Human-rights and green groups could not comprehend environmental harm as violence

Evidence

A Month and a Day includes a record of Saro-Wiwa’s imaginative efforts to capitalize on these new forms of international attention. Initially, both human rights groups and ecological groups proved equally unreceptive to the Ogoni cause. An African intellectual claiming ethnocide by environmental means? Saro-Wiwa seemed, at first, eccentric and unplaceable. At Boyd’s prompting, he decided to contact Greenpeace. They replied, quite simply, that they did not work in Africa. Amnesty International, for their part, said they could only take up the Ogoni cause if the military was killing people or detaining them without trial, a process that had yet to begin. Saro-Wiwa responded with frustration: “The Ogoni people were being killed all right, but in an unconventional way.” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 312

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The institutional blind spots of both human-rights and environmental NGOs — each requiring a recognizable dramatic form of harm — is the book’s central problem about slow violence being unconventionally illegible.
• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s core question of how Nixon makes a harm with no single dramatic moment politically legible.