Slow Violence: The Impact of Longevity by

Introducing Princess Mononoke

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-03 17:54:11 UTC

Princess Mononoke is a Cli-Fi film written by Hayao Miyazaki. This Studio Ghibli motion picture portrays the story of Ashitaka, a boy who becomes exiled from his village after being cursed by a demon boar. He discovers Iron Town, a community of people who are destroying the forest and disrupting the balance of forest spirits. Ashitaka explores the dynamic between the people of Iron Town and the forest spirits who are slowly dying off due to their resource extraction. In the end he is able to stop the humans from killing the god of the forest, however, it leads to a bitter sweet ending as despite the conflict concluding, the bridge between the forest and the people of Iron Town are never bridged

Introducing Rachel Carson

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-03 17:54:36 UTC

Rachel Carson was a pioneer of the environmentalist movement. When she released her famous book Silent Spring it took the community by storm. In her book she discusses the effects of pesticides and our mistreatment of the environment and the many ways that it could be catastrophic in the future. She is arguably the most important writer in the history of environmentalism and the movement may not be as strong as it is today without her contribution. In her writing, slow violence is a reoccurring theme and you can find traces of it in practically every section of the book.

Introducing Terry Tempest Williams

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-03 17:55:43 UTC

Terry Tempest Williams's non-fiction book Refuge tells the story of her family and how she came to be a member of the clan of one-breasted women. Her family fell victim to environmental injustice and slow violence by the United States government. In her story, we learn that during the Cold War, the country began sequencing nuclear bomb tests in areas they listed as "virtually uninhabited" (Williams, 287). The testing sites were located too close to her people's home. The nuclear testing infected her land and left her home contaminated with dangerous levels of radiation over time. Ultimately this caused the women of her family to frequently develop breast cancer; which is how her family's alias was adapted.

Scrapbook (1/2) Health Justice and Environmental Justice

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-03 17:56:23 UTC

Slow violence is deeply rooted in many of the prominent social issues in our country. This article discusses the 1968 story of two P.O.C. sanitation workers who ended up being crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage compactor because while trying to escape the rain, they were denied entry into a building due to segregation laws. Occurrences like these will allow us to look deeper into the racism and injustice that allow the United States to continue with its harmful endeavors. The only bright side to scenarios like these is it allows people to come together to fight under a common cause. Well over 1300 P.O.C men came to protest the preventable deaths of these two people, which also gained the attention of Martin Luther King.

Scrapbook (1/2) Can Cli-Fi Save Us?

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-03 17:56:59 UTC

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43541988/climate-fiction-wont-save-us/

Climate fiction sounds like a promising premise for environmentalists. All of our frustrations are written into a story that could allow people to actually put in the effort to understand climate change. Much of the effects of slow violence continue because of people's ignorance, so if those people were able to become informed through literature, then we could kill two birds with one stone. Unfortunately, it is not that easy. Over all else, a book needs to be entertaining over educational; particularly, books that are written for the sake of fiction must provide enjoyment for the reader before carefully crafting a narrative that can teach people subconsciously.

Citations

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-03 17:57:13 UTC

Works Cited

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

Princess Mononoke. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, 1997.

Shah, Aarathi Prasad. “Achieving Health Justice Through Environmental Justice.” AAMC, 5 Sept. 2023, https://www.aamc.org/news/achieving-health-justice-through-environmental-justice.

Mott, Jason. “Climate Fiction Won’t Save Us.” Esquire, 27 Mar. 2024, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43541988/climate-fiction-wont-save-us/.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Pantheon Books, 1991.

Princess Mononoke: Slow Violence as a Curse

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-03 18:53:24 UTC

The plot of Princess Mononoke primarily revolves around a curse that has plagued Ashitaka. At first glance, it may just seem like a fantastical element of the world; however, it holds real-world meaning. In the context of slow violence, Ashitaka's curse mark is representative of the pain the forest feels as humans destroy it. As the story progresses, his curse grows bigger, slowly consuming more and more of his body; it is a parallel to the humans' destruction of the forest and causing the animals greater and greater pain. It's an allegorical symbolism for the strain that humans are putting on our environment. Although, in our real world, no metaphysical manifestations will appear on our bodies due to the mistreatment of the environment, but given enough time, humans will begin to see destruction in other ways from their own doing.

Terry Tempest Williams: Nuclear Testing & The Consequences of Environmental Racism

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-03 19:14:34 UTC

Williams's story of hardship and triumph exposes the corruption in government and how they feed into environmental injustice and racism. Often in societies like ours, governments aren't always held accountable for their actions against members that are separate from the vocal majority. Very often they will develop a "The King can do no wrong" (Williams 285) mindset that permits the government to terrorize minority groups. They often get away with acts such as these because the effect isn't always immediate. Slow violence is a long process, and it is possible that if they weren't able to connect their condition with the nuclear testing, then the government may have continued to have gotten away with it undetected.

Rachel Carson: A Post Slow Violence World

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-03 19:37:42 UTC

The biggest issue surrounding slow violence is that the effects aren't immediate. This causes many people to deny their relevance in our society. Ultimately, it leads many uneducated people to believe that if the problems won't be relevant in their lifetime, then it's not worth a second thought. However, these are still things that we need to be concerned about. Carson directly confronts this idea in her writing. In the beginning of our reading, she painted a picture of a post-slow violence world in which all of our environmental wrongdoings have collected into a single instance upon an unsuspecting community. They experienced the death of their cattle, the disappearance of their wildlife, the failure of their crops, and the sickness of their families. The scenario was described as "a shadow of death." (Carson 1) This may not be our reality in the next 10 years, or even the next 20. But these are all real scenarios that loom over our world as we continue to harm the planet.

