Climate-driven inundation exemplifies slow violence because it lacks breaking-news speed

Evidence

The engulfment threatening the Maldive Islands is nothing as unambiguously instantaneous as that. The Maldives face an incremental threat from rising, warming oceans, a threat difficult to dramatize and even harder to arrest—a form of slow violence that is rapid in geological terms but (unlike a tsunami) not fast enough to constitute breaking news. In an effort to infuse dramatic urgency into this incremental crisis, the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, held an extraordinary underwater cabinet meeting in diving gear on October 17, 2009, shortly before the Copenhagen Climate Summit. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 803

Categorization

• DEFINE: Applies Nixon’s core slow-violence concept to climate inundation: the harm is real but temporally undramatizable, below the news threshold.
• XREF: connects to: Slow violence’s deferred consequences give polluters profitable cover for inaction — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 109; Fictional clustering of scattered disasters counters the dissociation of dispersed slow violence — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 174; Eyewitness immediacy can falsely certify a disaster’s end while slow violence continues — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 614 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Slow violence is marginalized by converging forces of inattention #corroborates (0.80) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 850
• Slow violence differs from structural violence in foregrounding time and change #expands (0.75) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 39