Often we think of environmental devastation as a matter of place—but in what ways does it echo through and against the human experience of time?

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In “Spinster Ecology,” Sarah Ensor argues for a queer ecocritical futurity—that is, an approach to the future that neither (a) rejects future generations altogether nor (b) focuses on heteronormative time, marked by the nuclear family, linear inheritance, and biological reproduction. She lays out the ways that ecocriticism might be informed by queer temporalities (see also Pryor).

The spinster embodies one such temporality. She “has no marriageable future” and so “comes to have no past” (Ensor 414). She is a figure made asexual, with no infancy, no puberty, no old age, and no death. For those around her, looking on, she appears to be stuck in time, or standing outside of it. Outside of the linear time society runs by and which we have deeply internalized.

This holds true, at least in a similar way, for victims of environmental catastrophe. Following the Chernobyl disaster, those with homes near the power plant, living in modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, or Russia, had to ask themselves, will time go on? will we move (on)? Many of course had no choice. They continued their daily lives, harvesting vegetables from radioactive fields, as one woman remembers “with horror” (Emmett and Nye 110).

Others have no choice in that they can’t go on as before. They wait for someone to acknowledge their suffering, to take responsibility for it and make it right. They stand beside time, hoping it will resume, even as the lives of family, friends, and loved ones carry on without them. There is no resolution, no denouement. They are stuck in one moment of time: the post-disaster.

Nuclear disaster cuts life in two, into the time before and the time after. As with other traumas, you can’t unknow what you’ve learned, or unexperience what’s happened to you.

In “What if a murderer appeared at your bedroom door?,” an episode of the podcast This Is Actually Happening, a young woman explains what it’s like to barely escape death. A neighbor targeted her house without reason, crept into her bedroom, stabbed her in the chest with a knife, killed her mother, and wounded her aunt and grandmother as well.

The world was no longer a safe place. She describes living in constant fear and anxiety, always wondering if the unthinkable might happen (again). She couldn’t return home, couldn’t hold a job, couldn’t afford to move, often couldn’t move her body at all. Any comfort in the present, fondness for the past, or hopes for the future faded into impossibility. Her experience of time was irrevocably altered.

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Rachel Carson warns of the unpredictable effects brought on by environmental toxins, which may well be underway but whose movement from cause to effect, or from original injury to secondary symptoms, remain uncharted. She writes:

we are already in the future—not simply because today marks one of yesterday’s possible futures, but also because the future is here well before it makes itself legible to us as such. (Ensor 418–19)

Today stands as one of yesterday’s possible futures, but in the case of nuclear disaster, this means playing a game of chance and facing the unimaginable. The future arrives silently, microsievert by microsievert, until a composite of medical conditions emerges.

Little Voices from Fukushima (Kamanaka) shares this lived experience. Besides daily exposure to radiation and these stubborn, sometimes maddeningly vague medical conditions, many residents near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant run the risk of developing a serious—or, if not detected and treated, fatal—case of thyroid cancer.

The clock is ticking faster, but no one takes notice unless it stops altogether. When it comes to environmental catastrophes, only deaths are counted; only deaths count. Anything less cannot be quantified, and so is better left ignored. This is slow violence, a violence all the more insidious for biding time and keeping out of sight, a violence “typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2).

Not only will the children in Little Voices from Fukushima never know the simple pleasure of playing in bare feet in their own backyard. They also come to see their parents as fallible and emotionally complex much too soon, a perspective they otherwise might not have taken on until late adolescence. They have to attend frequent medical check-ups, a burden most stave off until old age. The time of innocence is lost.

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Victims of environmental disaster, like the spinster of Sarah Orne Jewett’s imagination, live among “futures that will never come to pass” (Ensor 420). They experience the present as a future that has “failed to become” (424).

Examples from nuclear waste are literal. One woman in the documentary Little Voices from Fukushima expresses her reluctance to bring another child into the world, given the quality of life for her and her community in the zone of exclusion. Veterans and local civilians exposed to depleted uranium in ammunition bear children with birth defects or become infertile. Futures poisoned still in gestation; futures abandoned before they could even know the present.

An episode of This American Life, “One Last Thing Before I Go,” elaborates on this state of being caught up in futures that will never become. As Ira Glass explains, the tsunami and earthquake of March 2011, which also caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster, killed 19,000 people in Japan. 2,500 are still missing.

One man, Itaru Sasaki, built an old-fashioned telephone booth in his garden. He needed a place to grieve the disappearance of his cousin. The phone doesn’t work, but he would go there to talk anyway. The phone booth has since gained some renown in Otsuchi and the surrounding area as a means of speaking to those who have died or gone missing. 

What is so moving about excerpts from the phone booth is their everydayness. As they speak to loved ones, who were never supposed to leave or be lost, people find “understated” ways of saying I love you, or I miss you. A young girl tells her father, “I started tennis in junior high school. I’m not in the top eight.” Her lived present is marked by the future denied to her: a future in which he is still alive, standing witness even to small failures.

One wife says, “I feel like you’re still alive. […] We had so many things we wanted to do together.”

A husband promises, “I’ll come again, OK? […] I’ll be back.”

Like so many others, they wait out the present in a haze of nostalgia for what might have been, catching only glimpses of a trajectory imagined but never realized.

Education is not enough.

“To educate” is an easy/trope answer to the question what contributions and/or interventions the environmental humanities can make to address environmental issues. Education is important, no doubt but the knowledge about environmental issues is not enough. The knowledge so-to-say is out there and pretty much everyone is aware that we as human beings have an impact on the world we live in and that stewardship of the environment is important. Even people who deny the existence of climate change, usually under the guise of saying, there’s nothing to be done/doing something is too expensive, but they’ll admit, even if it is out of self-interest, that we should not destroy the environment. The difficulty arises when education is promoted as a straightforward answer, as if knowledge is the solution.

Creating compassion and empathy are the actual interventions the environmental humanities can make. As Bennett highlights in her piece on Vibrant Matter, everything is interconnected, and the most mundane items/objects are not just objects, they have a vibrant past, present and will persist in the future. The human subject stands in relation to them but is not superior to them. Therefore, the challenge of environmental humanities is to create compassion for the interconnectedness of matter. This means developing an understanding for even the things we actually cannot empathize with. The danger of this perspective of empathy might be that it still only values the environment from a human-centered perspective because that’s what we focalize human action through.

Highlighting only the impact that human action has on the environment would not go far enough, this might be a good start, but this once again would create a hierarchy that only values environmental issues in the way that it impacts humans, without focalizing the environment itself with all its constituting matter.

Highlighting the slow violence of environmental exploitation on the poor goes a step in the direction of creating empathy. Exporting waste to impoverished nations doesn’t get rid of said waste, it just puts it out of sight out of mind, where the poor have to deal with the consequences of the exploitation of others. The precarity comes from the fact that the poor seemingly “choose” to have slow violence exerted upon themselves. They decide to be exploited but because they do not really have a choice in the matter due to the dependence on the West, they are caught in a vicious circle, from which Nixon sees them emerging through environmentalism. They in his mind, emerge from the rubble of exploitation because they have no other choice. They see the impact that it has had on them and cannot but create and practice environmentalism.

Unfortunately, the third dimension of Nixon’s argument, the writer-activist seems to, once again, be founded in intellectualism rather than the environmentalism from the margins that he propagates. The writer-activist can certainly have an impact but their subject position seems to not come from within the ranks of the poor but an outsider position, in a way, once again, an educator, but educators who just transmit information, as heartfelt as they may be, are ineffective if they don’t create identification through empathy.

Martina

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.

 

 

 

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