Technology will play a role in addressing environmental violence. Some common technological aims include: more equitable access to cleaner and safer industrial techniques; wider deployment of pollution safeguards; and the transition of energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels and toward batteries and renewables. Of course, alternative technologies do not address many of the structural and cultural factors involved in generating environmental violence. Shifting from one mechanism to another, or one material to another, entails a shift in economic context, but guarantees nothing about whether this new context will be more equitable, or even ecologically responsible. We propose that, in order for technology deployment to be truly appropriate to the task of reducing environmental violence, economic affluence must be an equally primary factor of concern. In this article, we introduce the “affluence–technology connection” and provide several different contexts and perspectives to support the concept. These include appropriate technology efforts in Ladakh, India, the carbon footprint of alternative transportation technologies, and the true impact of service sector versus industrial sector activities. These lead us to a fairly simple conclusion: Achieving a lower-violence future means seeking appropriate affluence alongside appropriate and sustainable technologies.

Environmental violence is a cycle that preserves global power through the unequal distribution of pollutants while affecting society's most vulnerable ecosystems and populations. This concept poses a series of associations and interdependencies between our economic systems, our power structures, and our relation to nature. However, culture could interact with environmental violence beyond the supplementary role it has assigned in the model of environmental violence following Galtung's typology. Culture has autonomy from the economic practices that pollute the environment and its inhabitants. Under certain conditions, specific praxis and beliefs could dismantle the binary between the classical Marxist concepts of base and superstructure on which the relation between cultural violence and environmental violence, as defined, seems to depend. Therefore, there is a need to reconsider how culture, and our ways of understanding it, are part of the cycle in which our ways of production and consumption are incompatible with the stability of the environment and society. This chapter traces how far culture can, in its autonomy, reproduce the practices associated with environmental violence by analyzing a canonical Latin American poetic discourse: the poem Alturas de Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda.

How does environmental displacement fuel violent conflict? Worldwide environmental violence uproots more people every year than war, and the alarming acceleration of environmental displacement has generated significant speculation about its security consequences. This chapter undertakes a review of the literature linking environmental migration and violent conflict to: (1) map the complex causal pathways linking environmental migration to the onset and dynamics of political violence; (2) evaluate the “state of the evidence” or available empirical support underlying claims of an environment-migration-conflict link; and (3) identify gaps in existing literature. By systematizing existing research, this chapter seeks to clarify the state of knowledge on the environment-migration-conflict nexus, identify points of consensus and debate, and chart a path forward for future research. The review finds that while existing research suggests environmental displacement fuels civil war and communal conflict, there is a dearth of research addressing how environmental migrants may experience violence at the hands of the state. In addition, more comparative research is needed to gain deeper insights into the conditions under which environmental displacement impacts political violence.

This chapter engages with the concept of environmental violence to explore how art has witnessed and responded to human-produced pollution and its associated violence on human health and well-being. In this application of the environmental violence framing, this chapter seeks to deepen our understanding of the role of art in drawing our attention to the direct and indirect risks associated with anthropogenic pollution, ecological impacts, and climate change.

Amidst the popularizations of eco-crisis in movie and television media in the past two decades, the internationally vaunted eco-fiction film “Don’t Look Up” (2021) stands as a recent, explicit near-term allegory for political-economic culpabilities, technocratic infatuations, and social-ecological consequences of anthropogenic climate change. How might this contemporary, culturally acclaimed allegory help to illuminate some of the textures of environmental violence as proposed by Marcantonio and Fuentes; and how might notions of climate coloniality challenge the allegorical presentation of climate crisis in Don’t Look Up? Drawing on ecocinemacriticism, literary ecocriticism, contemporary Indigenous studies, and social theory, this chapter assesses the presumptive Whiteness of vaunted mainstream ecocinema as a form of cultural narrative; the generally myopic coloniality of apocalypse narratives; and linkages to other forms of spectacle in an international polity dependent on neoliberal political economics and structures of extraction. If these dynamics are interwoven with legacies of colonialism and racism, what are the implications for media representations of environmental violence?

