Linking minority to environmental rights required active cross-border strategy and travel

Evidence

Appeals to minority and environmental rights both gained ground in the 1990s, but there was little precedent in Africa for their simultaneous invocation. Despite the early unresponsiveness of Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth, and Survival International, Saro-Wiwa persisted in arguing that the Ogoni were victims of an “unconventional war” being prosecuted by ecological means. Undeterred, he sought to educate himself further through travel. An odyssey through the rupturing Soviet Union confirmed his sense of a growing international context for the articulation of minority claims. A visit to Colorado gave him access to an environmental group that had successfully salvaged a wilderness from corporate and governmental assaults. These experiences persuaded Saro-Wiwa that his incipient Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) would be well served by linking minority rights to environmental rights. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 315

Categorization

• XREF: The writer-activist’s strategic bridging of discourses is the reader’s core methodological interest for the literature strand. — connects to: Environmental and minority rights are simultaneously invocable markers of universal marginalization — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 315