Environmental Violence Statement

We live in an era of unprecedented environmental violence. Anthropogenic climatic changes and record pollution pulse through the fundamental architectures of society, shaping the geographies of human existence. Migration is among the most drastic consequences of environmental violence, which displaces more people every year than war. The purpose of this chapter is to examine how environmental violence impacts migration and how this displacement feeds into broader cycles of violent political conflict. By analyzing how environmental violence shapes society through processes of migration and conflict – two enduring global challenges – this chapter illuminates the dimensionality of environmental violence and how it reverberates across all levels and sectors of society. In turn, this highlights the multiplicative effect of environmental violence and the disproportionate impact it has on the most vulnerable populations.

12.1 Introduction

Displacement is among the most drastic consequences of environmental violence. While environmental shocks have always “pushed” people to more hospitable environments, anthropogenic changes in their intensity, frequency, and geographic distribution are accelerating displacement at unprecedented rates. Worldwide, human-induced environmental changes now uproot more people every year than war, and exponential increases are expected as the climate crisis unfolds. The alarming intensity of environmental displacement has generated significant speculation about its security consequences, with many arguing that large-scale environmental displacement has the potential to trigger violent conflict [Reference Homer-Dixon1, Reference Reuveny2]. Attention to the potential causal impact of environmental displacement on violence has been amplified by growing concern about the evolving patterns of human movement in response to climatic change, especially as modeled mitigation pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C become increasingly unattainable [3].

The last few decades have seen a sharp increase in scholarly interest in the relationship between environmental displacement and political violence. Nearly every scholarly publication examining the environment-conflict nexus mentions migration as a possible intermediary in the causal chain [Reference Barnett4–Reference Hendrix and Salehyan10]. Policy discourse has echoed concern for the destabilizing effects of environmental displacement. In the 1990s, unease about the proliferation of environmental displacement first appeared on the docket of UN agencies, including the High Commissioner for Refugees and the Environment Programme. Environmental displacement is now a top policy priority among the world’s major intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and national governments, and is already influencing decision-making considerations across areas of defense, foreign relations, homeland security, and immigration.

This chapter provides a comprehensive review of the growing and diverse literature examining the environment-migration-conflict nexus. Despite the growing number of studies, the relationship between environmental displacement and political violence has generated unclear findings. Empirical research varies remarkably in focus and scope, mirroring broader trends in the environment-conflict literature [Reference Koubi11]. Studies differ in how they define and operationalize environmental displacement, relying on both direct and indirect measures. Conflict is also defined and operationalized differently. Most prior research examining the security consequences of environmental displacement has focused on civil war [Reference Kelley, Mohtadi, Cane, Seager and Kushnir12], but understanding the impact of environmental displacement on other forms of political violence is equally important [Reference Koubi, Böhmelt, Spilker and Schaffer13–Reference Piasentin16]. Variation across empirical studies has yielded inconclusive, and even contradictory, findings. Reconciling these diverse findings is essential, because inferences from research could influence policy, disaster response, adaptation assistance, and other decisions about where to put efforts to address environmental challenges and conflict.

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. It focuses on three broad categories of political violence: communal conflict, civil war, and state repression. To this end, the chapter proceeds as follows: the next section defines the core concept of environmental displacement and explores the relationship between environmental violence and migration; the following section maps the complex causal pathways linking environmental displacement to the onset and dynamics of different forms of violent conflict and evaluates the “state of the evidence” or available empirical support underlying theoretical claims; I then conclude with summary remarks and implications for policy.

12.2 Environmental Displacement

12.3 Environmental Displacement and Violent Conflict: Pathways and Evidence

12.4 Conclusions

Policymakers and scholars alike have raised the alarm about the possibility of impending security crises and instability caused by environmental displacement. Understanding the linkages between environmental displacement and conflict is especially consequential given the context of evolving climatic change. Global warming is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme climate-related natural hazards, even under conditions of limited warming, with direct implications for environmental displacement [100]. Dislocations by accelerated climate-related risks will continue to accumulate with those driven by other environmental events, such as pollution and geological hazards.

This chapter aims to review the literature linking environmental displacement and political violence. Despite diverse findings in existing research, the balance of evidence points to some tentative conclusions. While environmental displacement is unlikely to trigger the onset of intrastate armed conflict, it tends to exacerbate existing conflicts, making them longer and more deadly. The finding that environmental displacement intensifies armed conflict attests to a threat multiplier effect [Reference Ghimire, Ferreira and Dorfman101, Reference Eastin102]. For governments already in the throes of violent conflict, this portends deepening security crises and potential conflict traps as a downstream consequence of environmental violence. Environmental displacement can also trigger intergroup conflict, particularly in the absence of a state mediator. A crucial gap in the literature is the absence of studies examining the impact of environmental displacement on state repression. Future research should prioritize this nexus to consider how, and under what conditions, states may use violence against EDPs, despite a humanitarian obligation to protect them.

What, if any, policy recommendations can be gleaned from existing research on the environment-displacement-conflict nexus? The conflict-exacerbating effect of environmental displacement highlights the need for more integrative frameworks of disaster preparedness, response, and recovery that incorporate elements of stabilization, security, and peacebuilding. Support for adaptation can limit the size and scope of environmental displacement and, in turn, reduce its destabilizing consequences. International actors can empower individuals, communities, and governments (at national and local levels) to reduce and manage environmental displacement with targeted financial, technical, and informational assistance. A wide range of adaptation options are available to reduce the incidence of catastrophic environmental displacement, and the most effective tools are highly contingent on local geography, economies, and socio-political relationships [103]. Decision-makers must work directly with communities situated in disaster-prone areas to support adaptation strategies appropriate to context.

It is also critical for policymakers to recognize that displacement is not inherently destabilizing and is often a vital adaptation strategy that saves lives and promotes development. Thus, relocation should not be categorically discouraged. Instead, policymakers can prevent displacement-related instability by supporting initiatives to anticipate, facilitate, and coordinate retreat through early warning systems and established evacuation plans. Governments can intervene in a variety of ways to limit displacement- related instability [Reference Brzoska and Fröhlich104, Reference Mitchell and Pizzi105]. Managed retreat from hazard prone areas, regulatory action on construction and settlement, investment in climate-resilient infrastructure, risk-informed land planning, and economic diversification are just a few strategies that can limit displacement [106]. Effective disaster response and humanitarian aid are also important for quelling grievances and discontent in migrant-receiving areas, but steps should be taken to secure disaster relief from predatory looting by armed non-state actors. Where governments lack sufficient resources to implement these measures, support from the international community will be critical in filling in the gaps to mitigate displacement crises and ensuing political instability.

Engaging Environmental Violence

Mining is a prominent context for environmental violence, leading to ecological destruction and harm to communities impacted by that damage. The praxis and theory of Catholic peacebuilding have much to offer for dealing with these problems. Globally, the Catholic community is already deeply engaged on issues of mining and environmental violence. This chapter will describe this engagement and identify some of the key components that mark its potential for positive impact on the environmental violence of mining.

13.1 Introduction

Mining relates to violence in diverse ways, and frequently the relationship includes environmental violence. For example, in Colombia, mining is expected to help deliver a peace dividend for the government after it signed the 2016 Colombian Peace Accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). That means it is expected to be a source of revenue to incentivize the government’s commitment; however, a major challenge is that criminal organizations are seizing mining territories previously controlled by the FARC and perpetuating violence and doing serious environmental harm [Reference Massé and Le Billon1, Reference Villar and Schaeffer2]. Or there is the Philippines, where extortion of mining companies by paramilitary groups has led to more militarized security around mining sites, which has led to violence and criminalization of even legitimate protests to protect the environment and human rights [Reference Holden and Jacobson3].

New technologies, including technologies central to a clean energy transition, mean that mining will remain a necessary industry. As a result, the human community will remain in need of ways to minimize and cope with the environmental violence of mining. This essay describes the connection between mining and environmental violence, that is, how mining does direct harm to the environment and in turn the ability of communities to thrive in those environments. This includes consideration of the paradox by which anticipated long-term benefits of renewable energy technology are problematized in the short term by that ecological and human harm, as well as broader questions about the sufficiency and justice of renewable energy. After describing these connections between mining and environmental violence, I will turn to ways in which Catholic peacebuilding, both in teaching and practice, can offer distinct resources for dealing with these challenges. This includes the Catholic social teaching principles of subsidiarity, care for creation, and integral human development; the church’s extensive grassroots presence; and the church’s institutional structure that enables networking between impacted communities and between communities and higher social orders. The argument is not that these resources are unique to the Catholic community. Rather, the idea is that the Catholic community, particularly through its theory and praxis of peacebuilding, can array and marshal these resources in a distinctive way that gives it special potential for responding to mining and environmental violence. Throughout the world, Catholic actors are engaged on issues of mining, and this argument about the Catholic community’s potential and capacity will draw on some of these examples of engagement. The Catholic community has shortcomings in this area, but there are some practical ways that they can be addressed to improve impact.

13.2 Mining and Environmental Violence

In January of 2019, the tailings dam at an iron ore mine in Brumadinho, Brazil collapsed. Two hundred seventy people died. Twelve million cubic meters of ore tailings were released into the nearby Paraopeba River, causing increased water turbidity and contamination that spread as far as 242 kilometers downstream [Reference Thompson, de Oliveira, Cordeiro, Masi, Rangel, Paz, Freitas, Lopes, Silva, Cabral, Soares, Lacerda, dos Santos Vergilio, Lopes-Ferreira, Lima, Thompson and Rezende4]. Staff from the mining company that ran the site, Vale, have been charged with murder, and the company has been ordered to pay USD 7 billion in compensation in socio-economic and socio-environmental damages with the possibility of more as remediation efforts advance [5]. Sadly, this incident is not one that can be brushed aside as a fluke or outlier given the data about how many other at-risk tailings dams exist [Reference Warburton, Hart, Ledur, Scheyder and Levine6]. Since the Brumadinho disaster, at least 16 known tailings dam collapses have occurred in countries around the world including Brazil, India, Peru, China, South Africa, Turkey, Angola, Myanmar, and Mexico [7].

Dramatic cases like Brumadinho demonstrate the environmental risks of mining and the severe damage they can do. But the environmental violence of mining can come in myriad forms, including social, cultural, and economic ones. The land scarring, deforestation, water depletion, and harmful waste associated with mining can increase climate vulnerability, hasten displacement, worsen resource scarcity, threaten cultural heritages, disempower already marginalized peoples, and cause illness and death. Severine Deneulin and Yvonne Orengo have detailed two powerful examples of mining areas, the Atacama region of Chile and the Anosy region of Madagascar, where predominantly marginalized peoples live and have had their ways of life almost completely undone [Reference Deneulin and Orengo8]. With regard to illness and death, there is the noted case of the people of Cajamarca, Peru, who are still feeling effects more than two decades after a mercury spill at the Yanacocha gold mine [Reference Moeys9]. There is also the near-genocidal generational violence against Native Americans as a result of uranium mining [Reference Fegadel10].

Mining also raises concerns about the environment’s well-being for its own sake. In Colombia, mining is responsible for an increasing share of deforestation, posing a major threat to Colombia’s massive biodiversity [Reference González-González, Clerici and Quesada11]. Birds in Colombia are not at high risk for extinction, but deforestation from mining and other activities, like agricultural expansion, are steadily raising the extinction risk level as the 2016 Peace Accord has opened new opportunities for land development as well as expansion of illegal mining and illicit crop activities [Reference Renjifo, Amaya-Villarreal and Butchart12]. A 2017 study by the Humboldt Institute in Bogotá identified 2700 plant and animal species as endangered due to forest and wetland loss, both of which are accelerating since the signing of the country’s peace agreement [Reference Emblin13].

