Kenya lost 98 percent of its forest cover since late-nineteenth-century British colonization.

Evidence

Resource bottlenecks are difficult to dramatize and, deficient in explosive 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 from the media, it is easy to forget that, in the words of the American agronomist Wes Jackson, “soil is as much a nonrenewable resource as oil.” International and intranational contests over this finite resource can destabilize whole regions. Soil security ought to be inextricable from national security policy, not least in a society like Kenya, which has lost 98 percent of its anchoring, cleansing, and cooling forest cover since the arrival of British colonialists in the late nineteenth century. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 372

Categorization

• XREF: Soil-as-nonrenewable-resource and slow soil violence connects to Nixon’s ongoing contrast of dramatic vs. attritional harms threaded through this polyad and to Soundscape’s chronic-noise parallel.