Question 2: In what ways are precarity, violence, and environmental degradation intertwined?
Oh boy, what a prompt, and where to begin?
I’d like to focus mainly on Nixon’s text this week. I found it fascinating and found myself frequently going to the margins to scrawl out examples to refer back to later. I’d like to begin with a focus on Nixon’s definition of ‘slow violence’ itself on page 2, in which he defines the subject 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.” This definition is something that most of us understand innately, but something that requires us to pause in order to parse out its implications. Nixon’s definition comes in the context of a confidential World Bank memo advocating the large-scale dumping of waste in the poorest countries in Africa. My mind strayed to a short documentary I saw years ago while my sister was stationed in Albania with the Peace Corps.
Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqkSH1YLXdg
The documentary, titled “Land of Waste,” provides an account of Albania’s import of waste from all corners of the European continent, much of which is designated as ‘recyclables’ as it leaves its countries of origin. Albania now faces growing mountains of foreign trash despite legislation that nominally bans the import of waste. My first time viewing this doc years ago, I remember having the dueling thoughts of “These European countries should produce less trash” and “It’s the institutional corruption in Albania that enables this sort of accumulation.”
Years later and a bit more well-read, I find myself returning to the doc with fresh eyes. We are able to see the corruption inherent in Albanian government, yes, but also the complicity of capitalists throughout Europe that exploit that weakness in a foreign power’s weak democracy. Nixon speaks frequently of the idea of “out of sight, out of mind” as a guiding force in politics, and the accumulating trash in one of Europe’s poorest countries bears witness to it. Not all coffee grounds and banana peels, this trash is rarely inspected for safety before being dumped in or near residential areas.
Elsewhere in the country, in cities like Elbasan, imported scrap metal is sorted by hand and smelted to make much of the country’s steel (17:55). The danger inherent in this process provides an example of both more ‘traditional’ forms of violence and Nixon’s idea of ‘slow violence.’ Scrap metal coming into Elbasan originates throughout Europe, though a major portion comes from neighboring Balkan states, where decades-old ordinance is commonly among the scrap. Workers have been killed in violent explosions while handling grenades and unused ammunition. Much like the lingering effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam (Dixon 14), human conflicts that were supposed to conclude decades ago are still creating human casualties.
Weakly-enforced environmental regulations in Albania mean that the foundries in Elbasan constantly belch dust and toxic fumes into the air around the city, resulting in a local atmosphere with 3 times as much pollution as the European average. Residents have higher rates of asthma and lung disease, as well as a risk of respiratory cancer twice the national average. The risks associated with living in Elbasan capture Dixon’s idea of slow violence as “not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded” (3). European countries like France and Austria have built a robust system of recycling and trash pickup that eliminates or renders invisible their waste, and the rest of the developed world looks on in wonder at these relatively spotless, idyllic lands. Meanwhile, that waste is shipped to places where the economy is depressed enough that processing French or Austrian waste is economically viable. There, the accumulation of waste proves slowly catastrophic for public health, whether through the literal poisoning of the populace or the more covert undermining of a country’s image abroad.
The global north places countries like Albania, Myanmar, Benin, et cetera under the pressure of improving their economies to the level of a ‘developed nation’ while exploiting those same countries for their labor or resources, or in this case, their ability to serve as expendable real estate. The end of the documentary draws attention to the state of Albania’s application for membership to the EU, stating that Union members still seem unconvinced by the small county’s reforms (28:40). Implicit in this statement is the country’s failure to address issues of normalized corruption. Despite this stance, economic entities in EU member states continue to contribute to this corruption in order to offload their garbage. They continue to take advantage of a neighbor’s economic precarity while denying that same country the economic prestige of EU membership. It calls to mind the old parental phrase, “Do as I say; not as I do.”
– Alex
Thank you for the link to the Land of Waste documentary and your thoughtful connections between the readings and the film. Nixon’s framing of slow violence, at once out of sight and mind because it is gradual and dispersed, works very well here. I think Solnit’s call to explicitly name global warming and the unfolding effects of climate change as violence is helpful as “…the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.” The work of identifying acts of violence – gradual such as the build up of trash or immediate in the explosions – and naming it as such also means an interrogation of the entangled politics, human and non-human relationships, as well as scales of time. Surfacing the actors, human and non-human, caught up in the webs of this damage could draw on Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism. Tracing these webs of actors exposes the local violence to Elbasan as well as the damage to all those actors in the chain of extracting resources to production to consumption to dumping. For me, this raises questions of violence against activists working to protect ecosystems from which resources are drawn as well as issues of exploitative labor. I wonder if Bennett’s inclusion of non-human actors within these webs fits within Karen Barad’s notions of entanglements. As defined by Barad, engagements are introducible relations of responsibility, not the intertwining of separate entities; meaning there is no fixed divisions between self and other, cause and effect, past and present and future. There are no fixed borders between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘trash’ and ‘useful/desired object’, rather, these designations shift into relationships, networks of interactions and responsibilities. Such small (geological), yet large (human) timescales and entanglements highlight a problem of perception and representation: how to perceive and represent the network of connections and effects diffused over centuries (450 years) and millennia, especially when these connections and effects may well go beyond human history (when geological strata which include plastiglomerates, or rocks infused with plastic)?
Your post draws out the entangled nature of the trash being dumped in Albania along such political, social, and time. I particularly like your exposure of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ to whom – as there are many who bear witness to such violences. While I agree with Solnit, these violences need to be named explicitly, many who are bearing witness are already sharing the subtle and direct destruction.