Paper 204: Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies
Assignment of Paper: 204 The Political Economy of Environmental Sacrifice: Ecocriticism, Environmental Justice, and the Making of Sacrifice Zones in Contemporary Literature
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Academic Details
Name: Sandhya Bhut
Roll No.: 26
Enrollment No.: 5108250004
Sem.: 3
Batch: 2025 - 2027
E-mail: sandhyabhut06@gmail.com
Assignment Details
Paper Name: Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies
Paper No.: 204
Paper Code: 22409
Unit: 2 - Queer Theory, Eco-Criticism, Feminism, Marxism
Topic: The Political Economy of Environmental Sacrifice: Ecocriticism, Environmental Justice, and the Making of Sacrifice Zones in Contemporary Literature
Submitted To: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Submitted Date: October 19, 2026
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Paragraphs: 90
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Reading time: 16m 35s
Abstract
Environmental destruction is often presented as an unfortunate consequence of economic development. However, the distribution of environmental harm is rarely equal. Certain communities experience disproportionate exposure to pollution, resource extraction, and ecological damage, while the economic benefits of these activities are frequently enjoyed elsewhere. The concept of the sacrifice zone helps explain this unequal relationship by identifying places and communities treated as expendable in the pursuit of industrial and economic progress. This assignment examines the political economy of environmental sacrifice through an ecocritical and environmental-justice reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). It focuses on the representation of uranium mining, Indigenous land, colonial power, and the relationship between ecological damage and cultural disruption. Drawing on scholarship on sacrifice zones, Indigenous environmental knowledge, and literary representations of extraction, the assignment argues that Ceremony challenges the assumption that land is merely a resource available for economic use. The novel connects environmental destruction with colonial histories, racialised hierarchies, and the disruption of Indigenous relationships with land. At the same time, it presents healing as a process involving cultural memory, ecological relationships, and collective responsibility. The assignment also questions the limitations of the sacrifice-zone concept, particularly when it suggests that pollution can be contained within a specific geographical area. It concludes that literature can make the unequal distribution of environmental harm visible while challenging the economic and political systems that normalise ecological sacrifice.
Keywords:
Sacrifice zones, ecocriticism, environmental justice, political economy, Indigenous literature, uranium mining, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, colonialism, environmental knowledge.
Research Questions
How does the concept of the sacrifice zone explain the unequal distribution of environmental harm?
How does Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony represent the relationship between uranium mining, Indigenous land, and colonial power?
How can ecocriticism and environmental justice be combined to examine the political economy of environmental destruction in the novel?
How does the novel challenge the treatment of Indigenous land and communities as expendable?
What are the limitations of the sacrifice-zone concept, and how can literary analysis help us understand environmental harm beyond geographical boundaries?
Hypothesis
This assignment hypothesises that environmental sacrifice is not simply the result of industrial development but is produced through political and economic systems that assign unequal value to land, human communities, and ecological life. In Ceremony, Silko presents uranium mining as part of a broader colonial relationship in which Indigenous land is treated as a source of extractable wealth, while the ecological and cultural consequences of extraction are disproportionately imposed on Indigenous communities. The novel challenges this logic by presenting land as a living relationship connected to memory, identity, and collective survival. Therefore, an ecocritical reading informed by environmental justice and political economy can reveal how literary representations of ecological destruction expose the power structures that make certain communities appear expendable.
1. Introduction
Environmental destruction is commonly discussed through the language of pollution, resource depletion, climate change, and industrial development. These terms describe serious ecological problems, but they do not always explain why some communities experience greater environmental harm than others. Mining, industrial waste, nuclear activities, and other extractive practices are not distributed randomly across landscapes. Their effects are shaped by decisions about which resources should be exploited, which communities should receive economic benefits, and whose health, land, and livelihoods can be placed at risk.
The concept of the sacrifice zone provides a way to examine this inequality. It refers to a place or community that bears disproportionate environmental damage for the perceived benefit of a wider economic or political system. Ryan Juskus traces the changing meaning of the concept, showing how it developed from a land-management term into a critical concept associated with energy production, Indigenous political ecology, and environmental justice. The term therefore draws attention to the relationship between economic progress and the unequal distribution of environmental costs (Juskus).
This assignment examines that relationship through Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, a novel that connects the experiences of Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo veteran, with colonial history, cultural disruption, ecological damage, and the search for healing. The representation of uranium mining near Indigenous land is particularly significant because it connects environmental destruction with the historical treatment of Indigenous territories as spaces available for external exploitation.