The Philippines is another case that brings together many of these environmental violence problems. Deforestation in the Philippines has accelerated in recent decades, with 151 000 hectares of primary forest lost between 2002 and 2020 [14]. This includes mangrove forests which are an important natural defense against storms and shoreline erosion. Logging, agriculture, dams, and other forms of land development are to blame, but mining is one of the chief culprits [Reference Tacio15]. This large-scale loss of tree cover is a violence to the environment itself, a violence to communities for whom forests provide livelihoods and resources as well as cultural anchors, and it is a violence that worsens the country’s already precarious climate vulnerability. The Philippines is rated the third most at-risk country for climate change impacts, and economic development models that are overly reliant on environmentally violent activities like mining and logging are exacerbating that risk [Reference Holden16].

One of the biggest drivers today of increased mining is the push for renewable energy technologies, which require certain minerals to function. So, there is tension with this method of reducing the extraction and use of fossil fuels for energy, which comes at the cost of increased mineral mining: One kind of digging is replaced by another, and the adverse economic and ecological impacts on the communities where the mining occurs remain. Another dimension of the problem is that most clean energy technologies are being put to use in the global North, while the mining that enables them occurs in the global South. A report from the London Mining Network has detailed and critiqued this dynamic by which the global North simply displaces its climate change footprint to the global South by relying on solutions that depend on continued extraction ([17], p. 5).

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is a paradigmatic example. The DRC produces more than half of the world’s cobalt, which is used in many different technologies, but batteries for renewable energy are expected to account for over 50% of its projected market growth by 2025 [Reference Nogrady18]. This means increased capacity for renewable energy in the global North will come at the cost of human rights violations, state violence, social instability, environmental damage, and compromised economic development in the DRC where, ironically, mining in remote areas is bringing attention to a severe lack in energy infrastructure [Reference Takemura19, Reference Slater20].

Despite these problems, renewable energy has merits. It is a better option than continued fossil fuel pollution accelerating climate change. It would be naive, and perhaps even counterproductive, to suggest that all mining stop. Although many of the resources needed for renewable energy technology are highly recyclable [Reference Sampat and Starke21], recycling is not a panacea that would completely eliminate the need for virgin ores [Reference Finn22]. The challenge then becomes how to untangle renewable energy from models of development and lifestyles that assume problems related to extraction can be solved by more extraction, and economic growth outweighs the damage that extraction may cause. If mining is necessary for renewable energy, a major ethical question becomes how communities might be empowered, politically and economically, rather than become victims of environmental violence.

13.3 Catholic Resources

Catholic peacebuilders have been engaged for a long time on issues of mining. Their work demonstrates the distinct, if not necessarily unique, assets possessed by the Catholic Church to address these challenges of mining and environmental violence. This is not to say that the Catholic Church is the only institution that has these capacities nor to say that the Catholic community can solve these problems fully of its own accord without other partners and collaborators. There are community activists and policy advocates working tirelessly and effectively to curb the sorts of problems outlined above who are not within the Catholic fold. Even the most dedicated Catholic actors on issues of mining, environmental protection, and defense of human rights need to partner with secular and interreligious groups, for example, to improve their technical knowledge, form more effective coalitions, recognize blind spots, or attain the scale of response needed for the massive scope of the problems related to environmental violence and mining. What “distinct” does mean here is that the Catholic Church, and related organizations that are not formally part of the church’s institutional hierarchy, has distinctly strong potential to address these problems and also offers a distinct ability to array and marshal the different levels of response that are needed. This distinct capacity comes substantively from the body of ethical reflection known as Catholic social teaching, and procedurally from the church’s grassroots presence and its institutional structure that enables vertical and horizontal integration.

The procedural aspects highlight ways in which the global network of the Catholic Church allows it to have local embeddedness and wide reach that are necessary for addressing problems of mining and environmental violence. Both of these problems are simultaneously radically local in that they have very specific contextual dynamics, and radically global in that they are driven by globalized economics and politics. They, therefore, need responses that have strong community roots and an ability to integrate levels and locations of response. The substantive capacity, Catholic social teaching, points at distinct content in the Catholic tradition that can support solutions to such multifaceted problems.

13.4 Conclusion

Mining and environmental violence are closely related. Mining is a major cause of environmental violence, and it also muddies one high-priority means of addressing environmental violence, that being renewable energy technologies. Mining and environmental violence are phenomena that are intimately local in how they impact specific communities and specific ecologies, while being expansively global in how they are part of complex global structures of economics, consumption, and political and corporate power, all of which are beset by vexing patterns of injustice and inequity.

The Catholic Church is an entity that is distinctively situated to respond to these issues, and its peacebuilding theory and praxis offer promising resources to support such a response. The Catholic Church has its tradition of Catholic social teaching, which gives a robust system of moral reflection to help critique problems stemming from mining and leading to environmental violence, while showing pathways to solutions. Subsidiarity demands that the dignity of persons and communities be kept at the center, which sometimes means acceding authority to higher social orders with more capacity and resources to protect community well-being and the global common good. Care for creation situates creation itself as an entity with moral standing apart from its utility to human flourishing. IHD asserts that models of economic development that do environmental violence and reduce the quality of life for some, while improving it for others, are inauthentic and need to be transformed with revolutionary changes to the patterns of consumption that drive narrowly growth-focused models of development. The Catholic Church also has a pervasive presence in local communities impacted by mining and related forms of environmental violence. Its institutional structure and network nature make it able to integrate communities horizontally so that marginalized voices can be amplified and community experience more effectively shared. It is also able to integrate communities with higher orders of authority vertically so that responses can be coordinated, and grassroots concerns can be represented at the levels of policy and regulation.

The Catholic Church is not the only institution that possesses these capacities. It could exercise them much more effectively, and it is not capable of fixing problems of mining and environmental violence without a wide coalition of partners. However, the Catholic community is capable of offering distinct value to the effort of addressing such problems because of the distinct way in which it can array and marshal these resources.

Engaging Environmental Violence

In this collection we take, as a given, that environmental violence (EV) is the sum total of harm (e.g., direct illness, lost years of life, climate change) caused by the release of both toxic and nontoxic pollution. Within the EV framework, Marcantonio argues that “the major driver behind the production of EV is everyday life behaviors and patterns of consumption that are so internalized and normalized that the violence they ultimately produce is either made invisible, seen as inevitable, or is incorrectly disconnected from its true causes” ([Reference Marcantonio1], p. 3). In this chapter, I explore a set of social science theory, particularly that of French sociologist Jacques Ellul, around the role of technology in the wider culture. Ellul’s theory of technique argues that, not just technology, but the cultural faith in technology, leads to the creation, production, use, misuse, and inability to control the harmful consequences of technology. To illustrate Ellul’s theory in relationship to EV, I highlight the example of the violence in agriculture, while then describing one potential counter to the harm.

14.1 Introduction

This chapter explores environmental violence (EV) in relationship to agriculture. More specifically, I will examine EV and agriculture from the wider lens of Jacques Ellul’s theory of technology with an emphasis on technique as it relates to violence. Ellul is an underappreciated theorist of technology, particularly in the United States, yet offers us a wider cultural and historical understanding of the role of technology and technique in relationship, especially to the unintended consequences of technology adopted uncritically. Next, I examine how technique interacts and causes violence through our interaction with nonhuman species and ecosystems. I then extend that relationship to our specific relationship with agriculture and look at both the violence through agriculture and the consequences. I conclude with an examination of what an agriculture of flourishing might look like through the example of the Catholic Worker farms.

14.2 Environmental Violence

Marcantonio and Fuentes define EV as “direct and indirect harm experienced by humans due to toxic and nontoxic pollutants put into a local and concurrently the global ecosystem through human activities and processes” ([Reference Marcantonio and Fuentes2], p. 3). The well-documented outcomes of EV include not only death, but also harm to physical and mental well-being. One of the most difficult things about EV is that, while we know that humans are the cause of this violence to other humans through the environment, it is difficult to see and assign responsibility. Further, many of those who are the victims of EV prioritize values other than their environmental well-being when considering their political choices [Reference Hochschild3].

The difficulty of seeing the harm done can, in part, be described as slow violence. O’Lear focuses on the process of science that occludes environmental harm as slow violence [Reference O’Lear4]. The harm to the environment from human activity is less able to be seen and much less talked about because the harm is often wrapped up in “complex” scientific explanations, rather than media-digestible bits. We can then see slow violence to the environment and through the environment. On the news we hear of oil spills, for instance, and instantly comprehend the damage to animals, watersheds, and ecosystems. It is more difficult to process the damage to humans, say, from consuming fish that have ingested oil drenched foods or swum in water poisoned by toxic releases. This kind of EV through the environment is far more difficult to see because it takes longer, both in the number of steps and the actual time. This picks up where Marcantonio and Fuentes [Reference Marcantonio and Fuentes2] were discussing EV as pollution that, yes, harms environmental systems and nonhuman species, but for our purposes, harms humans with “the environment” as the vector of delivery of the violence.

While much of the harm from EV, as defined by Marcantonio and Fuentes, may not have the direct cause and effect visibility of, say, homicide, we can interrogate and draw conclusions about the effects of the systems that engender harm through the environment. I will offer the example of EV through agricultural practices, but, prior to that, I want to offer a wider theory of one of the causes of EV.

14.3 Ellul’s Theory of a Technique, the Technological Society, and Technological Morality

Most of our critiques of technology, including the methods to produce the pollution at the heart of EV, tend to focus on particular technologies, or families of technologies, that either bear closer scrutiny or not. For instance, with the rise of social media, it is apps and particular regulations that come under fire, not cell phones in general, much less a wide critique of technology in our culture [Reference Haidt5]. Historically, individual advances in technological development made their way into people’s hands and then those advances were either adopted, discarded, or manipulated to work better over an appropriate period of time and in particular contexts. While a too brief summary of technological adoption, that scenario is just not what happens today. In fact, we are deluged with new, shinier, “better,” technological options all the time at a rate far too fast for culture to make decisions about what is best in a given context. Within a milieu of advertising, venture capital, and eroding systems of moral norms, the consequences are many. Related to the environment, we have been inundated with synthetic chemicals, especially in combination, that within a lax regulatory system, have led to significant harm to human persons [Reference Carson6, Reference Steingraber7]. In particular, much of this harm comes from agricultural chemicals and synthetic fertilizers. The harm to human persons (mainly in the form of various cancers and other diseases) accrues primarily to those who apply these chemicals or ingest water drawn from a polluted watershed or to their children.

French sociologist Jacques Ellul’s wider theory of a technological society starts from the premise that technique, not capital, is the determining factor in all of our societal relationships. By technique, Ellul emphasizes “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity. Its characteristics are new; the technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past.” ([Reference Ellul8], p. xxv, emphasis in the original). With this emphasis on efficiency, Ellul articulates that, while we commonly think of technology as only referring to machines, our current technological society seeks control and efficiency (that is, power), not just in our machines and digital tools, but in every area of life. In short, Ellul argues that technology has become a system unto itself under a wider culture of technique thus making it nigh impossible for the kinds of cultural checks outlined earlier to occur. As Ellul scholar, Richard Stivers articulates:

In our current milieu in which efficiency (in profit, in production, in consumption, in academics, in parenting, in politics, etc.) becomes the primary measure of success, we have turned winning into a value. We also seek to control and make efficient, not just our relationship with machines and the planet, but one another. Stivers contends that, “Manipulation leaves the other less free because it does not work rationally; human technique bypasses reason in its effort to control the other’s instincts and emotions” ([Reference Stivers10], pp. 85–86).

