Fluent Essays

RequirementsWrite a summary for each reading. A summary highlights (emphasizes) the main points of a text.Structure your summary as follows:Name the author (or authors) and title of the text.Identify 2-3 of the major points or ideas of the reading. Be concise. Accurately represent the author’s writings. Use direct quotations from the text.Conclusion: What findings (evidence, conclusions) does the author give?Example of opening sentence:In “__________” (title of article) by __________ (author’s first and last name), the author documents…• Don’t copy sentences verbatim from the text. Summarize the reading in your own words.• Use present tense, for example:The article documents, describes, examines, etc.The author observes, writes, concludes by saying, etc.• Type the following at the top left or right corner of the front-page:Your first & last nameEnvironmental Problems & SolutionsWinter 2020Reading title & author(s)Getting startedGrab the reader’s attention by:Citing an interesting fact or statistic from the reading.Opening with a quote from the reading.Posing a question your summary will answer.Using examples from the reading.Word length• 2.5 pages typed.• 12-sized font (any style).• Double-spaced. rob_nixon_slow_violence__gender__and_the_environmentalism_of_the_poor.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview H z z z C H z C C is almost a crime / Maathai as a writer-activist working in conjunction with environmentally motivated women from poor communities, most effectively acknowledge, represent, and counter the violence of delayed effects? Maathai’s memoir, Unbowed, offers us an entry point into the complex, shifting collective strategies that the Green Belt Movement (GBM) devised to oppose foreshortened definitions of environmental and human security. What emerges from the GBM’s’s ascent is an alternative narrative of national Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, cofounded by Wangari Maathai, serves as an animating instance of environmental activism among poor communities who have mobilized against slow violence, in this case, the the gradual violence of deforestation and soil erosion. At the heart of to mean movement’s activism stand these urgent questions: What does it be at risk? What does it mean to be secure? In an era when sustainability call has become a buzzword, what are the preconditions for what I would can how goal, “sustainable security”? And in seeking to advance that elusive —Bertolt Brccht, ‘An die Nachgcborenefl” (To posterity) Ah, what an age it is / When to speak of trees For it is a kind of silence about injustice! Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor 4 I [129] security, one that would challenge the militaristic, male version embodied and imposed by Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi during his twenty-four years of authoritarian rule from 1978 to 2002. The Green Belt Movement’s rival narrative of national security sought to foreground the longer timeline of slow violence, both in exposing environmental degradation and in advancing environmental recovery. At the same time, Unbowed provides us with an entry point into some challenging questions about the movement memoir as an imaginative form, not least the relationship between singular autobiography and the collective history of a social movement. The Green Belt Movement had modest beginnings. On Earth Day in 1977, Maathai and a small cohort of likeminded women planted seven trees to commemorate Kenyan women who had been environmental activists. By the time Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, the move ment had created 6,ooo local tree nurseries and employed ioo,ooo women to plant 30 million trees, mostly in Kenya, but in a dozen other African coun tries as well.2 The movement’s achievements have been both material—pro viding employment while helping anchor soil, generate shade and firewood, and replenish watersheds—and symbolic, by inspiring other reforestation movements across the globe. As such, the Green Belt Movement has sym bolized and enacted the conviction that (as Lester Brown has stressed in another context) “a strategy for eradicating poverty will not succeed if an economy’s environmental support systems are collapsing.”3 Early on, Maathai alighted on the idea of tree planting as the movement’s core activity, one that over time would achieve a brilliant symbolic economy, becoming an iconic act of civil disobedience as the women’s efforts to help arrest soil erosion segued into a struggle against illicit deforestation perpe trated by Kenya’s draconian regime. Neither soil erosion nor deforestation posed a sudden threat, but both were persistently and pervasively injurious to Kenya’s long-term human and environmental prospects. The symbolic focus of mass tree plantings helped foster a broad alliance around issues of sustainable security, a set of issues crucial not just to an era of Kenyan authoritarianism, but to the very different context of post-9/II America as well, where militaristic ideologies of security have disproportionately and destructively dominated public policy and debate. The risk of ignoring the intertwined issues of slow violence and sus tainable security was evident in many American responses to the