The assignment uses three connected approaches. Ecocriticism examines how literature represents relationships between human beings and the environment. Environmental justice investigates the unequal distribution of environmental risks, benefits, and decision-making power. Political economy considers how economic institutions, ownership, colonial histories, and systems of resource extraction shape these relationships.
James Tarter’s study of the uranium mine in Ceremony is an important starting point because it directly examines the relationship between place, ethnicity, and environmental justice in the novel. This means that the present assignment does not claim that the environmental significance of Ceremony has been overlooked. Instead, it builds on existing scholarship by bringing the concept of the sacrifice zone into a more explicit discussion of political economy and by considering the limitations of treating environmental harm as confined to a particular place.
The central argument is that Ceremony challenges the economic logic that makes some lands and communities appear expendable. By connecting ecological damage with colonial power and cultural disruption, the novel suggests that environmental justice requires more than the technical management of pollution. It requires a reconsideration of the relationships between land, community, history, and economic development.
2. Understanding Sacrifice Zones
The concept of a sacrifice zone is useful because it identifies a contradiction within the idea of economic progress. Industrial development may generate energy, employment, infrastructure, or profit, but its environmental costs are not necessarily borne by the people who receive its benefits. A mining project, for example, may contribute to a wider economy while leaving nearby communities to deal with contaminated land, damaged ecosystems, and long-term health risks.
Juskus’s historical analysis demonstrates that the concept has developed into an important framework for understanding environmental injustice. It draws attention to situations in which the destruction of particular places is accepted as a necessary cost of development. Such destruction is not simply an accidental consequence of economic activity. It can reflect decisions about which communities are considered politically influential, which territories are considered economically valuable, and which populations can be exposed to environmental risk.
Ipsen and Lequieu further examine the development of sacrifice zones as a concept in environmental sociology. Their discussion is useful for understanding how sacrifice zones emerge from broader systems of rationalised exploitation. Rather than treating each polluted location as an isolated problem, their approach encourages attention to the social and economic processes that repeatedly produce environmental harm.
The concept also has a moral and political dimension. To describe a place as a sacrifice zone is to question the assumption that its destruction is acceptable for the benefit of others. It makes visible the unequal relationship between those who profit from extraction and those who experience its consequences.
However, the term must be used carefully. It can suggest that environmental harm is restricted to a clearly defined geographical area. In reality, pollution can travel through air, water, soil, food chains, and human bodies. Kimberley Anh Thomas, Caitlin Joseph, and Britt Crow-Miller argue that the concept’s spatial boundaries may obscure the movement of toxic substances beyond the locations where they are initially produced or concentrated. Their critique does not erase the importance of identifying disproportionately harmed communities; rather, it asks researchers to consider both unequal exposure and the wider movement of environmental harm.
This tension is important to the present study. The concept of the sacrifice zone helps identify how Indigenous communities can be made to bear the costs of extraction. At the same time, its limitations encourage a broader understanding of environmental damage as an interconnected process rather than a problem belonging only to a single location.
3. The Political Economy of Environmental Sacrifice
The political economy of environmental sacrifice concerns the relationship between economic benefit, political authority, and environmental harm. It asks who controls natural resources, who makes decisions about their extraction, who profits from development, and who bears its long-term consequences.
Resource extraction is often justified through the language of national progress, industrial necessity, employment, or economic growth. Within this framework, land may be evaluated primarily according to its usefulness as a source of minerals, energy, or other commodities. The ecological relationships that sustain communities can become secondary to the economic value assigned to the resources beneath the surface.
This process becomes particularly unequal when communities have limited control over the decisions affecting their territories. Indigenous communities may possess longstanding cultural, historical, and ecological relationships with their land, yet those relationships can be marginalised when outside institutions define land chiefly through commercial value.
Vasudevan and Mukherjee’s framework of ecocritical extraction analysis provides a useful method for investigating these relationships in literature. Their approach involves identifying representations of extraction, examining the power structures governing relationships between humans and nature, and tracing literary representations of resistance or ecological collapse. Applied to Ceremony, this method encourages the reader to consider not only the presence of a uranium mine but also the political and cultural systems that make extraction possible.
A political-economic reading therefore moves beyond the observation that mining damages the environment. It asks why extraction takes place in particular locations, how the people living there are represented, and why ecological damage may be treated as an acceptable cost.
In Ceremony, uranium mining becomes significant because it connects the physical transformation of land with a longer history of colonial power. The mine cannot be understood only as an industrial site. It also represents a conflict between different understandings of land: one that treats territory as a source of extractable wealth and another that understands land through relationships, responsibilities, memory, and community.