In a technological society dominated by technique, EV, as the release of toxic and nontoxic pollution, is understood to be an efficient way of controlling material resources; creating wealth; and manipulating other human beings. EV is considered rational in spite of growing evidence that the costs of such perceived efficiency leads to terrible harm both to specific human persons and to the wider flourishing of social and ecological communities.

These techniques pursue efficiency in all things, and that pursuit of efficiency creates metrics of success (e.g., test scores, crop yields, workplace productivity) that then become the goals of society. The creation of these metrics creates incentives to erode planetary systems and turn human relationships into ones based on competition, as opposed to dignity. Thus, technique erodes sociality, tradition, civility, and modes of operating entrenched in context. Ellul’s is a historical theory. Prior eras looked to either the needs of survival (a milieu of nature) or institutions (the milieu of the social) that evolved over many years of interaction and trial and error. Ellul’s insight about technique is that it pursues its own ends as it operates as a system, and all of our institutions are tied to it in a pursuit of efficiency for its own ends, without regard for the consequences to persons or communities.

Hannah Arendt connects violence to the loss (or even perceived loss) of power ([Reference Arendt11], p. 63). That power, not enriching oneself, becomes the measure of success. For Ellul, this is technique at its height. Power for power’s sake becomes the mark of efficiency. But power is for something to be able to do something. However, in a technological society, power becomes a goal in and of itself – a value. Those who have power are valued, those who do not are devalued or eliminated, as in the case of the Holocaust and other genocides [Reference Stivers12]. Given that power is a value and any means necessary will be employed to get it, including violence. That violence will then be looked upon as appropriate because we culturally value power. We then turn science and technology into a tool to appropriate power, not to solve problems.

Ellul’s wider theory of technique and the wider technological society offers us a few strengths, as opposed to, say, Marcuse or science and technology scholarship (STS) that does not engage Ellul. First, Ellul offers an alternative to Marxian (only) political economy that, in spite of really incisive critiques of capitalism, still tend to rely solely on the Revolution as the solution. Ellul offers a framework that allows for critique without necessarily offering a solution. That can be an unsatisfactorily hard pill to swallow. Ellul contends that our institutions, including the state, are as mired in technique as all the problems and cannot necessarily offer a remedy through more regulation, or better leadership, or green capitalism, or any other way. As I will point to later, while Ellul was a Christian, I think the more apt takeaway for what Ellul offers as a path forward more closely tracks with an interpretation of nonviolent anarchism as opposed to solely sanctioning Christianity as the solution to political and environmental problems, including agriculture. Second, Ellul has been dismissed as a technological determinist because, to his critics, he does not offer viable (or any!) solutions. Ellul fails to give in to a desire to develop a pathway forward simply because we want the possibility of a happy ending. The wider question is, does offering palatable solutions, in spite of their unlikelihood, warrant the cancellation of scholarship in today’s language? I contend that it does not. I also put forward that I think there are some pragmatic reasons why Ellul, despite a brief moment in the 1960s with the English translation of the Technological Society, is dismissed, not only by STS scholars, but most social scientists [Reference Ellul8]. Much of Ellul’s work should be seen as a complement to that of his collaborator, Bernard Charbonneau, which has only recently been translated into English. Charbonneau, like Ellul, also suffered some of the parochialism of the French academy for deigning to not live in Paris. Charbonneau suffers the secondary indignation of having published explicitly about environmental issues prior to the global academy sanctioning them as anything more than the foray of scientific disciplines. This constellation of factors leaves Ellul and Charbonneau, and others in their wake, as an untapped resource of thought to help us frame today’s issues, including that of EV.

Charbonneau, following Ellul, does not paint us a rosy picture for those actively concerned about politics or achieving outcomes that protect or enrich environmentally positive outcomes, whether we employ violence (in response to and then a self-perpetuating cycle) or resist using violence. In fact, Charbonneau illustrates the environmentalist’s struggle at witnessing EV and feeling helpless while cautioning us with: “But by answering violence with violence, [the environmentalist] places himself on its turf and, in his turn, risks being seized by a rage driven this time by impotence” ([Reference Charbonneau13], pp. 175–176). Overall, technique overrides the ability to care (sociologically) and, thus, build and maintain flourishing communities for all. Under technique all are devalued when power is the only form of success; people and places are devalued along with everything in them, including other species, food, or ecosystems.

Technique pursues any means necessary for efficient outcomes, without guardrails as to what might be considered appropriate. As Weisberg writes, technique only seeks technical solutions to the exclusion of how we typically understand ethics and morality ([Reference Weisberg14], p. 48). Technological morality seeks only power [Reference Stivers15, Reference Stock16]. By concluding that we live in a technological milieu dominated by technique and a pursuit of efficiency with its own independent technological morality (it is out for efficiency and power), then violence as harm will only be understood as a necessity in pursuit of that self-same efficiency. We see examples in the managing of the Vietnam War, where the metric of success became body count (not limited to enemy combatants and, thus, we get My Lai) and previously during the Holocaust success was measured in the number of bodies “processed” [Reference Gartner and Myers17, Reference Todorov18]. These distortions of living in a world, where success is measured by the number of human lives extinguished, are perhaps the most extreme examples and, yet, in a consideration of violence, the fact that these are just two among many examples, speaks to the pervasiveness of the relationship between technique and violence.

14.4 Technique, Agriculture, and Violence

In her work Every Farm a Factory, Ruth Fitzgerald outlines the rise of industrialization in agriculture. Efficiency – more than anything, including profit – guides the cultural shift [Reference Fitzgerald19]. Capitalism dominates the largest and wealthiest agribusinesses and farmers, while also entrenching an ideology of technological utopia in global agriculture under the phrase “Feed the world” ([Reference Rosin20, Reference Vanderburg21], p. 343). James Scott offers: “If the logic of actual farming is one of an inventive, practiced response to a highly variable environment, the logic of [industrial] agriculture is, by contrast, one of adapting the environment as much as possible to its centralizing and standardizing formulas” ([Reference Scott22], p. 301). The practice of industrial agriculture has become sacred, inviolable under technique. Further, it actually undermines efforts of raising food within a community, with things like homeowners’ associations that demand front lawns of grass, rather than food-producing gardens. With specific consideration to agriculture, we can talk about violence through the environment, both the spectacular, like the explosion of a fertilizer plant, and the slower effects of pollution, water, and financial destruction that sometimes take decades to become visible. The sacred logic of technique in agriculture also precludes advocating for solutions to abate said violence.

In our current situation, where EV is conceptualized as harm done to persons, the pursuit of efficiency in agriculture requires that we accept that success (in terms of yield, profits, and quarterly growth) costs human harm. Yet, this system that is deemed efficient and profitable, is only such for a very few and is propped up by billions of dollars in subsidies and other systems. On the whole, the consequences of this system lead to poisoning [Reference Boedeker, Watts, Clausing and Marquez23]; water pollution [Reference Mateo-Sagasta, Zadeh and Turral24]; dead zones [Reference Bailey, Meyer, Pettingell, Macie and Korstad25]; algal blooms [Reference Wurtsbaugh, Paerl and Dodds26]; hunger [Reference Anderson and Rivera-Ferre27]; human harm [Reference Carson6, Reference Steingraber7]; lower sperm counts [Reference Hayes, Hansen, Kapuscinski, Locke and Barnosky28]; lawsuits [Reference Gillam29]; and hollowed out communities [Reference Carr and Kefalas30]. The EV of agriculture is clear. For the rest of this chapter, I would like to illustrate how Ellul’s theory of technique, and those in its wake, help us further utilize and expand the EV framework.

The broadest example of technique in agriculture is the historical and continuing colonization of land that falls within the United States. Further, the development of agriculture under a settler colonial regime built, and continues to maintain, institutions that marginalize many persons with historical ties to the land [Reference Brewer and Stock31–Reference Farrell, Burow, McConnell, Bayham, Whyte and Koss33].

An EV framework applied to agriculture might exclusively focus on the toxic and nontoxic harm to human beings. By incorporating EV in dialogue with Ellul’s understanding of technique and technology as a system, we can see that the harm goes beyond poisoning. I would like to briefly extend the ripple effect of damage from EV in agriculture related to persons and communities. Despite all the claims of technique of efficiency in modern agriculture, many rural communities, and those in them, are considered externalities and the outcomes to their livelihoods, communities, and selves are considered collateral damage.

14.5 The Future of Agriculture

If technique is as violent as it is, what can we expect in the future? Many will look to more institutional control – regulations, subsidies, and partnerships between public and private finances. If technique unfolds, as agribusiness and many investors believe, then we will continue to see major investments and policies geared toward colonizing space, lab innovations, and promises of Big Data breakthroughs.

EV comes from the gap between presumption of technology as magic and its reality as technique of manipulation and adjustment. In his book Technology as Magic, Richard Stivers indicates how technique continues to mystify us because it creates illusions like magic [Reference Stivers58]. We are swayed by the utopian promises, both in our day-to-day lives and in the contributions of technology to solve our social and ecological problems. Despite clear indications otherwise, most people perceive, and we write about, new technologies as if their introduction is one of neutrality; a new gadget is created and it enters society and is, thus, either adopted or not depending on its usefulness. Ellul’s great insight was to understand technology/technique as a system [Reference Ellul59]. Within this system, technique is not, nor can it be, neutral. It is embedded and implicated in the logic of power and violence [Reference Ellul60]. As the limits of Earthly production take shape in parallel with unprecedented indications of ecosystem collapse, some have taken up the notion that humanity should seek to colonize space as the future of the species. Taken to its logical conclusion, we will see agri-business increasingly partner with the mostly private industries pursuing a new space race. If we can’t feed the world, we’ll feed the worlds! It is not a coincidence that people who do not live in a community on a daily basis – for they are walled off by their wealth – demand and create systems that dismiss Earth as a spent resource. To talk of repair is weakness. As Kendra Pierre-Louis writes: “The false belief that the only way we can deal with current and future problems is to expand outward is an extension of colonialist ideals” [Reference Pierre-Louis61].

14.6 Agriculture of Flourishing

If we then take, as a given, that there is EV in agriculture, what response do we, as persons, have? Ellul, Stivers, and others, as opposed to many, see the state and other large-scale institutions as compromised by technique and, therefore, unable to counter technique’s effects. This would carry over to asking for state regulations and policy or restructuring to counter effects of technique because the state is technique as well [Reference Ellul62].

On one hand, we could argue that the strength of Ellul’s critique and the example of the Catholic Worker, offered later, rely solely on their basis in Christianity [Reference Whelan63]. However, personalism or nonviolent anarchism are not confined to Christianity and offer widespread possibilities for flourishing that aligns with other arguments, including bioregionalism, traditional ecological knowledge, and more contemporary openness to bridging Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of being in the world. Rather than looking to the state or other institutions corrupted by technique, the argument is to live in the world cooperatively with others without resorting to manipulating them. So what recourse do we have to understand and survive an environmentally violent world? For Ellul, our hope comes in a stance of nonpower [Reference Ellul and Woodward64]. By this, he means that whenever we are given the chance to hold power over others, we must abdicate in the hope of re-establishing or creating a new sacred that does not revolve around power. This stance of nonpower, to reject a technological morality that prioritizes winning as a value, like nonviolence, does not equate to passivity or indifference. As Stivers argues, “It is an ethic that must find some tiny crack in a structure of near total power” ([Reference Stivers12], p. 181).

