Ogoniland’s ruin spanned transnational corporate power beyond any national frame

Evidence

The resulting national self-enclosure seemed peculiar: one might surely have expected environmentalism to be more, not less, transnational than other fields of literary inquiry. It was unfortunate that a writer like Saro-Wiwa, who had long protested what he termed “ecological genocide,” could find no place in the environmental canon. Was this because he was an African? Was it because his writings revealed no special debt to Thoreau, to the wilderness tradition, or to Jeffersonian agrarianism? Saro-Wiwa’s writings were animated instead by the fraught relations between ethnicity, pollution, and human rights and by the equally fraught relations between local, national, and global politics. It was futile, he recognized, to try to understand or protest the despoiling of his people’s water, land, and health within a purely national framework. For Ogoniland’s environmental ruin resulted from collaborative plunder by those he dubbed Nigeria’s “internal colonialists” and by the unanswerable, transnational power of Shell and Gulf Chevron. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 719

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the polyad’s extraction/globalization thread and sums up ch.21-24’s Shell/Ogoni material into a single causal picture.
• DEFINE: Introduces Saro-Wiwa’s own term ‘ecological genocide’ as a coinage for slow-violence harms.