Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

The book’s main theme is how slow violence has the greatest impact on the most vulnerable people. In an age dominated by social media, the internet, and waning attention spans, spectacles of violence, which environmental catastrophes often do not offer, typically trigger activism. This “representational bias against slow violence” (13) makes the impacts of environmental catastrophes easier to ignore, especially by governments, NGOs, and corporations in more economically developed countries. Nixon argues that this bias has dangerous consequences because the both the human and environmental casualties of slow violence are often not counted as casualties. To help readers overcome their representational bias against slow violence, Nixon discusses numerous writer-activists who are detailing different facets of environmental injustices committed against the most vulnerable communities.

One facet of slow violence against vulnerable communities is displacement. To Nixon, there are two forms of displacement. The first is the forced removal of vulnerable communities. As he demonstrates, the dominant powers at the local, national, and transnational scales are responsible for this forced removal. The second form he proposes is “a more radical notion of displacement, one that, instead of referring solely to the movement of people from their places of belonging, refers rather to the loss of the land and resources beneath them, a loss that leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable” (19).