Conjuring the past: Slow violence and the temporalities of environmental rights tribunals

Abstract

In his 2011 Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon argues that the ‘slow violence’ of environmental collapse - the too often ‘invisible’ violence that unfolds over decades or even centuries, from the acidification of the oceans to the radioactivity of depleted uranium – represents a formidable representational challenge for contemporary environmental activists. In an era in which ‘the media venerate the spectacular and when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need’, the challenges of making visible the ‘staggeringly discounted casualties’ associated with environmental destruction are both substantial and urgent (2011: 3). Based on ethnographic research with rights of nature activists in Peru and Australia, this paper analyses the narrative and performative strategies that are increasingly being experimented with at Rights of Nature Tribunals to subvert, extend, and otherwise complexify the spatio-temporalities of mainstream environmental policy making. Drawing on recent work in feminist posthumanism and post-colonial eco-criticism, I argue that these temporal tactics, while still largely marginal to hegemonic policy blocs, are raising important questions about the scalar habits and assumptions that continue to anchor much environmental policy-making.