Scrapbook (2/2) Harmful Zoning & Living Downstream

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-04 20:46:49 UTC

Environmental damages are often unpunished as policies that permit capital racism often allow those in power to take shortcuts when it comes to environmental regulations. In our lectures, we have discussed in class how marginalized communities that have fallen victim to hateful zoning practices often also tend to fall victim to living in areas that are more heavily polluted and are less environmentally regulated. Over time, these harmful practices will continue to damage communities all over the country and allow the ones that do the most damage to survive. People who hold privilege, or as we have also discussed in lecture, people who live more upstream will completely ignore what happens to those who live downstream and will never face the brute force of these harmful policies that are beginning the destruction of our environment.

Scrapbook (2/2) The Failure of Entertainment

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-04 21:08:57 UTC

A story that has climate change at the forefront of its plot may not be enjoyable to as many readers than a story with a different focal point instead. Climate fiction stories seem fantastic in concept; however, they seem less optimal in execution. The scale of climate change is so grand that many will see it as fiction. Many stories of climate will often portray a world encompassed by desert, a result of some major disaster or climate change. Many stories have taken after these concepts, such as Dune by Frank Herbert. They often portray their post-apocalyptic world as another fantastic element for story building, which makes it wildly less effective as an educational tool.

Finalizing The Narrative: Environmental Ignorance (1/5)

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-04 21:13:13 UTC

Slow violence will be the cause of all of our environmental issues going forward. Our country has a long history with environmental racism, violence, injustice, and ignorance. Many people to this day still don't believe that climate change is an issue even worth considering because of the scale being so large; they still believe it to be something of fantasy rather than reality. To be an environmentalist, you need to have some sense of empathy in order to have the drive to fight for the cause. Most of the people in power who are able to make a difference in the fight against slow violence are those who are primarily upstream and will likely not be affected by any of the impacts of climate change in their lifetime.

Final Thoughts

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-04 21:14:05 UTC

After analyzing everything, we can assess that the problem is way more dynamic than it appears at first glance. There is so much literature and media that portray the pain caused by slow violence. Every day we can see the effects of environmental injustice and racism and how they contribute to these problems. And despite living in a time where this information is more accessible than ever, it still feels like nobody wants to do anything about it, so why is that? I've come to the conclusion that the problem is scale and empathy. Climate change is a grand process. It likely won't even affect us in our current lifetime to its full extent. That causes people to not worry about it as it won't be a problem in their lives. It reflects a lot about the character of those who live in our society. It truly takes a real empathetic person to be able to stand and fight against these issues that to many seem invisible. And unfortunately, for our society, that is not a trait we often have.

Finalizing The Narrative: Climate Change Representation (4/5)

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-04 21:21:54 UTC

People in our country being unwilling to educate themselves about the detriment of climate change is one of our biggest failures as a society. We have countless pieces of media that do a great job at depicting climate change as a catalyst of harm, particularly against humans as well. Princess Mononoke and the symbolism of its curse mark do an amazing job at telling the story of pain caused by climate change. At the end of the day, it will affect everybody at some point: humans, nature, and animals. Even now, we're still seeing the effects of slow violence happening to people in marginalized and underprivileged communities.

Finalizing The Narrative Absence of Literacy (5/5)

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-04 21:25:43 UTC

We have countless examples of environmental injustice in our media that we can reference in order to improve our environmental literacy. We have iconic non-fictional stories like Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring that popularized the environmental movement, we have Terry Tempest Williams story about the one breasted woman, and how environmental injustice poisoned her family, we also have fictional media like Princess Mononoke and a plethora of other stories that display the effects of climate in one way or another. Our issue isn't representation, it's literacy.

Finalizing The Narrative: Non-Fiction Nature Writing & The Sublime (2/5)

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-05 13:00:22 UTC

Not all works of climate writing are fictional. Some writers like Rachel Carson and Terry Tempest Williams do great jobs at telling their stories through their non fiction works. However writers who focus on nature as their major theme do not do a great job at representing it in their time periods. A great example of a failure to properly represent nature is John Muir. His attempts to display the beauty of nature are great, however his words are too fantastical and makes his experiences appear as if he is reaching the sublime. Truly for people like Muir, connecting with nature was often connected with spirituality, which I would say was to the detriment of his writing.

Finalizing The Narrative: Separation of Nature VS Culture & Environmental Racism (3/5)

alexandersheehy — 2025-05-05 13:06:20 UTC

Among older nature appreciators. Experiences of nature were frequently tied to sublime experiences. Ordinarily this wouldn't be an issue; however, their experience reinforces the same environmental racism that has allowed slow violence to permeate through time. A large majority of nature writers back in the 1800s and 1900s were typically white men; only a handful of the population ever had the opportunity to discover their own perspective of wilderness because their voices were suppressed due to the many injustices of those time periods. Nature writing was also an endeavor only able to be done by those who were fairly wealthy. Most people were unable to afford to simply take the time to go into the wilderness and explore nature, leaving representation of nature to be unequal in terms of race, sex, and class.