expressed frustrations about the inability to concretely connect current health conditions to their former occupations or long residency in the neighborhood that exposed them to hazards and unhealthy conditions. The Fairfield Renewable Energy Project was met with resistance and eventually stopped. It also brought attention to other acts of slow violence stemming from the industrial structure of the Curtis Bay neighborhood.

Jharia coalfields

The Jharia coalfields are the location of India’s biggest and longest running coal mines. They account for a significant percentage of the country’s coal production.

Coal mining is an extractive industry because it is a process that removes natural resources from nature. Extractive processes have been recognized by Nixon to create a specific type of tension that is characteristic of slow violence. For example, the workers that initially arrive to do the extractive labor and those that remain after and live through the longer-term impacts have different experiences. In the case of the Jharia coalfields, this is evident in both impacts on workers’ health and impacts on the surrounding environment. Both are examples of slow violence because, while they have harmful effects on the peoples and environments in the area, these effects are gradual. It is these collective effects that gradually accumulate which Nixon identifies as slow violence. In the case of Jharia miners or other laborers, their health is impacted by consistent coal fires that release harmful chemicals like “sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, lead and methane” into the environment. The effects range from respiratory challenges that may develop into disorders and nervous system damage. Environmental impacts are also spread out over time. Before mining started, the areas were “thick forests…populated with tribal communities”. To create space for mining, these areas were deforested, and the tribal communities displaced. These communities also became “vulnerable to large-scale capitalist exploitation in the form of cheap causal labor”. The environmental slow violence that occurred in the area has appeared in the form of chemical changes in the soil and water, unpredictable land movement, underground fires, and physical landscape degradation. S. and Shah attribute this to “years of unscientific mining and lack of standard practices such as backfilling”.

The coal industry supports energy modernity, or “the improved conditions of social life enabled by energy transition from less efficient energy sources…to more efficient ones”. The physical and mental distance from urban environments that the Jharia coalfields embody is an example of the ways that the impacts of energy are often invisible, hidden from the consumer or actor. While energy is consumed, seemingly inconsequentially, the environment and the health of miners slowly deteriorates.

Indigenous Reserve 12

Slow violence has been recorded affecting the Indigenous peoples that once inhabited Yuquot, British Columbia. Indigenous peoples were relocated from Yuquot to Ahaminaquus Indian Reserve 12, in Vancouver Island by the Canadian government in the late 1960s  The Department of Indian Affairs leased 30 acres of this land to Tasis Company who opened a Kraft pulp mill in 1968, on the same day of the closure of the Yuquot day school. The mill produced noise, air and water pollution, while also resulting in a road constructed over Muchalaht graves. Over time, the Department of Indian Affairs required the Indigenous peoples to give up their rights to reside on Ahaminaquus land, as well as their right to pursue health related claims from their residency. The Indigenous peoples claimed to have lost cultural opportunities and practices as a direct result of the pollution, as it was degrading the land. Paige Raibmon states that these circumstances represent modern-day colonialism.

Policing

Contemporary policing has been reported as a form of slow violence against marginalized communities. Rory Kramer and Brianna Remster state that police impose slow violence on Black and Brown Americans through racial and class-based harms inflicted by the state. Slow violence results in cultural trauma for people of colour, which is defined as "when members of a collective feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future in fundamental and irrevocable ways."

Women and Slow Violence

Women globally face instances of slow violence. Amy Piedalue who conducted research in Hyderabad, India states that the women "live and work in spaces of dispossession and marginalization", and that the slow violence they endure is specific to the dense urban settlement they exist in. They experience mobility constraints, due to economic resources being limited, as well as public safety concerns. Piedalue also reports that slow violence in these urban settlements is seen through illness, unemployment, hunger, the decaying of sanitation and infrastructures, and limited access to education.

Resistance to slow violence

Manipulations of time

Slow nonviolence has been suggested as a method of resistance to slow violence by Piedalue who theorizes it, "as focused on long-term incremental change, which not only responds to violence but is also productive of alternative visions and modalities of nonviolent social relationships and interdependencies". Piedalue states that slow nonviolence is a method of undoing future and past violence. Slow nonviolence approaches include protests, engagement from media sources, and public events, but as Piedalue states it operates mostly "through the intimacies of everyday life" and spaces such as homes or schools.

Other studies of slow violence, such as Chloe Ahmann’s report on the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project, highlight the different ways time can be used to create resistance to slow violence. She describes three types: incrementality, deferral or delay, and concentration. Incrementality most closely mirrors slow violence by working to gradually create resistance, increasing its effects over time. An example of this could be small victories in legislative battles, stalling or delaying projects momentarily, or slowly building public awareness to create a growing community of resistance. This strategy accumulates and creates counter-systems as it progresses. Deferral or delay often takes the form of enforcement of regulations or legislative action. These strategies use the timelines of judicial or legislative processes – which are often lengthy – as a barrier that limits the ability of those creating or building upon slow violence. This then eases the pressure of time constraints for activists or protestors. Finally, concentration utilizes deadlines and quick action to pressure actors and force a decision to be made.

Environmental photography

Environmental photography is a valuable tool for resisting, or at least uncovering the effects of, slow violence. Capturing the impacts of slow violence can interrupt the invisibility of long timelines over which it acts or unhide it from view if it is physically obscured or distant. Photographs of the Jharia coalfields, as described by Meenakshi S. and Krupa Shah, contrast the “slowly unfolding horrors of slow violence” with the “quicker sensation of the visual medium”. In cases like these where slow violence is occurring in locations set far aside from public view, photography can bridge this gap. Photography not only captures the effects of slow violence in the moment, but through exposure to the realities of these extractive energy industries, it can actively resist slow violence by bringing these affects to a wider audience.

Other Examples

Communities impacted by slow violence can resist this violence through counter-violent agendas. Resistance towards slow violence often occurs in the form of environmentalism. These movements when countering slow violence may refuse the distinction between environmental and social justice. For example, in Kenya, the Green Belt Movement mobilize the gradual violence of deforestation and soil erosion. The Movement was positioned at the crossroads between environmental and women's rights, because the environmental degradation being countered has common origins with the dispossession of economic resources during the colonial regime, especially towards women.