We can interpret that idea of nonpower in a number of ways – I tend to focus on care and community – both ecological and social – that follows and merges the ideas of Tove Pettersen [Reference Pettersen65] on mature care and Wilkinson [Reference Wilkinson66] on both social and ecological community well-being [Reference Stock49]. By mature care, Pettersen means “The notion of mature care, however, involves as much concern for oneself as it does for others. Mature care implies a balancing between the interests of self and others” ([Reference Pettersen65], p. 14). Others might refer to this combination of mature care and community well-being as flourishing [Reference Smith67]. These examples share a focus on decentralized power structures and an emphasis on cooperation.

The counter to technique and a technological morality is the pursuit of caring relationships in community toward social and ecological flourishing. As Robin Kimmerer puts it: “All flourishing is mutual” [Reference Kimmerer68]. What do we mean by an agriculture of flourishing?

As Michael Bell writes, with an emphasis on creating phenomenological lifelines and what I would describe as re/creating new sacreds: “But growing food is only one dimension of what I would argue is the purpose of agriculture: cultivation—the care and tending of creation, human and nonhuman, social and ecological” ([Reference Bell42], p. 248).

As I have written elsewhere:

It is only in recognizing the power of nature as the real, actual, physical home, and life-giving place of being human, that we can pursue actual freedom from our knowledge of nature, from the state, and from institutions that seek to undermine that freedom. Bernard Charbonneau wrote: “Freedom is but a sham if it fails to take into account the necessities (clean air, clean water, access to land for food) ruling any reality” ([Reference Charbonneau13], p. 80). Both Ellul and Charbonneau conclude that an emphasis on specific relationships with specific persons and specific places is the antidote to the totalitarian (from both Left and Right) impulse of modernity.

What, then, are some examples of farmers practicing and enjoying freedom and mature care that counters technique and technological utopianism? Who are these farmers working in a morality of flourishing? Examples include movements to return land [Reference Brewer and Stock31]; care for and with nonhuman species and ecosystems that are seen as relations in and of themselves [Reference Kimmerer68, Reference Whyte, Cuomo, Gardiner and Thompson70]; the Landless Peasants in Brazil [Reference Hernandez71]; encouraging autonomy like in repeasantization [Reference Ploeg72, Reference Nelson and Stock73]; reclaiming historical narratives like White’s Freedom Farmers [Reference White74]; and those pursuing agricultures of nonpower, wherever they may be, including small farms in the midst of industrialized agriculture [Reference Carlisle32] or new farmers in Kansas [Reference Stock, Darby and Hossler75]. Other examples can be found in iterations of agroecology, regenerative agriculture, and permaculture.

I would like to conclude briefly, with a focus on some of the farmers I have worked with in the United States, to offer some specific illustrations, but more so, to look forward to hearing examples that you may have to share with me.

Engaging Environmental 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.

15.1 Introduction

Climate change is a current form of profound environmental violence that disproportionately affects the quality and length of life of people that live in minority, Indigenous, or poor communities. Climate change and environmental violence systematically impact socially and economically disadvantaged communities due to factors such as the historical legacy of where certain peoples were forced to live, a limited access to resources, and existing income and language barriers. As climate change impacts manifest, the physical and mental health of these communities are threatened.

Due to the slow onset of climate change and its impact across vast geographies, people struggle to comprehend the magnitude of disruptions and how those impacts are being personally experienced. Many other issues of environmental violence, such as air pollution or water contamination are also invisible, diffuse, and incremental in nature. Artists focus on those intimate details of place, observing and documenting ephemeral and abrupt changes. Artists, therefore, offer a means of witnessing and communicating environmental violence through the creative production of aesthetic works. The word aesthetic comes from the Greek, aisthētikos, of sense perception and aisthanesthai, to perceive. Thus, through works of art, music, and literature artists interpret and depict elements of the environment so that others may become aware of those other existing realities through direct sensory experience. These works give us the experience of being woken up to the world and encourage us to look closer – seeing things for the first time, even if they have always been there. Across artistic mediums, music and writing, artists communicate what is often intangible, helping us to cope with, or draw attention to, social and environmental issues such as climate change.

Artistic responses to environmental violence are often place specific. Intimate connections with a landscape allow for detailed insight into the emergent impacts of climate change on our health, well-being, and knowledge. As landscapes are open, dynamic, and adaptive systems, they provide immediate experience in which we deepen our knowledge and develop ideas. The language we employ describes the present-day landscape, telling what we see or recalling what we have seen, and conveys the history of place through its named features often revealing how we try to make “what is separate from us a part of where we are.” As Barry Lopez wrote: “A neck of land, an arm of the sea, rock nipples, the toe of a slope, the mouth of a river, a finger drift, the shoulder of a road … We put a geometry to the land – backcountry, front range, high desert – and pick out patterns in it: pool and riffle, swale and rise, basin and range” [Reference Lopez and Gwartney1]. Through the naming of places, knowledge is concretized.

Memories are inscribed in the names, geometries and patterns of the physical landscape. The places are written, engraved and printed in our minds, drawn within us to be sensed as deeply as possible. “Returning to a place, experiencing its material presence, plays an active role in recollection in a profound sense, linking persons and events, situating them in a landscape” ([Reference Tilley and Cameron-Daum2], p. 295). Those memories may return with the sight of familiar landscapes, the smells, sounds, or tastes, or through the touch of landscape beneath hand, between fingers, or under foot. Robert Macfarlane describes remembering the terrains of travel through his bare feet as “textures, sensations, resistances, durably imprinted memories … footnotes, born of the skin of the walker meeting the skin of the land” ([Reference Macfarlane3], p. 159).

As places are changed with the loss of native species, and disappear under rising seas, our ability to recall memories is challenged, and new memories are born from the transformed landscapes. The lost landscapes and the memories that inhabit them, have resulted in long-term emotional impacts. This existential distress caused by environmental change or human activity that transforms the landscape one inhabits is referred to as solastalgia [Reference Albrecht, Sartore, Connor, Higginbotham, Freeman and Kelly4]. The new terms of eco-anxiety and climate anxiety that are emerging describe the stress of perceived and anticipated threats to existing ecosystems and landscapes [Reference Cunsolo, Harper, Minor, Hayes, Williams and Howard5]. Ecological grief and climate grief are rising in use to describe feelings of grief related to ecological loss, vanishing forms of ecological knowledge, and the disappearance of place-specific activities, such as ice skating on local ponds that no longer freeze in warming winters [Reference Cunsolo, Harper, Minor, Hayes, Williams and Howard5–Reference Comtesse, Ertl, Hengst, Rosner and Smid7]. These ecosystem distress syndromes are tied to both nostalgia of place that arises as people must move away from landscapes no longer habitable, and the pain of solastalgia that arises from staying in place and watching a familiar landscape be “rendered unrecognizable by climate change or corporate action” [Reference Macfarlane8]. The climate crisis is thus woven into our individual and community identities, our personal and communal landscapes, and the future we will collectively inhabit.

While the psychological effects of climate change are not fully understood, it is clear that the impacts of climate change are disproportionate and differential. Those most reliant on land for livelihood, such as fishermen, farmers, and Indigenous Peoples, are more exposed to the climate crisis. Geographical differences in where we live manifest in our health. Where some people are advantaged, and others are disadvantaged by the patterns and processes of place. This difference in place has been referred to as “place poverty” and “place affluence” [Reference Powell, Boyne and Ashworth9]. For example, communities that live in sparsely treed urban environments will be disproportionately impacted by the urban heat island effect due to rising global temperatures and occurrences of extreme heat.

Experiences of environmental violence, such as climate change and insecurity related to land, food, water, or energy resources, manifest in our bodies, as they tell a story about the conditions of our existence [Reference Krieger10]. In water security research, scholars have documented how lack of access to drinking water and perceptions of acceptability of drinking water supplies are a lived experience [Reference Eichelberger11–Reference Marino, White, Schweitzer, Chambers and Wisniewski13]. The impacts of which are embodied, become internal, and arise in our mental health [Reference Eichelberger11, Reference Eichelberger14, Reference Rosinger and Young15]. People without basic water services have been found to experience higher rates of personal water-related injury due to the mental toll and physical burden of fetching water [Reference Rosinger, Bethancourt, Young and Schultz16, Reference Hanrahan, Sarkar, Hudson, Bates, Beaumier and Ford17]. Mental health impacts include feeling unsafe while collecting water or while using sanitation facilities, and chronic stress due to constant uncertainty and concern of water-borne illness [Reference Rosinger, Bethancourt, Young and Schultz16]. Globally, research has shown that water insecurity increases psychosocial distress, risk of depression, anxiety, and negative emotions like anger, shame, humiliation, and frustration [Reference Cooper-Vince, Kakuhikire, Vorechovska, McDonough, Perkins and Venkataramani18–Reference Wutich, Budds, Jepson, Harris, Adams and Brewis24]. Those incarnated health impacts can have intergenerational effects [Reference Rosinger and Young15].

Similarly, studies of climate change and extreme weather have revealed that stress, anxiety, depression, and fear are increasing as people experience flooding and storm surges that threaten property, communities, cultural places, and human life [Reference Brubaker, Berner, Chavan and Warren25, Reference Sarkar, Hanrahan and Hudson26]. Globally, the mental and physical impacts of climate change are diverse and nuanced. How climate change and environmental violence are affecting mental well-being will continue to evolve, especially as its full impacts on cultural resources, historical places of subsistence and tradition, and spaces of shared memory and kinship are realized.

Compounding the concern of the changing environment is the recent trend of language to use non-descript words and terms, such as lake, bird, mountain, instead of the specific or a name. This movement of language reveals societies’ growing lack of familiarity with nature [Reference Lopez and Gwartney1, Reference Stambach and Kwayu27]. This disconnection between people and nature may mean people do not see the changes or do not have the words to describe the impacts and, therefore, may be unmotivated to protect the environment from continued degradation [Reference Kesebir and Kesebir28, Reference Cervinka, Röderer and Hefler29]. Art offers a means of joining us to nature, bringing us in closer association to landscapes and experience at this critical time of climate crisis and distancing.

This chapter focuses on works that combine artistic enterprise and environmental communication to provide sensory experiences that convey the intimate manifestations of environmental violence [Reference Landau, Toland, Amy, Husberg, Cerpina and Stenslie30]. The chapter is organized around the elements from Indigenous and spiritual knowledge, and their associated sensory organ in living creatures: space (ears), air (skin), fire (eyes), water (tongue), and earth (nose). The art forms and artistic expressions respond to the harm and impacts at different scales, such as individual, community, and global. Through this chapter, I hope to encourage examination, not just of the elements and associated five senses, but consideration of other means of perception that may not be captured here, and how those faculties may perceive environmental violence. While artistic responses included in this chapter are categorized in one of the elemental and sensory groups, perception is intersensory [Reference Jenner31]. The information derived from one sense influences what is perceived by another [Reference Jenner31]. As a result, our senses are engaged in a constant interplay, entangled with one another.

Finally, given the space limitations of this chapter, it is not possible to include all of the artworks responding to environmental violence. This chapter seeks to provide an introduction to some of the artworks witnessing environmental violence, in the hope that it will inspire consideration of the role of art in addressing the challenges of our time. Further, through art we can consider the stories told through deep traditions of art, such as in Indigenous cultures, including through storytelling, chant, basketweaving, carving, weaving, canoe building, pottery, fashion, tattooing, petroglyphs, and floral arts. These art forms and artworks often capture mythology, folklore, and celebrate nature, convey proximity to landscape, and act as witness to environmental violence.

