Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World

Political Geography, 2023

2017

War by Other Means: Environmental Violence in the 21st Century This dissertation studies the intersections of militarism, climate change, and environmental justice in U.S. literature and popular culture since the end of the Cold War. The project identifies different mechanisms enacting environmental military violence through discursive analysis of literary and cultural texts, and considers the ideas, values, and beliefs that support environmental military violence. In each chapter I trace a different dynamic of environmental violence structured through the logics of U.S. counterinsurgency theory by examining what I call "narrative political ecologies"cultural texts that center concerns of ecology and broadly defined political economy. Chapter I establishes the stakes and questions of the dissertation. The next two chapters investigate the dynamics of environmental violence depicted within narrative political ecologies. Chapter II investigates how eruptive interpersonal violence secures more insidious, hidden forms of slow environmental violence in Héctor Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier. Chapter III considers the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands and the environmental military violence responsible for the deaths of undocumented migrants by examining Luis Alberto Urrea's The Devil's Highway and the Electronic Disturbance Theater's Transborder Immigrant Tool. Chapter IV turns to potential f wars and conflicts that may v be caused by climate change as they have been depicted in speculative fiction. In novels depicting climate migrants, such as Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (2014), I show that even politically progressive, intersectional approaches to environmental endangerment naturalize conflict and occlude dialogic solutions to environmental change. The final chapter traces how the environmental refugee has become a paradigmatic figure in climate change discourse, particularly the aspects of this discourse where issues of national security are articulated. At the center of these texts is the figure of the migrant and narratives of migrations, and I argue that the figure of the environmental migrant offers a privileged vantage on the constitutive forces of the Anthropocene. The dissertation identifies the specific literary and rhetorical techniques that authors use to contest environmental militarization and expand the U.S. public's capacity to creatively and compassionately reason around increased flows of environmental migrants-issues of vital importance for humane climate change adaptation.

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 2024

The Anthropocene puts humanity within the continuum of long-running Earth processes, but what does it mean to be violent in deep time? This article aims to redefine violence for the Anthropocene. It does so by first examining the temporal dimensions of violence, where violence is claimed to be a historic and stratigraphic phenomenon, as much as it is present, immediate, and abrupt. Violence is relational, slow, and often accumulating, but there exists also violence that is stratigraphic, which bears the witness of and that will impact organisms and ecosystems other than us, the humans, in the distant future. Second, the article links violence to violation, and shows how violence is an evaluative term. In short, this means that violence should always be treated on a case-by-case basis. Third, the article posits that the notion of violence should be extended to the more-than-human world, as other beings, habitats, landscapes, and ecosystems can be, are, and have repeatedly been violated by human actions. Following these claims, the article proposes a non-anthropocentric definition of violence as encounters entailing the use of force that violates life-supporting processes. For reducing violence in ecosystems, the article calls for a withdrawal from the industrial-capitalist megamachine and placing more emphasis on the provisioning of fundamentals of life and other collective efforts advancing an ecological civilization.

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 2024

The Anthropocene puts humanity within the continuum of long-running Earth processes, but what does it mean to be violent in deep time? This article aims to redefine violence for the Anthropocene. It does so by first examining the temporal dimensions of violence, where violence is claimed to be a historic and stratigraphic phenomenon, as much as it is present, immediate, and abrupt. Violence is relational, slow, and often accumulating, but there exists also violence that is stratigraphic, which bears the witness of and that will impact organisms and ecosystems other than us, the humans, in the distant future. Second, the article links violence to violation, and shows how violence is an evaluative term. In short, this means that violence should always be treated on a case-by-case basis. Third, the article posits that the notion of violence should be extended to the more-than-human world, as other beings, habitats, landscapes, and ecosystems can be, are, and have repeatedly been violated by human actions. Following these claims, the article proposes a non-anthropocentric definition of violence as encounters entailing the use of force that violates life-supporting processes. For reducing violence in ecosystems, the article calls for a withdrawal from the industrial-capitalist megamachine and placing more emphasis on the provisioning of fundamentals of life and other collective efforts advancing an ecological civilization.

Porous becomings: anthropological engagements with Michel Serres, 2024

This chapter introduces Michel Serres as an important theorist of modern warfare and violence. It brings together Serres’ topological perspectives on time, history, and general ecology of pollution together. The chapter thus opens new avenues for thinking and writing about the long-lasting socio-environmental effects of wars and their aftermaths. It draws on examples from Henig’s ongoing research on explosive war remains in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, toxic legacies of the Cold War era military projects, and Serres’ reflections on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bomb explosions. In so doing, the chapter retraces Henig’s encounters and resonances with Michel Serres, and his thinking with Serres about wastes of war, their unruly temporalities and insidious planetary effects.

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1162 152638004323074156, 2006

ABSTRACT Empire has returned as a key political category in the last few years. It allows the politics of environment at the largest scale to be reconceptualized in interesting ways. Looking to imperial history and its ecological disruptions, to political ecology with its focus on the connections between rural production and metropolitan consumption, and in particular at the contemporary discussion of resource wars, this comment suggests that the focus on empire adds important dimensions to understanding global environmental politics. Not least empire requires a more explicit focus on the material contexts of contemporary politics and the violence that is connected to the extraction of resources, and petroleum in particular. Among other things this suggests a very different interpretation of the events of September 11-super-th 2001, and the importance of including much more than regimes and cooperation into the study of global environmental politics. Copyright (c) 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Political Geography, 2010

Twenty years ago the intellectual projects that have become known as critical geopolitics emerged at the end of the cold war as a series of critiques of geopolitical reasoning. Drawing heavily on Edward Said's formulations of Orientalism the critical analyses probed the dense cultural productions of danger, the rationalisations for intervention and the logics of ''Western'' foreign policies. The geographical specifications of the world in the political discourses used to justify numerous imperial actions, and the rationales for the provision of security came under sustained scrutiny. Now two decades later despite the supposed end of history and endless invocations of globalization, the themes of empire and Orientalism remain at the heart of the Western geopolitical imaginary, explicitly structuring how the security intellectuals of our time plan for war and justify the construction of their military machines. Given the continuing dangers of warfare in a biosphere that is being radically destabilized by the modes of economy and violence these geopolitical texts legitimize, the necessity for critique remains compelling. But given the proliferation of uses of the term critical geopolitics, and the numerous disciplinary concerns encompassed by it, perhaps the time has come to narrow its focus once again to its core themes which involve confronting and challenging the geographical reasoning used in the legitimizations of contemporary warfare.

PhD Dissertation, University of Virginia, Religious Studies, 2020

Conservation and Society, 2018

This article introduces the special issue on ‘Political Ecologies of Green Wars’ and the research papers comprising it. While state-authorised and state-directed forms of violence in support of conservation have been evident in many places for quite some time, the current scope, scale and rhetorical justification of the violent defence of biodiversity seem quite unprecedented in the history of global conservation. We, therefore, ask whether and how the term green wars may be appropriate to describe this new intensity of violence and the changes in environmental governance it signifies. In bringing together a number of important recent discussions around green grabbing, green militarisation/violence, green economy, neoliberal conservation and biopower, amongst others, the special issue emphasises the increasingly central role of environmental and conservation concerns within the global political economy as a whole. In the process, it also points towards an overarching conceptual framing for understanding these conjoined dynamics in terms of an ‘intensification of pressure’ precipitated by the combined yet uneven magnification and integration of power and capital within the world today. Consequently, we argue that the concept of green wars potentially heralds the new twenty-first century ‘real-politik’ of the centrality of violence and conflict both to the neoliberal political economy and to environmental conservation, and their integrated socio-ecological manifestations and effects.