4. Ceremony: Uranium Mining and the Colonial Treatment of Land
Silko’s Ceremony follows Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo man who returns from military service during the Second World War struggling with psychological distress, grief, and a sense of disconnection. His experiences are connected to the wider histories of colonialism, cultural disruption, and the marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge. The novel presents his healing as a process that cannot be separated from his relationships with his community, cultural traditions, and the land.
The representation of uranium mining is central to an environmental-justice reading of the novel. The uranium mine near the reservation is not merely a background detail. It becomes part of the landscape through which the relationship between colonial extraction and Indigenous experience can be understood. Tarter’s analysis identifies the mine as a crucial location in the novel’s movement towards the completion of Tayo’s ceremony. The encounter connects the protagonist’s personal journey with a landscape marked by the consequences of resource extraction.
This connection challenges an exclusively individual understanding of Tayo’s suffering. His distress cannot be reduced to a private psychological problem detached from historical circumstances. The novel situates his experiences within a wider environment shaped by war, colonial authority, cultural conflict, and ecological disruption. The landscape therefore participates in the narrative’s examination of suffering and healing.
The mine also reveals the unequal power relations underlying environmental sacrifice. Uranium possesses economic and strategic value within wider political systems, but the extraction of such resources can impose environmental risks on communities living near mining sites. The central question is not simply whether uranium is valuable. It is whether the economic and political importance assigned to uranium can justify damage to Indigenous territories and the lives connected to them.
A sacrifice-zone interpretation makes this inequality visible. Land is treated as available for industrial use, while the community’s relationships with that land are subordinated to external priorities. The language of sacrifice exposes the ethical problem concealed by the language of development: one group’s material or strategic benefit may depend on another group’s exposure to harm.
Nevertheless, Ceremony should not be reduced to a straightforward account of environmental victimhood. The novel gives importance to Indigenous cultural knowledge and to the possibility of restoring relationships damaged by historical violence. Its treatment of the landscape challenges the assumption that land is passive material awaiting human use. Instead, the land is embedded in a network of relationships that connect human life, cultural memory, and ecological processes.
The mine consequently operates as more than a symbol of pollution. It brings together the novel’s concerns with colonial power, environmental damage, and the struggle to restore relationships disrupted by extractive thinking.
5. Environmental Justice and Indigenous Knowledge
Environmental justice is concerned not only with the physical presence of pollution but also with the unequal distribution of environmental risks, access to decision-making, and recognition of affected communities’ knowledge and experiences.
In Ceremony, the consequences of colonial disruption extend beyond physical damage. The novel examines conflicts between Indigenous traditions and dominant systems that have historically marginalised Indigenous identities and forms of knowledge. These conflicts matter environmentally because the way a community understands land can influence how it responds to ecological change and how it defines responsibility towards the natural world.
Indigenous environmental knowledge should not be treated as a single, universal system shared identically by all Indigenous peoples. In Silko’s novel, Laguna Pueblo cultural relationships provide the specific context through which land, community, and healing are represented. The novel’s emphasis on these relationships challenges approaches that separate ecological conditions from cultural experience.
Research on traditional ecological knowledge and abandoned uranium mines on Navajo Nation by Tommy Rock and Jani C. Ingram offers a relevant contextual comparison. Their work addresses policy considerations surrounding abandoned uranium mines and the importance of Indigenous knowledge in environmental decision-making. It should not be treated as direct evidence about every aspect of the Laguna Pueblo context in Ceremony, since the communities and histories are distinct. Rather, it demonstrates the wider importance of including Indigenous perspectives when examining the legacies of uranium extraction.
This distinction is essential. Literary analysis can reveal how a text represents land, power, and cultural knowledge, while environmental research can document particular historical, ecological, or policy conditions. These forms of evidence can inform one another, but they are not interchangeable.
The novel’s representation of healing also complicates the assumption that environmental recovery is purely technical. Remediation may be necessary at a contaminated site, but the restoration of community relationships, cultural continuity, and trust may require additional forms of recognition and responsibility. Environmental justice therefore involves both material conditions and the social relationships through which environmental harm is experienced.
Silko’s narrative suggests that ecological damage cannot be fully understood when Indigenous knowledge is dismissed or when land is valued only according to its economic usefulness. By making cultural relationships central to the narrative, Ceremony challenges the exclusion of Indigenous perspectives from dominant accounts of progress.
6. Ecocriticism, Extraction, and the Representation of Nature
Ecocriticism examines the ways literary texts represent the natural environment and the relationships between human and nonhuman life. In an environmental-justice study, however, ecocriticism must also ask how these representations are connected to political and economic power.