15.2 Space (Ears)

In her print The Poetic Body: Poem Ears (1992), Lesley Dill considers the relationship between language and the human body [Reference Casais32]. Dill’s print shows two sketched ears connected by a U-shaped string of Emily Dickinson’s words: “I heard, as if I had no Ear/ Until a Vital Word/ Came all the way from Life to me/ And then I knew I heard.” Dickinson’s lines underscore the importance of hearing to processing sound into language [Reference Dickinson33]. Those sounds emerge from place and shape the listener’s perception of reality. As we construct language from sounds, they inform human consciousness and thinking. As Mosab Abu Toha writes: “When you open my ear, touch it/ gently./ My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside” [Reference Abu Toha34]. These memories are sound based and live in the ear, then mind. These memories emerge through notes, tones, and pitches, and may be remembered and recalled through voice, poetry, storytelling, and music.

As poems give form to memories, they encourage us to pay attention to specific moments unfolding all around us, to “… hear the singing of the trees when they are fed by/ Wind, or water music—” [Reference Harjo35]. In capturing these moments, poems may act as a means of attestation to environmental violence and articulation of environmental hope [Reference Wong36]. Poems also allow for exploration of potential futures or possible realities. For example,

These ideas have us consider what it is we do not hear, not because it does not exist, but because we cannot sense it. These living worlds of vibrant matter speak to the vital force inherent in all beings and material forms [Reference Bennett38]. Upon recognizing this, we are challenged to reflect on our relationship with landscape and nature, what we know, and how our senses contribute to that ever-developing knowledge.

“Poetry is not purely a personal concern or event; its spiritual evolution comes from one’s responsiveness to a community” [Reference Woody39]. It helps us to learn to “turn to, not from, an earth we are perilously close to ruining for ourselves as well as for the nonhuman” [Reference Kwasny40]. For example, Rita Wong’s poetry collection, undercurrent, draws attention to the destruction of the environment by focusing on water [Reference Wong36]. Wong’s references “unceded streams” that were stolen “from the salmon who swam them,” acknowledging the other life forms that depend on the waters we also use. This perspective offers alternate ways of living with water replacing the “pipe grid” where water and fish are commodified as “resources” with a belief that respects them as inhabitants of a shared “riparian” home [Reference Wong36].

Poetry pushes us to acquire new perspectives, to

Simon Ortiz also stresses the relationship between humans and nature in his poetry, as he celebrates the relationship he has with everything, encouraging us to let the vastness of the universe into ourselves [Reference Ortiz42]. Poetic images juxtapose “the green fields” of the native landscape to the “yellow / and dry” lands that have become useless without water [Reference Kim43]. Ortiz’s poetry emphasizes the violence that has been borne by the Earth, and by Indigenous Peoples as he shares stories of harsh environments that have been endured and survived, of the living forms encountered along the way, and of the colonialization of the lands that forced relocation of Indigenous Peoples [Reference Kim43]. These poems allow us to hear personal experiences of environmental violence and destruction. Through the rhythm and words, poetry negotiates between the personal and the evolving world, its history, and the present-day realities. The words chosen and used in poems can be a form of prayer, where words effect meaningful change [Reference Schmidt44].

Music too is being used as a powerful medium to communicate environmental violence. As Bertolt Brecht wrote: “In the dark times, will there also be singing?/ Yes, there will be singing./ About the dark times,” music has featured nature’s sounds in order to warn of impending threats [Reference Brecht45]. For example, Judy Collins’s 1970 album Whales and Nightingales adapted the traditional whaling song, “Farewell to Tarwathie” to include the songs of humpback whales to call attention to the diminishing numbers of humpback whales and their risk of extinction due to commercial hunting until 1965. “Farwell to Tarwathie” introduced millions of listeners to the haunting sounds of the humpback whale, and helped to launch the anti-whaling movement of the 1970s along with biologist Roger Payne’s album, Songs of the Humpback Whale [Reference Firestein46, Reference May47]. Similarly drawing attention to threatened animals, naturalist David Stewart and the Bowerbird Collective recorded the songs of 53 Australian birds that are at risk due to human activity and climate change for the album, Songs of Disappearance. The album went viral and was number three on Australia’s top 50 albums chart in December 2021, helping to call attention to the plight of many native Australian birds [Reference Lim and Jarenwattananon48].

Music has also been used to convey Earth’s rhythms and the rhythms of climate data. Judy Twedt transforms decades of numerical scientific data, such as the loss of Arctic sea ice into piano pieces that audibly relay the disappearance of sea ice by moving from high notes to low notes [Reference Twedt49]. As data changes over time, the dynamism of music allows listeners to experience that longitudinal change. In this way, Twedt uses music to help listeners emotionally respond to climate data, to approach the science from a new perspective, and to connect with one another in the face of loss and change [Reference Twedt49].

Musicians, such as the Halcyon String Quartet, use music to stimulate discussion around environmental issues. Halcyon incorporates spoken word and background displays of photography and artwork during their live musical performances in order to compel the audience to consider what changes they observe in their landscapes and seascapes. In this way, their music contributes to dialogue, promotes learning, reflection, and understanding, and responds to the tragedy of climate change [Reference Davis, Davis, Willauer and Wheatley50].

An innovative, historical means of portraying humanity’s relationship with nature in the pre-industrial era was Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Each of the four concertos has a corresponding sonnet, believed also to have been written by Vivaldi. The sonnets and music were meant to accompany one another, and in their bounded way describe aspects of each season through word and music, such as when “[s]pringtime is upon us/ the birds celebrate her return with festive song” and “[t]hunderstorms … heralds of Spring, roar,/ casting their dark mantle over heaven …” [Reference Vivaldi51]. Reflecting the unfolding climate crisis, musicians took The Four Seasons and altered the scores using the data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report’s RCP 8.5 future scenario, which assumes no restriction on greenhouse gas emissions. The new compositions transpose knowledge into feeling, evoking a new sense for what climate change would mean for humanity in 2050 [Reference von Matt and Crosthwaite52]. The medium of music to convey this possible future is powerful and evocative, and can draw a response of tenderness, grief, love, joy, and sadness from its audience that inspires action.

As poetry and music help us to hear new perspectives, storytelling and oral tradition offer a means of collecting stories of environmental violence, and a tool for building community [Reference Armiero, Andritsos, Barca, Bràs, Cayuela and Dedeoǧlu53]. Indeed, through sharing stories, communities create bonds and a narrative of understanding that becomes collective knowledge [Reference Armiero, Andritsos, Barca, Bràs, Cayuela and Dedeoǧlu53]. Stories help to give structure and coherence to ideas that allow us to view reality through a new framing [Reference Moernaut, Mast and Pauwels54]. Through those frames, elements of reality are magnified or minimized to affect their salience. This facilitates the processing of new information by evoking mental structures and helps to naturalize ideologies [Reference Moernaut, Mast and Pauwels54]. Stories from the local context allow people to experience realities from a distant geography or gender and share representations of their different lived experiences related to environmental violence. For example, story narratives communicate how acts like fetching water from the land are personally embodied by women, and imbued with social relations involved in water procurement and consumption, and preferences related to water’s appearance and taste [Reference Perreault55]. Stories help make differential injustices visible, offer a tool to conceptualize and confront asymmetries of power and inequalities in societies, and create space for dialogue that shares knowledge and cultural exchange. Through stories people can represent themselves and promote other forms of knowledge and alternate epistemologies in the communication of complex issues, such as environmental violence in the onset of climate change. This representation allows for visibility and inclusion, as diverse voices from Indigenous Peoples and marginalized groups shift narratives and perception of climate impacts on their communities. In this way, our ears facilitate knowledge of our landscape, society, and selves, through the lessons and memories shared through spoken words, music, and sound [Reference Stambach and Kwayu27].

15.3 Air (Skin)

Through our skin we breathe, we feel all the tactile aspects of life, from pleasure to pain. Our skin provides an intimate connection to place, as Pattiann Rogers describes through the “rejuvenating powers” of “[l]ying down naked every morning in the dew.”

In those experiences, our bodies tell a story that cannot be “divorced from the conditions of our existence” (p. 350) [Reference Krieger10]. Therefore, understanding how environmental violence may affect our bodies and well-being necessitates first understanding the relations between a person and place.

While our skin seems a boundary separating oneself from the outside, as skin breathes and experiences the humidity, the visibility, heat, or precipitation of space, the perceived sensorial boundaries between areas become unclear [Reference Landau, Toland, Amy, Husberg, Cerpina and Stenslie30]. As Louise Ho describes in her poem Storm: “… the enveloping hot air, ungiving, with not a flicker/ of movement, a still thermal from which there is no relief. You are/ surrounded by hot air, buoyed up by hot air, weighed down by hot air./ You inhale hot air, you swallow hot air, you feel hot air behind the ears,/ between the legs, between the toes, under the feet” [Reference Kerr57]. In air, aspects of the atmosphere, such as breath, particulates, aerosols, and humidity are aggregated, thus, blending the edges between people, regions, and events [Reference Choy58]. Indeed, our bodies sense and experience the connectedness of scales and quickly recognize the fluctuating conditions of space like air pollution through more or less exhaust or fresh air, or pollution’s severity depending on time of day, season, or personal perception [Reference Landau, Toland, Amy, Husberg, Cerpina and Stenslie30]. Air then scales down global environmental politics to the personal politics of health [Reference Choy58]. Through air, the atmosphere becomes tactile.

Despite air’s presence floating above and all around us, it is often less studied. Artists have sought to make the relations and movements between body and air more visible, asking us to consider the dialectics of solidity from solids to permeable skin, and all things’ impermanence and eventual return to dust [Reference Shakespeare59]. Even in the absence of solidity, there is substance around us. “Air is not a one, it does not offer fixity or community, but it is no less substantial. The question is whether we can feel it” [Reference Choy58]. In his work, Timothy Choy explores air as medical fact, bodily engagement, constellation of difference, and index of international comparison, helping to draw attention to how air orients us to social and cultural practice, as well as weather events and economic relations [Reference Choy58]. For example, through smell, breath, air conditioning, anthropogenic emissions, smoking, wind, weather, and topography, air is recognized to be co-produced by the engagements between people and air, and to reflect the evolving relationship of humans and the environment [Reference Choy58, Reference Hsu60].

Due to air’s differences in composition and distribution, and how it flows across space and geographic scales, questions of justice and equity emerge. How are air spaces distributed? Who breathes the cleanest air? Disadvantaged communities have higher rates of health conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and asthma as they are disproportionately exposed to environmental conditions like extreme heat and smog [Reference Cho61]. Death has become a proxy for air’s effects as scholars map daily mortality risks of poor air quality, the lack of trees to mitigate extreme heat, and the high asthma rates experienced in marginalized communities [Reference Mitman62, Reference Ogneva-Himmelberger, Huang and Xin63].

To explicitly examine ideas around air pollution and ownership of air, artists from Kitchen Budapest and Baltan Laboratories in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, created an installation series, Air Slaves [Reference Landau, Toland, Amy, Husberg, Cerpina and Stenslie30]. The installation invited visitors to use wearable masks to collect their own breath in bags that were then displayed in the installation space. Amassed, the bags of air visualized the process of breathing, created connection to the exhaled breath of others, showed the bodily proximity to air, and underlined the physicality of “used” air. In versions of the art installation, the audience could consider access to good quality air as a commodity, not as a basic right [Reference Landau, Toland, Amy, Husberg, Cerpina and Stenslie30].

