Personifying uprooted trees makes resource extraction legible as bodily violation

Evidence

The people of the wadi first experience oil’s blessings as violation; the Americans, having probed the soil at Wadi-al-Uyoun, vanish then reappear in “yellow iron hulks.” The “unearthly” machines are neither of nor for this earth: They descended like ravenous wolves, tearing up the trees and throwing them to the earth one after another, and leveled all the orchards between the brook and the fields. After destroying the first grove of trees, the tractors turned to the next with the same bestial voracity and uprooted them. The trees shook violently and groaned before falling, cried for help, wailed, panicked, called out in helpless pain and then fell entreatingly to the ground, as if trying to snuggle into the earth to grow and spring forth alive again. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 226

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: Munif’s anthropomorphized, groaning trees offer a direct model for rendering land-dispossession sensually — a technique a writer could adapt for almost any extraction scene.
• FICTION: The suffering-tree motif (trees crying for help as a second, nonhuman population displaced) is a generative scene for fiction about resource frontiers.
• XREF: connects to: Human marginalization and ecological exploitation share one root of value-hierarchized thought — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 126; The body-as-metaphor legitimated social hierarchy as naturally given

Broader Connections

• The body-as-metaphor legitimated social hierarchy as naturally given #expands (0.80)
• Human marginalization and ecological exploitation share one root of value-hierarchized thought #expands (0.75) — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 126