The Niger Delta as a Cautionary Tale for Environmental Sacrifice Zones Worldwide
An Exxon Valdez-worth of oil has spilled in the Delta every year for about fifty years, poisoning fish, animals, and humans.
--Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything 305
The Niger River Delta may present a particularly painful history of the so-called "resource curse." But there are more and more places in the world that are being sacrificed to appease our demand for natural resources. Therefore, the Niger River Delta story presents a cautionary tale for the growing list of environmental sacrifice zones worldwide. At the same time, according to Naomi Klein and Nigerian political ecologist and environmental activist Godwin Uyi Ojo, the Ogoni resistance movement remains "on a global scale, the most formidable community-wide resistance to corporate oil operations" that we have seen (306). In fact, for Klein, the Ogoni and Ijaw protest movements are the models in a growing wave of protests to this day against fossil fuel development in the global "Blockadia" struggle against coal mines, coal plants, fracking operations, tar sands oil extraction, and fossil fuel investment (370).
We are much too quickly reaching the limit of what our planet can handle. It is now time we find a way to reduce our continued exploitation of nature.
If what has happened in the Niger Delta is not enough, we can look at what is happening in the Alberta Tar Sands, the Bakken Oil Fields of North Dakota, and the other fracking zones in the United States. For examples of environmental sacrifice zones around the world, take a look into the legal battle between indigenous Ecuadorans and Chevron over Texaco Petroleum oil spills in the Amazon Rainforest (Lahrichi), read Klein's chapters on sacrifice zones (293-387), or spend some time with the Environmental Justice Atlas (external link).
My own most vivid encounter with an environmental sacrifice zone was my visit to the Union Carbide factory site and the Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal, India after reading Indra Sinha's Animal's People. But, as a concept, the idea of environmental sacrifice zone became clear to me by reading David Gessner's Tarball Chronicles: The Journey Beyond the Oiled Pelican and Into the Heart of the Gulf Oil Spill. Gessner's travelogue to find out what kind of impact the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill was having in the Gulf of Mexico region. To his surprise, Gessner did not find the spectacular violence of oiled pelicans and oil slicks. Instead, he found a more pernicious slow violence in that the oil industry had already turned the region into a sacrifice zone before the spill. Gessner's account is also haunted by the dispersants that were used to sink the oil to the bottom of the gulf and the slow violence these chemicals will inflict on the ecosystem over time which may well be worse than what an oil slick on the surface may have wrought. As the fracking boom began to take its toll on Western North Dakota, where I was born, it became clear to me that as environments are sacrificed, those of us with a connection to the place that is undergoing such systematic slow violence are in a position to see how environments are being sacrificed at an increasingly alarming pace around the world. Naomi Klein argues that while the sacrifice zones have been around for quite some time, the last decade of "extreme energy frenzy" has colonized more territory:
Through various feats of denialism and racism, it was [once] possible for privileged people in North America and Europe to mentally cordon off these unlucky places as hinterlands, wastelands, nowheres--or unluckiest of all, as in the case of Nauru, middle of nowheres. For those fortunate enough to find ourselves outside those condemned borders, myself among them, it seemed as if our places--the ones where we live and to which we escape for pleasure (the assumed somewheres, the centers, or best of all, the centers of everywhere)--would not be sacrificed to keep the fossil fuel machine going.
And up until quite recently, that has held up as the grand bargain of the carbon age: the people reaping the bulk of the benefits of extractivism pretend not to see the costs of that comfort so long as the sacrifice zones are kept safely out of view.
. . . . [But the "drill everywhere" approach comes] as a rude surprise to a great many historically privileged people who suddenly find themselves feeling something of what so many frontline communities have felt for a very long time: how is it possible that a big distant company can come to my land and put me and my kids at risk--and never even ask my permission? How can it be legal to put chemicals in the air right where they know children are playing? How is it possible that the state, instead of protecting me from this attack, is sending police to beat up people whose only crime is trying to protect their families?
--Naomi Klein "All in the Sacrifice Zone," This Changes Everything 310-311, 313
Oil fueled the American Century, propelling the American Dreams of autonomy, prosperity, and mobility. And, so long as the environmental and social costs were confined to out-of-the-way sacrifice zones where local people were few and had little political power, we kept trucking along and enjoying what sociologists call our "automobility," to convey our ideology of individual autonomy and mobility symbolized in our private automobiles, interstate highways, and suburban homes. But the data and the climate science suggest that the current rate at which we are burning hydrocarbons is no longer sustainable. We must curb our carbon and methane emissions. And the sooner the better.
Around the world, more and more movements are protesting extraction with the rallying cry of "keep it in the ground." This week, even the first family of Big Oil in the United States has joined the clamor to say,
There is no sane rationale for companies to continue to explore for new sources of hydrocarbons. The science and intent enunciated by the Paris agreement cannot be more clear: far from finding additional sources of fossil fuels, we must keep most of the already discovered reserves in the ground if there is any hope for human and natural ecosystems to survive and thrive in the decades ahead.
--Rockefeller Family Fund statement explaining their divestment from fossil fuels despite being one of the first founding families of the Oil Industry
March 23, 2016
When we gas up our cars at the local gas station, how responsible are we for the injustices that have occurred to get that oil to that pump at that price? If the United States buys 40% of all Nigerian oil as Nixon reports (106), how much of that is in my gas tank? How much of the rest comes from the Tar Sands? and from Ecuador? and from Iraq? and from Saudi Arabia? and from the Bakken? And with the proliferation of highly water-intensive extraction techniques and the inevitiable leaks and spills, how much longer will we be able to count on clean drinking water?
Furthermore, what contribution does my carbon footprint make to the melting glaciers and the rising oceans that are threatening so many island communities as you read this?
Rob Nixon argues that climate change is a prime example of the type of slow violence that our neglect of the environment is causing but that we have a tough time in getting our imaginations around. Writers like Saro-Wiwa, Ifowodo, Habila, Nixon, Klein, and the writers contributing to this site are trying to do their part as we all begin to grapple with our complicity in environmental injustice and as we hope to prepare for a more sustainable future for our grandchildren and our grandchildren's grandchildren.
Making this slow violence visible before it is too late may be difficult because the clock is ticking. But we have to start somewhere.
Sources Cited
Backman, Melvin. "One of Oil's Founding Families is Divesting from Fossil Fuels, and Slamming ExxonMobil in the Process." 23 March 2016. Quartz media. qz.com. Web. 25 March 2016.
Gessner, David. The Tarball Chonicles: The Journey Beyond the Oiled Pelican and into the Heart of the Gulf Oil Spill. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2011. Print.
Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Print.
Lahrichi, Kamilia. "Environmental War Waged in Amazonia." USA Today 11 March 2016. Web. 28 March 2016.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.
Sinha, Indra. Animal's People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Print.