Differences in air quality and geography have been shown to be a determining factor in whether a community is at higher risk of coronavirus (COVID-19) due to underlying lung diseases and asthma resulting from regular exposure to air pollution from nearby automobile and industrial pollution [Reference Landau, Toland, Amy, Husberg, Cerpina and Stenslie30]. Breath, the quality of air, and the slogan, “I can’t breathe” have become central to understanding systematic racism of failed environmental protection laws, environmental violence, civil rights, zoning and housing laws, and international human rights laws [Reference Landau, Toland, Amy, Husberg, Cerpina and Stenslie30, Reference Baker, Valentino-DeVries, Fernandez and LaForgia64]. Air invites us to consider the connection between breath and justice, the breath that is vulnerable, unacknowledged, plain, or labored. To think of moments where we held our breath in fear, in anticipation or in excitement. To consider the last breath, and how many African American men have used that singular breath to say “I can’t breathe.” Through the exploration of our breath, the exhaled or held breath, the breath which emerged in chest-tight breathlessness or in buoyant laughter, we begin to recognize the connections between justice and air. Who breathes cement? Who breathes specific landscapes?

15.4 Fire (Eyes)

Through the eyes, art bears witness to the times in which humans have lived. Artists have sought to remind us through the “poetry of witness” of the loss, joy, wonder, grief, and destruction being experienced daily around the world [Reference Forché65]. The images conjured in the words of poems and stories recreate moments in time and call people to action. Theater uses language and body to visually address environmental violence through productions or staged readings that respond to the ecological crisis [66]. Plays can enliven and transform our experience of the world, introduce us to new perspectives, inspire us to listen better, and instill a deeper sense of community [66].

For example, in an effort to affirm and deepen our collective memory of the passenger pigeon, Feral Theatre of Brighton, UK created a memorial of tributes to the bird. Emily Laurens’s drawings in the sand depicted a flock of passenger pigeons as shadows moving over the beach [Reference Laurens67]. The drawings were beautiful and haunting, appearing as full body silhouettes pressed into the wet sand, the pigeons’ wings arched and moving toward the sea. Laurens’s art compelled the viewer to consider when passenger pigeons were so abundant, they would blacken the sky as they flew overhead. From billions of birds to none, the passenger pigeon went extinct in 1914 due to commercial hunting and habitat loss [68]. Feral Theatre has also organized events focused on extinction and ecological loss, including “Remembrance Day for Lost Species” and “Funeral for Lost Species.” These events seek to display grief for ecosystems and species and allow for the release of suppressed emotions through ritual. After the grief rituals, mourners may move forward with strengthened practices to grieve environmental destruction they bear witness to. Theater may also explore change. A series of eight plays by Chantal Bilodeau examined the social and environmental impacts of the climate crisis on the eight Arctic states, such as the competing interests shaping the future of the Canadian Arctic and the local Inuit population.

Artists have used photography, painting, and public art installations to help people to see the unseeable effects of environmental violence. Some works use time-based media to show the longitudinal impacts of climate change on mountain and ocean ecosystems, while others display variation over time, creating art such as “tideline as timeline” where people can witness the tideline’s fluctuations over thousands of years due to geological, social, and historical changes [Reference Conklin and Psaros69, Reference Burko, Garrand and Broude70]. Art pieces also share underrepresented voices or reverse perspective. For example, Jenny Kendler’s Birds Watching features a single eye from 100 bird species that are threatened by climate change [Reference Del-Colle71]. The exhibit’s use of birds’ eyes allows the viewer to become the subject of the birds’ fixed gaze in the hope that this inspires people to engage more deeply with the natural world [Reference Del-Colle71]. Exhibitions such as “Big Weather” at NGV Australia’s Ian Potter Centre featured Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ cultural knowledge of the weather and its changes. The artworks detailed social and environmental issues, such as the legacy of colonialization, slavery, water policy, and climate change [72].

To make visible the environmental violence of air pollution, the artist Amy Balkin symbolically purchased emission trading certificates and created a “clean air” park above major cities [Reference Landau, Toland, Amy, Husberg, Cerpina and Stenslie30]. In these parks, Balkin created imaginary blocs of cleaner air that hovered above the city skylines. This allowed Balkin to evoke a desire for better air quality through an almost sensory experience of the desire for clean air. These parks encourage people to think about air pollution, the commodification of air, and air as a public good [Reference Landau, Toland, Amy, Husberg, Cerpina and Stenslie30].

These works build on a history of art that sought to capture the ephemeral quality of nature, and preserve the memories attached to fleeting moments of beauty. From the ancient petroglyphs of Alta, Norway and Lascaux, France, to the land art of Andy Goldsworthy, artworks often used found materials to create pieces that emerge and merge from the surrounding environment and erode over time. During the US land art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, installations like Lightning Field by Walter De Maria helped people to meditate on changing perceptions of time and place, and the role of land in modern society [Reference De Maria73]. While Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield—A Confrontation sought to draw attention to US society’s misplaced priorities and values through an artistic act to protest climate change, economic inequality, and world hunger [Reference Denes74]. Created structures in land art help people consider natural forms and beauty in a new way, and increase awareness regarding the importance of environmental preservation. Further, sculptures created in abandoned surface mines, such as those by Robert Morris sought to highlight the traumatic impact humans have had on the environment in pursuit of coal, ore, and other minerals.

To spark environmental and social change, especially around tree planting and urban renewal, Joseph Beuy developed the project “7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks)” in 1982 [Reference Beuys75]. Over five years, the project planted 7000 oak trees throughout the greater city of Kassel, Germany [Reference Beuys75]. Beuy believed the tree to be “an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time …. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet” [Reference Cooke76]. Each tree was paired with a columnar basalt stone approximately four feet high that pointed upwards and was positioned above ground. The basalt column sought to mark the planting of the trees as the beginning of the tree planting movement, the “transformation of all life, of society, and of the whole ecological system” [Reference Cooke76]. The visual language of these installations and of art allow concepts to be captured and depicted in innovative ways; they and challenge us to consider what we are paying attention to.

15.5 Water (Tongue)

In response to environmental violence, artists have used taste as a mechanism to convey and call memories of place and to reveal the consequences of climate change at the table, to your dishes, and to taste. These artworks convey the power of the tongue in shaping experience. Indeed, how:

The tongue, with its taste and sensorial qualities, and its possible attributes as loose-tongued, two-tongued, lost or tongue-tied, guides our experiences and informs our understanding.

Norwegian media artists Zane Cerpina and Stahl Stenslie created a multi-media Anthropocene Cookbook that explores the relationship between humans and food, our dependence on food and the environment for our survival, and changes humans have caused due to consumption and the development of synthetic sources of food [Reference Cerpina and Stenslie78]. The book proposes tastes of anthropogenic pollution that stage both utopian and dystopian imaginaries [Reference Cerpina and Stenslie78]. For example, it describes cuisines that include powdered meteorite, speculates on what an era characterized by smog could taste like, and offers concoctions such as Highway Blend, a “cocktail of exhaust particles” and salts and minerals extracted from the snow of city roads [Reference Cerpina and Stenslie78]. By asking us to consider these fantastical edible futures, the book challenges us to think about whether it is ok for us to eat the mythical creatures of today, such as the overfished, endangered, or threatened species that may be traditional to or coveted by certain cultures. The book invites us to think about who will eat what, by what choice and, therefore, who eats what today, and by what choice.

Many places, too, are defined by taste and cuisine. Regional cookbooks often have recipes for dishes that call for local plants and animals, foraged, hunted, or picked from nearby forests, streams, and fields. Drawings and photographs often included in the cookbooks display the beauty of the food. These traditional recipes, subsistence activities, and local food security will be threatened by climate change. Such transformations and environmental violence force us to consider what will happen when those ingredients of place are no longer possible. What will it mean for memory, for connection to landscape?

In many places, access to sufficient food, and food of high-quality nutrition are challenging. In the United States, many neighborhood environments contain stimuli that encourage food addiction, overeating of low-nutrition foods, and obesity. These places, sometimes referred to as “obesogenic,” are often populated with unhealthy food advertisements that contribute to childhood and adult obesity [Reference Baretić, Seljan and Baretić79, Reference Guthman80]. Food marketing that uses “sensory marketing” is based on “embodied cognition,” where bodily sensations help determine human decisions without conscious awareness [Reference Baretić, Seljan and Baretić79]. Our health is not only impacted by sensory marketing, but we also embody neighborhood environmental stressors and toxins, such as the presence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) substances in water, the use of prescription drugs, or bisphenol-A (BPA) in food and water containers [Reference Guthman80].

People experience and perceive the taste of food and water differently. In Labrador, Nunatsiavut, Alaska, and Nunavut there is a cultural attachment to raw, non-chlorinated drinking water, such as from melted ice and rivers, as the communities believe that raw water is of superior quality in terms of taste, health, and safety [Reference Martin, Bélanger, Gosselin, Brazeau, Furgal and Déry81–Reference Daley, Castleden, Jamieson and Furgal83]. In Alaska’s northwest Arctic region, people associate the taste of chlorine with cancer, and distrust the centralized water system due to colonialization [Reference Marino, White, Schweitzer, Chambers and Wisniewski13, Reference Ritter, Lopez, Goldberger, Dobson, Nickel and Smith84]. Research has shown that violations of interpersonal justice can trigger a heightened sense of taste and smell, where disgust joins “dis” and the Latin word “gusto,” meaning taste [Reference Skarlicki, Hoegg, Aquino and Nadisic85]. People then experience a distaste toward those who have violated their sense of dignity and respect.

Taste is, therefore, influenced by historical trauma and present-day environmental injustice. Flint, Michigan became the site of a public health crisis in 2014 when it was revealed that water was polluted with lead. Flint’s poor and largely African American population were less protected from the water pollution than other communities [Reference Hill86]. The artist, Pope.L drew attention to this water contamination crisis through art installations, such as “Flint Water Project” which bottled water from Flint and turned the bottles into a series of art objects [Reference Pope87, Reference Pope88]. As perceptions of the environment change, so too do concerns regarding water quality and the way that residents use water resources [Reference Medeiros, Wood, Wesche, Bakaic and Peters89]. In an act to remember clean water and undammed rivers, the artist Betsy Damon brought together papermakers and artists to create a paper casting covering 250 feet of a dry riverbed in Castle Rock, Utah. The art piece was installed in seven venues across the United States from 1986 to 1991 and brought attention to dry riverbeds to serve as a living memory of missing water.

15.6 Earth (Nose)

Trash, wet grass, lilac blossoms, smoke. Every day we are exposed to fragrances and odors, that “… walk right through, transparently,/ … all day long they saunter/ In and out my nose:/ Orris-root and camphor,’/ And wild wet rose./ … Strange, the daily habits-- / Informal at the most-- / Of smells that act like fairies,/ Or nothing, or a ghost” [Reference Moore90]. Smells can signify a place, such as salt air close to the sea, or

Whether it is cattle’s mud in Texas, or basil in Greece, scents may be so common to a place that they become imbued with meaning and conjure memories of home [Reference Chiang91].

