Environmental memory as a field of battle. : On the temporalities of slow violence. Remarks on Rob Nixon's book.

Abstract

The article analyses the main themes and arguments of Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Polish translation: 2025, originally published in 2011). The author develops an extended reflection on the concept of slow violence, with particular attention to its temporal dimensions and the related concept of environmental memory. She argues that the slowness of environmental violence is an effect of the dominant temporal regimes of accelerated capitalist modernity, which remains blind to dispersed and cumulative processes of the longue durée. Through an analysis of selected cases discussed by Nixon — ranging from the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster, through the destructive consequences of oil extraction on the Arabian Peninsula, to the Kenyan Green Belt Movement — the article shows the conflict between local and official landscapes as a clash of heterogeneous temporalities. Environmental memory, inscribed in landscapes subjected to extractivist interventions, is conceived not as a passive archive of lost ways of life, but as an active field of practices of resistance against environmental violence and cultural amnesia. The author extends Nixon's concepts to the Eastern European context, examining the drainage of the Polesie region as an instance of overlapping layers of slow violence and the gradual erosion of local water culture. In doing so, she points to the methodological and practical implications of the concept of slow violence for engaged humanities.