In societies that rely on the economic framework of consumer capitalism, materialistic values, whereby individuals place high importance on acquiring money and material goods to improve well-being and status, tend to be rife. Materialistic values, however, negatively impact human health and well-being. One way in which they do this is by facilitating environmental degradation. Psychological research demonstrates that strong materialistic values can directly lead to lower levels of physical and mental health. In contrast to the problems presented by materialistic values and lifestyles, flow experiences, whereby people are completely immersed in an activity, may offer a means of limiting environmental violence and enhancing human well-being. The benefits of flow for well-being are well documented within the field of positive psychology. Further, research is beginning to show that flow may be able to support sustainable outcomes by occurring in activities with low environmental costs and encouraging stronger self-transcendent values. This chapter reviews the evidence to show that materialistic values support environmental violence before considering how flow experiences can offer an antidote that would allow us to reduce environmental violence and to live better and more sustainably. In doing so, practical recommendations are made for how to encourage flow experiences across society.

Environmental violence focuses on the harm from both toxic and non-toxic pollution. Contemporary agricultural practices contribute significantly to such environmental violence through a heavy reliance on synthetic chemicals to raise commodities, as well as fossil fuels for tractors and shipping related to distribution. These same practices further harm persons and communities (both human and non-human) in ways not included in the environmental violence framework. Using Jacques Ellul’s theory of a technological society and technique that values efficiency in all areas of life, this chapter explores the relationship between environmental violence, contemporary agricultural practices, and wider critiques of technology. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of how we might culturally encourage an agriculture of flourishing rather than one focused solely on efficiency through the example of the Catholic Worker farms.

From the Latin American Decolonial Environmental Thought (LDET) contributions, environmental violence can be defined as the deterritorialization of life expressed as the acceleration of the entropic dynamics of the biosphere, the loss of cultural (ontological) diversity of the world, and the transformation of nature into an external and commodifiable thing. This chapter presents the content of environmental violence as the deterritorialization of life. It begins by exposing the notion of environmental conflict and violence in the LDET. Then, this chapter shows four knowledge-power strategies that illustrate four emphases among decolonial thought and, at the same time, the critical dimensions to understand environmental violence sources. These emphases and dimensions are: (a) the social reappropriation of nature that emphasizes the politics of cultural difference; (b) the re-enchantment of the world, which emphasizes the politics of affect; (c) EcoSimia, a concept which emphasizes the difference-diversity of forms of production; and (d) peace as a restitution of the collective functions of territory, which emphasizes territorial difference. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the implications of LDET to understand environmental violence by arguing that the ultimate political ally to stopping violence is nature.

As a result of anthropogenic climate change, Inuit in the Arctic and island inhabitants in the Pacific Ocean both experience interrelated changes in their maritime environments. Global warming causes Arctic ice to melt, which leads to rising sea levels. As a result, local inhabitants in both regions experience the disappearance of their space (land and ice), paired with the arrival of new stakeholders with a diverse range of interests in the areas. As the inhabitants of the regions most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, Inuit and Pacific Islanders have engaged in counter-mapping and counter-narrating their space that colonial powers have previously conceptualized as isolated, remote, and peripheral. In contrast, the maps of Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific illustrate and tell the stories of transnational spaces that have been collectively shared and used since time immemorial. These counter-mapping and counter-narrative approaches shape a new perception of the regions. This chapter contributes to conceptual development of environmental violence by discussing case studies of counter-mapping and counter-narration in the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean – as locals’ responses to experiences of structural and cultural violence to overcome their vulnerability, challenge power differentials, and satisfy their human needs.