Scents leave a lasting mark on human perception and memory [Reference Landau, Toland, Amy, Husberg, Cerpina and Stenslie30]. Those smells conjure living and past people and places, “… a tree smelling/ of citrus & jasmine that knocks/ me back into the arms of my dead/ mother …/ a tree I can’t see, but can smell/ … my mother’s skirt twirls/ & all i smell is her ghost, perfume” [Reference Asghar92]. Despite smell’s power, it is often forgotten in the company of the other senses [Reference Jenner31]. It has suffered a “reversal of cultural fortune” so that it is rarely captured, and existing historiographies are narratives of decline and deodorization [Reference Classen, Howes and Synnott93]. For those in the late eighteenth century, there was a witnessing of a “lowering of olfactory tolerance” where societies moved graveyards to the edges of cities, to cleanse streets and markets, and to ventilate buildings in order to make them simultaneously healthier and sweeter-smelling [Reference Jenner31].

Much of the effort to deodorize arose from the concern that certain foul odors were fatal. In the 1880s and 1890s, belief moved from the perception that although noxious fumes may indicate unhealthy conditions, they were not in themselves hazardous. Yet, foul odors were still viewed negatively as they continued to be perceived as indicative of germs and disease [Reference Jenner31]. In the twentieth century, the concerted effort to bathe, shower, and deodorize societies continued, with soaps and other hygiene products promoted by advertising campaigns that stigmatized bodily odors [Reference Jenner31]. By the 1960s, anthropologists said “the extensive use of deodorants and the suppression of odor in public places” had made America “a land of olfactory blandness” [Reference Jenner31].

In recent years cultural historians have begun to examine not only when and where odors mattered more in the past, but also how and where particular odors mattered or were said to matter. Scholars have drawn attention to the ways in which odor terms have been used to stigmatize and stereotype social and ethnic groups in contexts such as slavery and segregation [Reference Smith94]. While other scholars have shown how the metaphorical and symbolic languages of odors used in late medieval and early modern pageantry and drama constructed social and sexual distinction [Reference Dugan95].

Smell is cultural, with each smell coming into being in the nose of the perceiver [Reference Jenner31]. The sense of smell is therefore “uniquely visceral” and personal [Reference Hsu96]. Smells may provide a sense of security, well-being, and pleasure and enable learning experiences beyond language [Reference Brulé, Bailly, Brock, Gentès and Jouffrais97]. A study that sought to understand how olfaction affected geographical knowledge in children explored how scents tied to six cues informed their understanding of space, including the smell of pastries to illustrate bakeries, rubber to represent traffic, and fresh grass to illustrate green spaces or the countryside [Reference Brulé, Bailly, Brock, Gentès and Jouffrais97]. Such studies have helped confirm smell’s role in informing experience, knowledge, and well-being.

Due to smell’s qualities as subjective and volatile, olfaction is a vital tool for sensing and staging environmental risk and inequality [Reference Hsu96]. In these environmental contexts, risk perceptions tied to an industrial plant have been measured through interpretations of odiferous hydrogen sulfide emissions [Reference Parr98]. Workers in factories that emitted hydrogen sulfide began to realize that they would physically change due to gas inhalation, as it diminished their olfactory abilities [Reference Jenner31]. With a reduced sense of smell, the signaling system between olfaction and satiation is diminished. This negatively impacts mental health through lack of satiation and impeded sociability as links between meaningful olfactory signals and perception of emotions are lost. Environmental violence may therefore be perpetuated through physical damage to olfaction as smells transform a person as they are taken into the body [Reference Chiang91, Reference Hsu96]. This violence is differentiated given specific livelihoods or geographies.

To raise awareness of the unpleasant smells connected to urban air pollution, and the impact of scent on the body, artists created Smog Perfume. The art installation invited the audience to spray the distilled scents, such as “rotten egg,” “burning alcohol,” and “salted fish” on their skin [Reference Landau, Toland, Amy, Husberg, Cerpina and Stenslie30]. Through this, the art seeks to draw attention to daily exposure to these smells and their impact on lived experience, such as the smell of waste correlating positively with disgust and sadness and negatively with joy [Reference Quercia, Maria Aiello and Schifanella99]. Other artists have explored how Latino communities exposed to freeway exhaust and pesticides are impacted, while other artists respond to racialized discourse about Asiatic odors, and the destruction of Indigenous smellscapes due to colonialism [Reference Hsu96].

These artworks demonstrate the power with which smell affects memory, and the violence that air maintenance and control enact on poor and marginalized communities. Unevenly polluted airspaces are distributed across social landscapes, and smell communicates “risk perception in literature, olfactory art, and environmental justice discourses” [Reference Hsu96]. Air and the smell carried in it become the “element for theorizing social relations and affect in material terms” [Reference Hsu96]. Smell connects urban geographies with agricultural landscapes, or freeway construction with abandoned oilwells or coal mines. The resulting geographic inequities manifest in the body and health. Olfactory perception should, therefore, be considered beyond the individual sensory experience, in order to explore smellscapes and the larger frames of decolonization, emancipation, and environmental violence [Reference Hsu96].

15.7 Conclusion

Artistic responses to environmental violence in the context of climate change outlined in this chapter highlight how works can mobilize a sense of urgency and empower multi-sensory understandings of the impacts of environmental violence. These artworks develop narratives that encourage us to remember former landscapes and witness contemporary conditions [Reference Perreault55]. They make visual what others cannot see, such as embodied geographies and the consequences of injustice. Art provides an emotional language for us to discuss environmental violence through its affective, experiential, and embodied qualities. By diversifying the stories told so that they include the perspectives of many people, and other species and material forms, art can encourage new ways of knowing and of experiencing. As the art communicates these perspectives, we develop shared memories through spoken or written words, and visual works that inform how people understand environmental violence, its causes, and potential remedies. Through this collective understanding, we will be empowered to address environmental violence and work toward a more just and inclusive world. A world that recognizes the diversity of lived experiences, the embodied impacts of change and loss, and the interconnected nature of humans with all earth.

Engaging Environmental Violence

The first half of this chapter is dedicated to outlining the detrimental consequences of materialistic values in order to highlight how materialism can be considered a form of cultural violence, which facilitates the persistence of environmental violence. In outlining the problems presented by materialistic values, I also want to highlight that all hope is not lost. The second half of the chapter is, therefore, dedicated to a potential antidote to materialistic values and lifestyles, in the form of flow experiences. Flow experiences could thus offer a means of limiting environmental violence. I end by considering how to encourage flow experiences and reduce the prevalence of materialistic values across society.

16.1 The Emergence of Materialism

Striving for happiness and well-being has long been considered a feature of the human experience [Reference Reshotko1]. However, understanding of the factors that lead to happiness differs across time and space [Reference McMahon2]. This is because the understanding of what makes for happiness or “the good life” is socially constructed and results from the interaction of people with each other and their environments. In the contemporary societies of Europe, North America, and Australasia, the materialistic understanding of the good life is commonplace.

On an individual level, materialism is considered a value or goal orientation [Reference Kasser and Ryan3, Reference Richins4]. People with strong materialistic values and goals consider the acquisition and ownership of material goods to be a major life goal [Reference Richins5], which takes precedence over concerns for freedom, aesthetics, and civil power [Reference Inglehart6]. They also consider the acquisition of material goods as essential for their own happiness [Reference Belk7], with Richins [Reference Richins, Wallendorf and Anderson8] highlighting that, for materialists, the possession of goods is seen as a means to achieve life satisfaction, rather than religious contemplation, a simple life, or social interaction. Materialism, therefore, seems to involve viewing consumer objects as a determinant of happiness and placing relatively more importance on their acquisition than other life aspects, such as relationships or religion.

Definitions of materialism also commonly emphasize the use of material goods to portray status or a particular image. For example, Bauer et al. [Reference Bauer, Wilkie, Kim and Bodenhausen9] stressed that highly materialistic individuals are not only engrossed by possessions, but also the social messages they are able to project. The inclusion of possessions as a means of portraying a certain image and status was echoed by Dittmar et al. [Reference Dittmar, Bond, Hurst and Kasser10], p. 880, who defined materialism as “individual differences in people’s long-term endorsement of values, goals, and associated beliefs that center on the importance of acquiring money and possessions that convey status.” Likewise, Csikszentmihalyi [Reference Csikszentmihalyi, Kasser and Kanner11] emphasized that materialism not only involves excessively wanting to own material items, but also the desire to showcase possession of them. Therefore, there appears to be a strong social aspect to materialism whereby individuals seek to influence how others perceive them through a public display of their possessions.

Accordingly, materialism is more than just an interest in getting and spending. It involves placing material possessions at the center of one’s existence and pursuing their acquisition as a means of becoming happier and appearing successful, both in your own eyes and the eyes of others. Note also that, although the definitions outlined here have been concerned with individual materialism, materialism is sometimes discussed at the cultural level, with certain cultures (e.g., the USA) considered to be more materialistic than others [Reference Belk and Pollay12]. A materialistic culture is one in which the majority of the members place a lot of value on material objects [Reference Srikant13]. This aligns with definitions of “consumer culture” which emphasize a social system whereby consumption is used as a means of allocating status and prestige, perceived well-being, and creating social bonds [Reference Featherstone14]. Materialistic values could, therefore, be seen as the individual manifestation of participating in a consumer culture.

The extent to which someone holds materialistic values is typically determined using one or more survey assessments that have been devised within the fields of consumer research and applied social psychology. Popular measures include the Material Values Scale, which includes items such as “I like a lot of luxury in my life” and “I’d be happier if I could afford to buy more things,” [Reference Richins and Dawson15] and the Aspiration Index [Reference Kasser and Ryan3], which asks individuals to rate how important different goals (e.g., “to be rich” and “to grow and learn new things”) are to them. Respondents rate their agreement with each item on Likert-type scales, with responses to individual items being summed to create an overall materialism score. The extent to which an individual is considered materialistic is therefore represented along a continuum with some individuals scoring higher and, therefore, considered to be more materialistic than others. There are no strict cut-off points from which an individual is either considered to be materialistic or not.

Prevalent materialistic values and goals are a logical consequence of consumer capitalism, which remains the dominant economic framework within the Western world [Reference Ritzer and Jurgenson16]. Under this paradigm, the success of a nation’s economy is judged via its gross domestic product (GDP), which rises as a greater number of goods are produced and consumed. While no theory of GDP explicitly proposes this measure to be indicative of societal welfare, it has often come to be viewed as such [Reference van den Bergh17]. A nation’s economic development and social well-being would, therefore, require that individuals within that nation choose to go out and shop. To stimulate these increasing levels of consumer spending, the advertising industry projects messages that happiness can be achieved via the acquisition of material goods [Reference Dittmar18].

In line with the association between materialistic values and consumer capitalism, much academic research exploring materialism has been focused on the contemporary societies of Europe, North America, and Australasia [Reference Dittmar, Hurst and Maddux19]. Scholars have suggested that materialistic values may be expressed differently across cultures [Reference Andersson and Nässén20], and although studies using samples from non-Western and less developed/developing economies are emerging [Reference Unanue, Vignoles, Dittmar and Vansteenkiste21], findings concerning how materialism links to well-being and the environment in these contexts in less well established [Reference Dittmar, Hurst and Maddux19]. In this chapter, therefore, I focus primarily on the consequences of materialistic values in contemporary societies, and how flow may be a means of reducing environmental violence for individuals in these contexts.