March SLOW VIOLENCE, GENDER, AND THE ENVIRONMENTALISM OF THE POOR VIOLENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENTALISM OF THE POOR . . . will produce a different political result.4 [130] should be considered analogous to losing territory to an invad ing enemy. And indeed, if any country were so threatened, it during the rainy season, thousands of tons of topsoil are eroded from Kenya’s countryside by rivers and washed into the ocean and lakes. Additionally, soil is lost through wind erosion in areas where the land is devoid of vegetative cover. Losing topsoil ded the battle This war, Hertzberg continued, was not the kind that “expan media commenta field to encompass whole societies.”5 Like most American idea that so-called tors at the conflict’s outset, Hertzberg bought into the depending on the smart bombs exhibit a morally superior intelligence.t Yet, may morph into a ordnance and strategies deployed, a quick “smart” war ng death. Precision long-term killer, leaving behind landscapes of draggi through its active warfare that has receded into memory often continues, tions. residues, to maim and slaughter imprecisely for genera whole societ The battlefield that unobtrusively threatens to encompass Green Kenya’s to ies is of direct pertinence to the conditions that gave rise what one might call Belt Movement. The movement emerged in response to scale. from the the violence of staggered effects in relation to ecologies of has been threat perspective of rural Kenyan women whose local livelihood secure in space ened by soil erosion’s slow march, what does it mean to be and timel As Maathai notes, sion, the Iraqi dic [wihatever else can be said about the war against the tatorship that began on March i9th, it cannot be said that ly remote ng Anglo-American invaders have pursued anythi far, resembling a policy of killing civilians deliberately. And, so to s they have gone to great tactical and technological length What we do not yet know is avoid doing it inadvertently. preci whether a different intention, backed by technologies of Yorker, declared that 2003 strategic and invasion of Iraq, which was widely represented as a clean e. Even many liberal moral departure from the ugly spillages of total warfar writing in the New commentators adhered to this view. Hendrik Hertzberg, SLOW Of THE POOR [‘3’] junctures that the Green Belt women found a way to exert their collective agency. As the drivers of the nation’s subsistence agriculture, women inhab ited most directly the fallout from an environmental violence that is low in immediate drama but high in long-term consequences. Resource bottlenecks are difficult to dramatize and, deficient in explo sive spectacle, typically garner little media attention. Yet the bottlenecks that result from soil erosion and deforestation can fuel conflicts for decades, directly and indirectly costing untold lives. Certainly, if we take our cues lence—deforestation and the denuding of vegetation—and it was at those Soil erosion results in part, of course, from global forms of violence— especially human-induced climate change, to which rural Kenyan women contribute little and can do very little to avert. But the desert’s steady sei zure of once viable, fertile land also stems from local forms of slow vio and tree politics. tion, are inflected with the distinctive history in India of the Green Revolu transna t peasant resistance to industrial agriculture, and the battle agains tional corporate plant patenting, but her insistence on broadening our con soil ception of security is consistent with the stance that underlies Maathai’s monumental resource mismanagement. s Maathai’s line of reasoning here can be connected to activist writing advo from elsewhere in the global South, most strikingly to Vandana Shiva’s ents cacy for soil security as a form of environmental justice.8 Shiva’s argum of war. Under Kenya’s authoritarian regime, the prevailing response to soil land, erosion was a mix of denial and resignation; the damage, the loss of al went unsourced and hence required no concerted mobilization of nation ’s resources. The violence occurred in the passive voice, despite the regime What is productive about Maathai’s reformulation of security here is her insistence that threats to national territorial integrity—that most deepseated rationale for war—be expanded to include threats to the nation’s integrity from environmental assaults. To reframe violence in this way is to intervene in the discourse of national defense and, hence, in the psychology would mobilize all available resources, including a heavily armed military, to protect the priceless land. Unfortunately, the loss of soil through these elements has yet to be perceived with such urgency.7 ENTALISM SLOW VIOLENCE, GENDER, AND THE ENVIRONM VIOLENCE AND ENVIRONMENTALiSM OF THE POOR F132] engaging the violence of The Green Belt Movement’s achievements in critical strategies. First, detbrestation and soil erosion flowed from three nse to an attritional envi tree planting served not only as a practical respo symbolic hub for political ronmental calamity but to create, in addition, a amorphous issue. Second, resistance and for media coverage of an otherwise of violent land loss to a the movement was able to articulate the discourse first by British colonial deeper narrative of territorial theft, as perpetrated Green Belt Movement ists and later by their neocolonial legatees. Third, the The Theatre of the Tree the words of the American from the media, it is easy to forget that, in enewable resource as oil.”9 agronomist Wes Jackson, “soii is as much a nonr finite resource can desta International and intranational contests over this inextricable from national bilize whole regions. Soil security ought to be , which has lost 98 percent security policy, not least in a society like Kenya cover since the arrival of Brit of its anchoring, cleansing, and cooling forest .’