Between 1966 and 1996, France conducted 193 nuclear weapons tests in French Polynesia, including 41 detonations at or above ground level. This chapter explores the history of legal and diplomatic contestations of the French right to conduct nuclear tests in the South Pacific through the lens of environmental violence. Polynesians and other Pacific stakeholders saw France’s use of the South Pacific as a nuclear proving ground as an act of colonial violence and sought, unsuccessfully, to prevent the imposition of any additional radiological risk in Polynesia. Data gaps, information asymmetries, and the inherent causal uncertainty surrounding harms from exposure to ionizing radiation frustrated both prospective and retrospective legal recourse, as Pacific Islanders struggled to prove that they would be – or, in ensuing decades, that they had in fact been – harmed by French nuclear tests. The complex dynamics around radiological risk provoked anguish not only during the period of nuclear testing, but also afterwards, as individuals who developed potentially radiogenic conditions continued to navigate challenging victim compensation landscapes. This chapter illustrates the particular difficulties of coming to terms with causally complex, underdetermined harms in modern contexts of environmental violence.

We propose researchers of environmental violence have much to gain by considering the relevance of degrowth critiques in characterizing and addressing environmental violence. We argue a more dynamic, intersectional, and less anthropocentric definition of environmental violence reveals how pervasive forms of violence against the biosphere are still embedded in many contemporary strategies for sustainability. Recognizing these limits as well as their overlaps with degrowth can help us better identify assumptions and practices that address environmental violence’s sources and far-reaching consequences.

Mining relates to violence in diverse ways, and frequently the relationship includes environmental violence. New technologies, including those central to a clean energy transition, mean that mining will remain a necessary industry. This means in turn that the human community will remain in need of ways to minimize and cope with the environmental violence of mining. The theory and practice of Catholic peacebuilding can offer distinct resources for dealing with these challenges. First, there is Catholic social teaching, which creates a foundation from which to respond to the environmental violence of mining in suitably complex and integral ways. Second, the Catholic community has a vibrant base of grassroots actors defending people and the environment from mining damage. And third, there is the church’s institutional capacity to network those grassroots actors and coordinate their work with national and international efforts to change resource governance and industry practice. The argument is not that these resources are necessarily unique to the Catholic community. The idea is that the Catholic community can array and marshal these resources in a distinctive way that gives it special potential for responding to mining and environmental violence.

On July 28, 2022 the United Nations General Assembly declared that living in a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a human right. This volume explores and accounts for the primary vector of violence degrading this purported human right: environmental violence. Environmental violence is harm due to excess pollution put into the earth system through human activities and processes. Environmental violence is not the only mode of framing the myriad ills facing humanity and the planet, but as a tool it is designed to map, trace, and draw out the multitude of potential and realized pathways of harm from environmental hazards framed in the antecedent conditions and impact-mediating contexts that are integral parts of the whole of the violence facing humanity and the planet. The global metabolism for material and energy shows no signs of abating and the possibility of relying on decoupling consumption from material use and emissions shows no sign of materializing in a sufficient way to avoid ecological catastrophe. To drawdown emissions and regenerate biotic and abiotic communities are likely the orders of the day, and this volume proposes the environmental violence framework as a tool to help us get there.

The essay examines the communities and workers most impacted by acute climate disasters, within the context of business’s role in human rights, stakeholder well-being, and resilience, featuring illustrative examples from Japan and the United States. The disproportionate impact of climate change on the poor and vulnerable is clear, though the role of disaster “first responders” and essential workers is largely missing from academic discourse and policy solutions. Despite distinct contexts, nuclear clean-up crews, and those who rebuild after extreme weather have commonalities. Workers are largely transient, and underpaid, and often work without legal protections. These considerations are inextricably linked to business with its tremendous potential for impact. The role of business in climate change, indicted as much of the problem’s genesis and hailed as the source of innovative solutions, is clear. Its responsibilities to these workers and their communities, reflecting a stakeholder conception of business, are significant. The toll of environmental violence and the human rights of those who clean our climate messes must be part of our discourse and our solutions.