WAR BY OTHER MEANS: ENVIRONMENTAL VIOLENCE IN THE 21ST CENTURY by SHANE DONNELLY HALL A DISSERTATION Presented to the Environmental Studies Program and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2017 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Shane Donnelly Hall Title: War by Other Means: Environmental Violence in the 21st Century This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Environmental Studies Program by: Stephanie LeMenager Co-Chair David J. Vázquez Co-Chair Jacob Darwin Hamblin Core Member Sarah D Wald Core Member Anita Chari Institutional Representative and Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2017 ii © 2017 Shane Donnelly Hall iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Shane Donnelly Hall Doctor of Philosophy Environmental Studies Program June 2017 Title: 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 iv 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. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Shane Donnelly Hall GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s City DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, Environmental Sciences, Studies and Policy, 2017, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, English, 2009, St. Mary’s College of Maryland AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Environmental Justice Environmental Humanities and Ecocriticism Environmental Ethics and Policy Ethnic Literatures of the U.S. 20th and 21st Century Anglophone Literatures of North America Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Speculative Fiction American Studies Rhetoric and Composition PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Student Teacher-Scholar, Teaching Engagement Program, University of Oregon, 2015–2017 Consultant to Karakorum International University, Gilgit, Pakistan, 2016 Volunteer, Center for Renewable Energy and Appropriate Technology for the Environment, Eugene, Oregon, 2014–2016 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award, University of Oregon, 2016 vi Advanced Certificate, Graduate Teaching Initiative, University of Oregon, 2016 Founding Grant for Environmental Humanities Research Interest Group, University of Oregon, 2014 Stoddard Malarkey Essay Prize, , University of Oregon, 2013 Outstanding Graduate Teaching Fellow Award, University of Oregon, 2012 Jane Campbell Krohn Essay Prize, University of Oregon, 2012 International Leadership Syndicate Travel Grant, University of Oregon, 2012 Jane Campbell Krohn Fellowship, University of Oregon, 2011 PUBLICATIONS: Siperstein, Stephen, Shane Hall, and Stephanie LeMenager, editors. Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities. Routledge, 2017. “Learning to Imagine the Future: the Value of Affirmative Speculation in Climate Change Education.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. 2.2. University of Nebraska Press. 2015. vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am extremely grateful to many people for their help, support, and friendship throughout my work on this dissertation and my graduate education more broadly. I wish to express that gratitude and appreciation to Professors David Vázquez and Stephanie LeMenager for co-advising this project. More than helping me on the dissertation, I appreciate how you have mentored me by ushering me into different book projects, conferences, and fishing trips. I am grateful to Professors Sarah Wald, Jacob Darwin Hamblin, and Anita Chari for both helping me bring together my diffuse ideas and compose this manuscript, and for offering me advise about how to continue this work. For being my collaborators, co-teachers, colleagues, and commiseraters, I would like to thank all my grad student friends and colleagues in Environmental Studies and English, particularly: Taylor McHolm, Stephen Siperstein, Aylie Baker, Jules Bacon, Erica Elliot, M Jackson, Deion Jones, Nick Dreher, Alayna Linde, Dan Platt, Andrew Dutterer, and Kaityln Grigsby-Hall. I thank my family: Thomas, Peggy, Jamie, and Trevor Hall, Briana Garcia, Kim, Kurt, and Kyle Grigsby. Most of all, I thank my partner, Kaitlyn Grigsby- Hall, for her infinite patience and insightful advice, her humor and her passion for making the world a better place. I also want to acknowledge Professor Kate Chandler, who introduced me to good books and farming at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. viii This dissertation is dedicated to Kaitlyn Grigsby-Hall ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION: WAR BY OTHER MEANS: ENVIRONMENTAL VIOLENCE IN THE 21ST CENTURY ................................................................. 1 An Introduction to War, Militarism, and Environmental Crisis ............................ 1 Militarism through the Environmental Humanities ............................................... 10 Locating Environmental Humanities’ Investigations of Militarism ...................... 13 Critical Contexts and Confluences......................................................................... 20 A Massive Shift in Military Power and Purpose ............................................. 23 The Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement .......................................... 24 The Rise of Intersectional Analysis and Pedagogy in Higher Education ........ 26 The Rise of Public Concern over Anthropogenic Climate Change ................. 28 Organization of Work ............................................................................................ 29 Conclusion: Challenging Militarized Adaptation in the 21st Century................... 32 II. THE SPECTACULAR AND SLOW VIOLENCE OF WAR’S ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM IN TOBAR’S THE TATTOOED SOLDIER ...... 35 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 35 Reading for Ecologies of Violence ........................................................................ 42 Microbios: Discourses of Cleanliness and State Repression ................................. 43 Longoria the Jaguar.......................................................................................... 48 Germ Warfare .................................................................................................. 52 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 61 x Chapter Page III. THE “FUNNEL EFFECT” AS ENVIRONMENTAL WARFARE: DESCRIBING AND DISRUPTING THE FUGITIVE AGENCY OF THE BORDERLANDS IN URREA’S THE DEVIL’S HIGHWAY AND ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE THEATER’S TRANSBORDER IMMIGRANT TOOL ..................................................................................................................... 62 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 62 La Frontera Through an Environmental Warfare Lens: Building Deadly Funnels in the Borderlands ...................................................................................