INTRODUCTION

Violence is an abiding presence in this world. Humans practice it and experience it. Humans control it, focus it, or amplify it. We name it, categorize it, and argue about its limits. We argue about what events in the world count as “violence” or as something else. For some, violence must include some measure of physical force or destruction. For others, limiting the expression of violence to the physical may itself be an enactment of violence. Thus, we now hear about discursive or representational violence, and, as we saw in connection with animal experimentation and endangered species, physical violence may be encouraged precisely through the denial that it even counts as violence. Violence is a problem and violence is a solution. Violence is, as we know, even the solution to the problem of violence. And while we argue about its limits, its causes and cures, its pleasures and uses, we are commonly aided by a rough but durable taxonomy in which conceptions of nature play a fundamental role. When we consider violence in general or in regard to specific events, when we want to explain or assess it and gauge our response to it we work with a fundamental distinction between natural and human violence.

Natural violence comes in many varieties, large and small. It includes the violence associated with the forces of nature that provided the grounds for Mill's indictment: earthquakes, hurricanes, fire, and pestilence.