° Together transnational, ish colonialists in the late nineteenth century an authoritarian regime’s national, and local forces—climate change, on—fueled the assault on ruthless forest destruction, and rural desperati Belt Movement recog human and environmental security that the Green its roots in a colonial his nized as inextricably entangled. That threat had orably evoked in Ngugi wa tory of developmental deforestation, most mem remarks how “the land Thiong’o’s epic novel Petals ofBlood, where an elder also cast a shadow on was covered with forests. The trees called rain. They You remember they used the land. But the forest was eaten by the railway. iron thing. Aah, they only to come for wood as far as here—to feed the Despite Ngugi’s forceful knew how to eat, how to take away everything.”1 novels tend—as Laura critique of colonial and neocolonial land politics, his nizing of the soil, replete Wright notes—to fall back on an essentialist femi purity and neocolonialism with oppositions between a precolonial virginal Maathai, as a writer and as prostitution.’2 One of the key challenges facing ics of Kenyan land poli activist, was how to dramatize the gendered dynam alism that mars Ngugi’s tics without submitting to the sentimental essenti ires that we engage the novels. To understand the angle ofher approach requ civic politics. metaphoric underpinnings of the GBM’s gender and SLOW THE [‘33] of this symbolic nexus was a contest over definitions of growth: each tree planted by the Green Belt Movement stood as a tangible, biological image of steady, sustainable growth, a dramatic counterimage to the ruling elite’s kieptocratic image of “growth,” a euphemism for their high-speed piratical plunder of the nation’s coffers and finite natural resources. Relevant here ture of impunity.”4 The theatre of the tree afforded the social movement a rich symbolic vocabulary that helped extend its civic reach. Maathai recast the simple gesture of digging a hole and putting a sapling in it as a way of “planting the seeds of peace.”5 To plant trees was to metaphorically cultivate demo cratic change; with a slight vegetative tweak, the gesture could breathe new life into the dead metaphor of grassroots democracy. Within the campaign n against one-party rule, activists could establish a ready symbolic connectio t hear the At between environmental erosion and the erosion of civil rights. discounted casualties, especially marginalized women, citizens whose envi ronmental concerns were indissociable from their concerns over food secu rity and political accountability. At political fiashpoints during the 198os and 199os, these convergent concerns made the Green Belt Movement a powerful player in a broadbased civil rights coalition that gave thousands of Kenyans a revived sense of civic agency and national possibility. The movement probed and wid ened the fissures within the state’s authoritarian structures, clamoring for answerability within what Ato Quayson, in another context, calls “the cul made strategic use of what one might call intersectional environmentalism, d broadening their base and credibility by aligning themselves with—an ron stimulating—other civil rights campaigns that were not expressly envi mental, like the campaigns for women’s rights, for the release of political prisoners, and for greater political transparency.’3 The choice of tree planting as the Green Belt Movement’s defining act ly proved politically astute. Here was a simple, pragmatic, yet powerful figurative act that connected with many women’s quotidian lives as tillers of the soil. Soil erosion and deforestation are corrosive, compound threats that damage vital watersheds, exacerbate the silting and desiccation of riv ers, erode topsoil, engender firewood and food shortages, and ultimately contribute to malnutrition. Maathai and her allies succeeded in using these compound threats to forge a compound alliance among authoritarianism’s NTALISM OF THE POOR SLOW VIOLENCE, GENDER,_AND THE ENVIRONME AND THE ENVIRONMENTALISM OP THE POOR .