For this post, I’d like to briefly highlight what I think is a productive overlap between Rob Nixon’s powerful suggestion of the role of the activist-writer and Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism. To do this, I want to look at what Nixon calls “long-termers” (17).  Long-termers are those “who must live inside the ecological aftermath” of those governmental, corporate, or NGOs (called short-termers by Nixon) who seek to “extract, despoil, and depart” (17). What is important about these terms is that they are capacious. While short-termers can include a range of actors from individual tourists to more abstracted notions of corporate power structures, so too can long-termers include more than just the local or indigenous communities. Long-termers can also be nonhuman actors. And as Bennett helps us see, if the nonhuman world can include actors that create affective relationships amongst themselves and the human world, part of those affective relationships are the stories they have to tell. 

Speaking directly, the world tracks what happens to it. Scholars in the humanities now discuss geological strata as one would a book–leafing through the layers of rocks as though they were pages detailing the history of climate change and our own interference therein (there are layers of radioactive material found in recent strata which mark the advent of our nuclear age). These stone voices are those that speak in the longest of terms. 

In advocating for the voices of the long-termers, Nixon offers the role of the activist-writer as one who speaks truth to power, dispels the production of doubt, and amplifies the voices of those whom power tries to silence. But most importantly, the role of the activist-writer is to help remember. Specifically, it is to help remember the stories of those who are silenced by the construction of concrete boundaries.   Narratives of violence, Nixon suggests, erase the reverberations of thereof and create a myth of calm that is punctuated only by brief upheaval; once the disaster is over, it says, all will return again to as it was.  This itself is a myth aided by modernity in its construction. Amitav Ghosh,  in his book The Great Derangement argues, in part,  that the biggest threat to a full representation of climate change in fiction (and in general) is a need to adhere to modernity’s narrative of gradual change, especially in the context of economic and structural upheaval (21). That is, we are less likely to take serious the stories and warnings that tell of great cataclysm because they upset our shared narrative of relative calm.  Disaster, when it happens, is a break from the what is expected, rather than a state of being that exists independently alongside of us. As is the case in Nixon’s piece, boundaries aid in obscuring the underlying state of entanglement and uneasy definitions that structure the world. 

Nixon writes that “To confront slow violence requires, then, that we plot and give figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time” and that we need stories that are “low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects” (10).

This is one such story.  There are old stone tablets that are placed along the shoreline of Japan that warn of tsunamis. They have been there for hundreds of years. They mark high-water lines and urge in stone voices “Do not build your homes below this point” (Ghosh 55). For the sake of brevity, you can learn more about them here from this wonderful article. There are stones like these near the Fukushima Daiichi plant–above where it was built.  The solution that the humanities can offer is in helping to cultivate an ability to listen to the stories of those surrounding us. And they can teach us to do so before disaster has struck, since it is usually after the fact that we remember there were warnings in the first place.

I invoke these stones because for me they exemplify the intersection of Bennett’s call for an openness to our material surroundings and the need to listen to the voices of the long-termers. The stone voices are an instance of the voices of long-termers–those people who came before and tried to warn of danger but whose voices were drowned out by a drive for capital or for the sake of progress myths. The soft warnings, even of the human inscribed in the landscape itself, are drowned out most by those who stand to profit from ignoring them. The goal of the activist-writer is to amplify the voices of the long-termers–whoever or whatever they may be. That is something that the humanities in their creative capacity can do.