Borders can shift across pollution, leaving detoxification to successor states

Evidence

But the miner’s choice of phrase deserves a second parsing, one directly pertinent to my reading of Animal’s People. Dmytro had been saddled, I would argue, with a “foreign burden” not just in a somatic but in a geo-temporal sense as well: his post–Soviet Ukrainian body remained under occupation by a Soviet-era catastrophe. For in the case of Chernobyl, not only did the radiological toxicity travel across the national border, but (as the Soviet Union fragmented) the national border traveled across the toxicity. The Ukrainian body politic, though politically autonomous, remained environmentally and epidemiologically dominated by the “foreign burden” of a ghosted country, by a Soviet past that (as Faulkner would have it) was not even past. Through the workings of slow violence across environmental time, Ukraine’s sovereignty was compromised. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 133

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes the settler-colonial and postcolonial strands of the polyad: a nation gains political sovereignty while remaining environmentally colonized by the previous regime — parallels postcolonial environmental-justice cases and adds the temporal dimension that connects to Soundscape’s chronic harm. — connects to: Political turnover outpaces environmental recovery, killing cleanup incentives. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 696; Geochemical cycles cause ecological harm at one place to spill over to others. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 53; Environmental mayhem outlives regime change and troop memory. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 708
• SEED: The ‘border travels across the toxicity’ inversion is a strong opening figure for an essay on how decolonized/sovereign states inherit environmental debts from empires.

Broader Connections

• Political turnover outpaces environmental recovery, killing cleanup incentives. #corroborates (0.85) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 696
• Geochemical cycles cause ecological harm at one place to spill over to others. #expands (0.80) — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 53
• Environmental mayhem outlives regime change and troop memory. #corroborates (0.80) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 708