A reading that focuses only on the beauty or symbolic significance of nature may overlook the institutions responsible for environmental destruction. Similarly, a reading that treats nature only as a victim of human activity may fail to recognise how literary representations expose unequal power relations. An ecocritical analysis of Ceremony must therefore connect the physical landscape with the historical and economic systems that shape it.
Vasudevan and Mukherjee’s ecocritical extraction analysis is particularly useful here because it offers a structured way to study resource exploitation in literary texts. Its focus on extraction, human–nature power relations, and resistance helps establish a connection between close reading and environmental politics.
Applied to Ceremony, this framework raises three questions. First, how does the narrative make uranium mining and its surrounding landscape significant? Second, what conflict emerges between extractive economic priorities and Indigenous relationships with land? Third, how does the novel imagine responses to the damage produced by colonial and extractive systems?
These questions prevent the mine from being treated as a disconnected environmental symbol. Instead, it becomes part of a narrative structure through which the reader can examine the relationship between ecological destruction and social inequality.
Environmental sacrifice is also connected to the unequal valuation of human lives. When a landscape is regarded chiefly as a source of minerals, the communities whose lives are intertwined with that landscape may be represented as obstacles to development or as acceptable bearers of risk. This does not mean that every mining project operates in the same way. It means that literary analysis should examine how particular texts represent the relationship between resource value, power, and the distribution of harm.
Ceremony challenges a narrow economic understanding of land by placing ecological relationships within a broader cultural and historical framework. Its environmental significance lies not simply in its representation of a damaged landscape but in its examination of the worldview that makes such damage possible.
7. Resistance, Healing, and Ecological Relationships
If the concept of the sacrifice zone identifies the unequal distribution of environmental harm, literary analysis must also examine how texts represent resistance and the possibility of change. Otherwise, affected communities risk appearing only as passive victims of economic and political decisions.
In Ceremony, healing is a central narrative concern. Tayo’s recovery develops through his engagement with cultural knowledge, relationships, memory, and the landscape. The narrative does not present healing as a simple return to an untouched past. Rather, it explores the need to respond to changed historical conditions while recovering forms of understanding that colonial disruption has weakened.
This representation is important for environmental justice because it questions the assumption that ecological problems can be resolved exclusively through technical intervention. The removal of pollution or the rehabilitation of a site may address material damage, but environmental justice also requires attention to the histories and relationships through which that damage was produced.
The novel’s emphasis on cultural knowledge should not be interpreted as a claim that Indigenous traditions can automatically reverse environmental contamination. Such a conclusion would romanticise Indigenous knowledge and minimise the material consequences of industrial activity. A more careful interpretation is that cultural relationships provide an alternative framework for understanding responsibility, belonging, and the meaning of environmental recovery.
The contrast between extractive logic and relational understanding is therefore central to the novel. Extractive logic treats land as a resource whose value can be calculated and appropriated. Relational understanding recognises that land is connected to histories, responsibilities, communities, and forms of life that cannot be reduced to market value.
This contrast also provides a basis for understanding resistance. Resistance may involve opposing destructive projects, preserving community knowledge, challenging exclusion from decision-making, and demanding accountability for environmental harm. In literary terms, it may also involve challenging the narratives through which extraction is represented as inevitable or necessary.
Silko’s novel makes the restoration of relationships part of its response to colonial disruption. Its contribution to environmental-justice thinking lies in showing that ecological questions cannot be separated from questions of history, identity, power, and collective responsibility.
8. The Contemporary Relevance and Limitations of Sacrifice Zones
The concept of sacrifice zones remains relevant to contemporary debates about mining, industrial pollution, energy production, and environmental inequality. It encourages readers to question who benefits from economic development and who is expected to bear its environmental costs. It also helps connect particular environmental problems with wider patterns of political and economic power.
However, the concept has limitations. Thomas, Joseph, and Crow-Miller argue that the term can create the misleading impression that pollution remains contained within a defined geographical area. Toxic substances may travel through air, water, and soil, affecting communities far from the original source. The concept may therefore identify concentrated harm while failing to communicate fully how environmental damage moves across geographical and social boundaries.
This critique is important because it complicates the distinction between places that are sacrificed and places that are supposedly protected. Environmental damage may be concentrated in particular communities, but the systems producing it can affect wider populations. Recognising the mobility of pollution does not mean that all communities experience equal harm. Instead, it requires an understanding of both disproportionate exposure and interconnected consequences.
The critique also raises a political question: if environmental harm is treated as a problem belonging only to a particular location, responses may focus on managing that location without challenging the wider economic system that produced the damage. A mine may be closed, for example, while the demand for extracted resources continues to encourage extraction elsewhere. The location of harm may change even when the underlying economic priorities remain.
