Anti-dam rhetoric shifted from wilderness ethic to environmental justice with subsistence-farmer populations

Evidence

The third, critical difference is this: the giant dams Roy opposed were located in rural areas densely populated with subsistence farmers, areas quite unlike the thinly peopled hinterland of the American West. Roy’s rhetorical strategies are thus remote from those associated with the traditions of the wilderness ethic. Instead, her approach borrows from and advances the rhetoric of an international environmental justice movement that did not exist in any comparable form during the years when Edward Abbey, much less John Muir, was writing. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 435

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the eco-justice pedagogy thread: the American West wilderness ethic versus inhabited South subsistence contexts — a key contrast for the eco-justice course. — connects to: Dam opponents framed their fight as a clash between engineering and geological sublimity — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 436