Slow violence, not terrorism, is most people’s immediate terror

Evidence

Maathai, however, sought to recast the question of urgency in a different time frame, one that challenged the dominant associations of two of the early twenty-first century’s most explosive words: “preemptive” and “terror.” The Green Belt Movement focused not on conventional ex post facto conflict resolution but on conflict preemption through nonmilitary means. As Maathai insisted, “many wars are fought over natural resources. In managing our resources and in sustainable development we plant the seeds of peace.” This approach has discursive, strategic, and legislative ramifications for the “global war on terror.” Most of our planet’s people face more immediate terrors than a terrorist attack: creeping deserts that reduce farms to sand; the incremental assaults of climate change compounded by deforestation; not knowing where tonight’s meal will come from; unsafe drinking water; having to walk five or ten miles to collect firewood to keep one’s children warm and fed. Such quotidian terrors haunt the lives of hundreds of millions immiserated, abandoned, and humiliated by authoritarian rule and by a purportedly postcolonial new-world order. Under such circumstances, slow violence (often coupled with direct repression) can ignite tensions, creating flashpoints of desperation and explosive rage. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 418

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the chapter’s central thesis-defining concept of slow violence and links resource wars to the war-on-terror frame.
• SEED: Angle: how the war-on-terror frame actively occludes quotidian resource-based insecurity—a reframing of ‘urgency’ that connects environmental security to global security discourse.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ via tree-planting as conflict preemption and security-building infrastructure.