“ [‘3 4i tional context, that is William Finnegan’s observation, in a broader interna sally as an overall “even economic growth, which is regarded nearly univer unequal that it height social good, is not necessarily so. There is growth so is growth so environ ens social conflict and increases repression. There quality mentally destructive that it detracts, in sum, from a community’s in order economic of life Certainly, there is something perverse about an is calculated as which the unsustainable, ill-managed plunder of resources productive growth rather than a loss of GNP. huge rithi;1 the metaphoric groves of “growth,” we have witnessed a Danish exile in 1939 spectrum of literary tree politics. Bertolt Brecht, from his of “terrible tid most memorably lamented the dark times he lived in, times a crime / for ings”: “Ah, what an age it is / When to speak of trees is almost that bears those words— it is a kind of silence about injustice!”t7 The poem )—has sometimes “An die Nachgeborenen” (To posterity or To the unborn clear clarion call been invoked by those who wish to distinguish the hard, Yet Brecht was of radical politics from the soft claims of environmentalism. ascendant fas clearly writing into a particular cultural moment—into an implicated in cism, a powerful strain of blood-and-soil German romanticism there are other Nazism’s ascent. As Kenya’s Green Belt Movement testifies, about trees with eras whcn, for the sake of the unborn, we need to talk is to become unremitting urgency; indeed, when to be silent about trees complicit in an injustice to posterity. the fullest To plant trees is to work toward cultivating change, in y and unshared sense of that phrase. In an era of widening social inequit patory image growth, the replenished forest can offer an egalitarian, partici The Moi regime of growth—growth as sustainable over the long haul)8 progress, all dis vilified Maathai as an enemy of growth, development, and plunder. Saplings courses the ruling cabal had used to mask its high-speed d trope of growth in hand, the Green Belt Movement returned the blighte to its vital, biological roots. a selfless act at To plant a tree is an act of intergenerational optimism, future the planter once practical and utopian. an investment in a communal rs. To act in strange unborn will not see; to plant a tree is to offer shade to of ruth this manner was to secede ethically from Kenya’s top-down culture under that quip less short-term self-interest. (Kenyan intellectuals used to in addition Moi l’etat c’est Moi.)’9 A social movement devoted to tree planting, - SLOW VIOLENCE I [‘35] laying claiming to it. Since the early 1970s, a strong but varied transnational tradition of civil disobedience has gathered force around the fate of the forest. In March yan village of Mandal 1973, a band of hill peasants in the isolated Himala devised the strategy of tree hugging to thwart loggers who had come to fell hornbeam trees in a state forest on which the peasants depended for their livelihood. This was the beginning of a succession of such protests that launched India’s Chipko movement. Three years later, in the Brazilian Ama zon, Francisco Chico Mendes led a series of standoffs by rubber tappers and ied by a panga; protestors were arrested and imprisoned. The theatre of the tree has accrued a host of potent valences at different points in human history: both the planting and the felling of forests have become highly charged political acts. In the England that the Puritans fled, for example, trees were markers of aristocratic privilege; hence on numer ous occasions, insurrectionists chopped or burned down those exclusionary groves. After the Restoration, notes Michael Pollan, “replanting trees was regarded as a fitting way for a gentleman to demonstrate his loyalty to the monarchy, and several million hardwoods were planted between 1660 and 1800.”21 By contrast, early American colonists typically viewed tree felling as an act of progress that could double as a way of improving the land and the longue durëe of patient growth for sustainable collective gain. By 1998, the Moi regime had come to treat tree planting as an incendi ary, seditious act of civil disobedience. That year, the showdown between the Green Belt Movement and state power came to a head over the 2,500acre Karura Forest. Word spread that the regime was felling swathes of the public forest, a green lung for Nairobi and a critical catchment area for four rivers.20 The cleared, appropriated land was being sold on the cheap to cabi net ministers and other presidential cronies who planned to build luxury developments on it —golf courses, hotels, and gated communities. Maathai and her followers, armed with nothing but oak saplings, with which they sought to begin replanting the plundered forest, were set upon by guards and goons wielding pangas, clubs, and whips. Maathai had her head blood to regenerating embattled forests, thus also helped regenerate an endan gered vision of civic time. Against the backdrop of Kenya’s winner-takes-alland-takes-it-now kleptocracy, the movement affirmed a radically subversive ethic—an ethic of selflessness—allied to an equally subversive timeframe, ENTALISM OP THE POOR SLOW VIOLENCE, GENDER, AND THE ENVIRONM VIOLENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENTALISM Of THE POOR [136] gered California redwoods. move What distinguished the Green Belt Movement, like the Chipko went deforestation ment before it, was the way that activists protesting civil dis beyond what would become standard strategies of environmental oneself to a obedience in the global North (sit-ins, tree hugging, or chaining became the tree). For the Kenyan and Indian protestors, active reforestation an undemo primary symbolic vehicle for their civil disobedience. Under into a ... Purchase answer to see full attachment