Ceremony provides a literary framework for questioning such priorities because it connects the environmental consequences of extraction with a longer history of colonial power. Its representation of the uranium mine makes it possible to examine the relationship between particular places and broader political structures.
At the same time, the novel should not be used as direct evidence for contemporary environmental conditions without supporting historical and scientific research. Its value lies in its literary representation of the relationships between land, colonialism, cultural knowledge, and harm. Contemporary studies of mining, pollution, and Indigenous environmental justice can establish the specific conditions of particular communities.
A careful approach therefore combines literary interpretation with contextual research while maintaining the distinction between them. The concept of the sacrifice zone helps identify unequal environmental burdens, while its limitations encourage a more comprehensive account of the systems and relationships through which those burdens are produced.
9. Conclusion
This assignment has examined the political economy of environmental sacrifice through an ecocritical and environmental-justice reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. It has argued that sacrifice zones are not simply polluted places but locations shaped by economic priorities and political relationships that distribute environmental harm unequally. The concept makes visible the contradiction between the benefits of extraction and the environmental costs imposed on communities with limited control over the decisions affecting their land.
The analysis of Ceremony has shown how the representation of uranium mining connects ecological damage with colonial histories, Indigenous land, and cultural disruption. The novel challenges the assumption that land should be valued primarily according to its usefulness as a source of extractable wealth. By placing cultural knowledge, memory, and healing at the centre of its narrative, it offers a different way of understanding relationships between communities and the environment.
The assignment has also demonstrated that environmental justice requires more than identifying polluted locations. It requires attention to the political and economic systems that determine where extraction occurs, who benefits from it, whose knowledge is recognised, and who bears the consequences. The limitations of the sacrifice-zone concept further show that environmental harm cannot always be contained within geographical boundaries. Pollution can move beyond its source, while the unequal distribution of exposure continues to follow existing patterns of power.
The hypothesis is therefore supported at the level of the novel’s representation: Ceremony presents environmental destruction as inseparable from colonial and cultural relationships rather than as an isolated technical problem. The novel also demonstrates why ecological healing cannot be reduced to the restoration of physical landscapes alone. Cultural continuity, recognition, and responsibility are essential dimensions of the relationships through which communities understand and respond to environmental damage.
Ultimately, literature contributes to environmental-justice debates by revealing the human, cultural, and ethical meanings concealed by the language of economic development. Ceremony challenges readers to question the systems that make particular lands and communities appear expendable. Its environmental significance lies in its insistence that land cannot be understood only as a resource and that genuine justice requires confronting the relationships of power that make environmental sacrifice possible.
Works Cited
De Bruyn, Ben. “Introduction: Beyond the Sacrifice Zone.” Textual Practice, vol. 37, no. 10, 2023, pp. 1475–1498. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2023.2264675.
Ipsen, Annabel, and Amanda McMillan Lequieu. “From Rationalized Exploitation to Supra Sacrifice Zones: Tracing Sacrifice Zones as a Keyword of Environmental Sociology.” Environmental Sociology, vol. 11, no. 3, 2025, pp. 351–362. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2024.2430390.
Juskus, Ryan. “Sacrifice Zones: A Genealogy and Analysis of an Environmental Justice Concept.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 15, no. 1, 2023, pp. 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216129.
Manoharan, Aleena. “Environmental Justice and Sacrifice Zones: Reading Jack Davis’s Plays.” Literature, Critique, and Empire Today, vol. 60, no. 2, 2025, pp. 323–340. https://doi.org/10.1177/30333962251346682.
Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. “Expandability and Expendability: Reading the Sacrifice Zone.” Textual Practice, vol. 37, no. 10, 2023, pp. 1624–1630. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2023.2268922.
Rock, Tommy, and Jani C. Ingram. “Traditional Ecological Knowledge Policy Considerations for Abandoned Uranium Mines on Navajo Nation.” Human Biology, vol. 92, no. 1, 2020, pp. 19–26. https://doi.org/10.13110/humanbiology.92.1.01.
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Tarter, James. “Locating the Uranium Mine: Place, Multiethnicity, and Environmental Justice in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment, [insert editor and publisher details from the book’s title page], pp. 97–110. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt20q1x4v.11.
Thomas, Kimberley Anh, Caitlin Joseph, and Britt Crow-Miller. “Respatializing Toxic Harm: The Case Against Sacrifice Zones.” Antipode, vol. 58, no. 1, 2026, article e70123. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70123.
Vasudevan, Harsha, and Akaitab Mukherjee. “Ecocritical Extraction Analysis: A Method for Studying Resource Exploitation and Environmental Justice in Literature.” MethodsX, vol. 14, 2025, article 103384. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2025.103384.
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