Research shows that exposure to advertising is a key promoter of strong materialistic values and goals, especially among children and adolescents [Reference Dunkeld, Wright, Banerjee, Easterbrook and Slade22, Reference Nairn and Opree23]. The relationship between television advertisement exposure and materialistic values may also be reciprocal, such that those individuals who already hold stronger materialistic values and goals show greater interest in television commercials [Reference Goldberg, Gorn, Peracchio and Bamossy24]. Hence, once an individual starts adopting materialistic tendencies, they are susceptible to falling into a cycle of increasing materialistic values and goals due to heightened attention to consumer advertising. Materialistic values and goals can also be passed down through generations. Studies have shown that highly materialistic children tend to have parents who are also very materialistic [Reference Goldberg, Gorn, Peracchio and Bamossy24] and that mothers who greatly value their teens’ financial success are more likely to have children who value their own financial success, over and above self-acceptance [Reference Kasser, Ryan, Zax and Sameroff25]. The experience of personal or economic insecurity has also been suggested to encourage stronger materialistic values and goals [Reference Chang and Arkin26, Reference Sheldon and Kasser27]. Evidence suggests that the prevalence of materialistic values increased over the latter half of the twentieth century in the USA [Reference Twenge and Kasser28] and, when global news reports are documenting increasing levels of economic insecurity and a mental health crisis [Reference Shoib, Isioma Ojeahere, Mohd Saleem, Shariful Islam, Yasir Arafat, De Filippis and Ullah29, Reference Strauss30], we may predict that the prevalence of materialistic values and goals will continue to increase.

16.2 Materialism as a Form of Environmental Violence

Despite the apparent encouragement of materialistic values and goals within consumer capitalist societies, such values and goals are highly problematic for human health and well-being [Reference Jackson31]. Here, I will argue that there are two key pathways through which materialistic values and goals can work to have detrimental impacts on human well-being. The first is a direct pathway, informed by findings from psychology and consumer research documenting that increases in the strength of materialistic values and goals lead to reductions in different facets of personal well-being. The second is a more indirect pathway through environmental degradation. Research increasingly documents that individuals with strong materialistic values and goals are less likely to care for the environment and engage in pro-environmental behaviors. The environmental degradation that materialistic values and goals contribute to can then negatively impact human health and well-being. This latter pathway represents an instance of environmental violence.

Environmental violence describes the process through which human-produced pollution and other forms of environmental damage have subsequent negative impacts on human health and well-being [Reference Marcantonio and Fuentes32]. It can operate at individual, community, regional and global scales. The founders of the environmental violence framework discussed in this volume, Marcantonio and Fuentes, highlight that environmental violence arises through dynamic, socio-ecological processes, whereby structural, cultural, and behavioral factors all have a role to play. Materialism represents an individual action that can cause environmental violence, and this individual action is facilitated through a consumer culture that normalizes materialistic behaviors, thus, allowing them to continue to occur unchallenged.

16.3 Flow Experiences

Given the problems presented by materialistic lifestyles, it is important that we explore alternative ways of living that may enhance both human well-being and planetary health and, hence, be a means of combating environmental violence. I wish to focus on the potential benefits that flow experiences can offer to these areas. Flow describes a state of optimal experience whereby a person’s attention is completely focused on the activity they are engaged in [Reference Jackson and Eklund75]. This state of concentration can be so intense that individuals become temporarily unaware of their everyday worries and feel transported into a new reality. There is no attention left over that can process any stimuli other than those directly relevant to the activity [Reference Csikszentmihalyi76, Reference Csikszentmihalyi77]. Although normally one would need to expend a lot of effort to maintain such intense concentration, during flow there is less perceived effort required to stay focused on the task [Reference Jackson and Eklund75].

This intense concentration helps create other phenomenological characteristics of flow. For example, individuals often stop perceiving themselves as separate from the actions they are performing [Reference Csikszentmihalyi77]. This blurring of the boundaries between the self and the action can give rise to an experience of effortless movement, as individuals are not aware of any conscious effort to initiate their actions. They can also begin to experience a sense of oneness with the activity for the same reasons. Granting all attention to the activity also means that there is no attention available for self-scrutiny, and self-consciousness temporarily disappears. Rather than being pre-occupied with living up to a certain standard, one is free to engage with a challenge in the absence of fear of failure, ridicule, or embarrassment. Self-consciousness returns after the flow experience subsides [Reference Csikszentmihalyi76, Reference Csikszentmihalyi77]. Similarly, individuals are not paying attention to the passing of time and, hence, during flow, perception of time is altered such that hours may seem to go by in minutes, or alternatively, minutes may feel like hours [Reference Csikszentmihalyi77]. The former experience appears to be more common [Reference Jackson and Eklund75]. Descriptions of what it feels like to be in flow are given as follows [Reference Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi78].

Being in a flow state is highly enjoyable. So much so that the experience is said to be intrinsically motivating. That is, it is so enjoyable and rewarding to be in flow that individuals will choose to engage in the activity providing flow for them simply for the sake of doing the activity, and not to gain any external rewards such as money or praise. This may occur even if engagement in the activity incurs great costs against the person. For example, a person who experiences flow when playing football may choose to continually practice the sport, even in bad weather or when dealing with other life pressures. For these reasons, the flow experience is often referred to as an “autotelic” (auto = self, telos = goal) experience because the activity is seen as an end worth striving for in itself. Each experience of flow increases the actor’s motivation to experience it again [Reference Jackson and Eklund75, Reference Csikszentmihalyi76].

Flow experiences are suggested to be more likely to occur when certain conditions are present. Often flow is spoken of as a “high challenge high skill” experience because it is suggested to occur when there is both a matching of the level of challenge presented by an activity and the individual’s skillset, and this matching occurs above an individual’s average skill level for the activity [Reference Engeser and Rheinberg79]. This means that people feel that they are being stretched to perform at a level that is good for them, but still able to eventually overcome any challenges. It is important to highlight that everyone’s own perception of their skills in comparison to the challenges present in a situation is more important than their objective skillset. If an individual perceives there to be a match between their skills and the activity, then this is more important than any objective matching in terms of experiencing flow [Reference Moneta and Csikszentmihalyi80].

Other conditions that support flow include that the task has clear goals. Having clear goals helps people to know what they need to achieve and, thus, what they need to focus on to get there. Being aware of the purpose of one’s actions also helps to maintain connection with the task [Reference Jackson and Eklund75]. Alongside perceiving clear goals, flow is also more likely to occur if individuals are receiving unambiguous feedback concerning their progress toward these goals. Feedback could be in the form of bodily awareness or cues from the environment [Reference Csikszentmihalyi76]. Feedback does not have to be positive; its purpose is to help the actor adjust their behavior appropriately in response to the demands of the task. Receiving feedback concerning the consequences of one’s actions also helps to support the feelings of control that are common during flow [Reference Csikszentmihalyi77]. Individuals feel as though they are acting freely and can directly influence the outcome of the activity.

Although Csikszentmihalyi [Reference Csikszentmihalyi77] highlighted that, theoretically, any activity could be molded to support flow, certain activities have been shown to support flow experiences more frequently than others. For instance, work activities have been suggested to be well equipped to support flow in that people often have clear goals that they are working toward. Outside of work, the leisure activities that have been found to better support the experience of flow include reading, sports, and creative activities [Reference Magyaródi and Oláh81]. Many of these are “everyday” activities that do not have to require significant investments of time or money. In line with this, recent work by Isham and Jackson [Reference Isham and Jackson82] has explored the demographic associates of the extent to which people experience flow among a largely representative sample of adults in the UK. Findings document that factors such as age, gender, educational attainment, and socioeconomic status had a very little role to play in accounting for how often individuals reported experiencing the characteristics of flow, explaining less than 7% of variation in scores overall. Accordingly, within contemporary societies, such as the UK, flow experiences appear to be fairly dispersed across different demographic groups. Much of the research that has been conducted on flow to date has tended to focus on individual experiences of flow. Nevertheless, emerging work documents that flow can also occur in group contexts whereby flow is sometimes experienced on a more collective level as teams effectively cooperate to perform a task together [Reference Pels, Kleinert and Mennigen83].

16.4 Flow as an Antidote to Environmental Violence

It may not be immediately obvious why flow experiences should be an antidote to environmental violence. Within the field of positive psychology, flow is considered an optimal and largely beneficial experience. However, many of these benefits have been confined to the areas of individual well-being and performance. Athletes who experience flow during practice and competitions, or students who experience flow when studying, are shown to have better finishing positions and grades than those who do not experience flow [Reference Bakker, Oerlemans, Demerouti, Slot and Ali84, Reference Sumaya and Darling85], for example. In this chapter, I aim to highlight that flow’s benefits extend beyond individual outcomes to ecological well-being. By being able to enhance individual and ecological well-being in tandem, flow experiences offer a powerful tool for limiting environmental violence.

16.4.2 Flow Supports Ecological Well-Being

While research has been documenting a positive association between flow and personal well-being for several decades, academics and practitioners have only recently turned their attention to the links between flow and ecological well-being [Reference Isham, Elf and Jackson95], which describes the well-being of the Earth’s natural systems alongside that of its inhabitants. One of the first studies to explore this link came from Isham et al. [Reference Isham, Gatersleben and Jackson96]. They examined experience sampling data taken from the members of 500 families in the United States. Experience sampling is a method whereby people are prompted to report what they are doing, who they are with, and how they are feeling at random times during the day. It is a useful method for getting real-time measures of people’s everyday experiences. Isham et al. used data surrounding how participants were feeling to infer in which cases they were having stronger experiences of flow. They then correlated this with the greenhouse gas intensity of the activities in which they reported having varying degrees of flow. Results demonstrated that people reported having stronger experiences of flow in activities with lower greenhouse gas intensities. In other words, flow experiences appeared to be more likely to occur in less environmentally costly activities. There were particular types of activities that appeared to often support the experience of flow while having low environmental costs. These revolved around the five categories of: (1) positive, romantic relationships (e.g., spending time with a partner and physical/sexual intimacy); (2) contemplative activities (e.g., prayer, yoga, and meditation); (3) creative activities (e.g., arts and crafts and performing arts); (4) sports and physical exercise (e.g., cycling, running, aerobics, and ball games); and (5) social engagement (e.g., playing with children and talking with neighbors). The authors of this work were at pains to note that they are not suggesting that flow experiences only occur in less environmentally costly activities, but the fact that these types of actions can effectively support flow is a promising sign that well-being can be achieved in the absence of a reliance on material consumption.

By allowing people to find intrinsic reward in more sustainable activities, flow experiences should prompt further engagement in those activities due to the intrinsically motivating nature of flow. This is one way in which flow can encourage participation in more sustainable lifestyles [Reference Isham and Jackson97]. A more recent study can be seen to further support this notion. Whittaker et al. [Reference Whittaker, Mulcahy and Russell-Bennett98] found that if people experienced flow as they were using an app that featured games promoting sustainable behaviors, they evaluated the act of engaging in sustainable behavior more positively and had stronger intentions to enact sustainable behaviors themselves in the future. Accordingly, when people experience flow in more sustainable activities or those promoting sustainable behaviors, they may come to have more positive views on acting in ways that will support environmental well-being.

A further way in which flow may support environmental well-being is by influencing the strength of personal values. Values represent people’s beliefs about what is important to strive for in life [Reference Rokeach99]. They are important because they are a strong guide for people’s judgments and actions. People will act in ways that are in line with their values. For example, as we have already noted in this chapter, if someone has strong materialistic values, whereby they believe it is important to acquire money and material goods, then they are likely to spend more time shopping [Reference Fitzmaurice and Comegys63]. Although values are suggested to be somewhat stable over time [Reference Eisentraut100], they are still subject to change as an individual matures or experiences situations which challenge their perceptions of what is desirable [Reference Cieciuch, Schwartz, Davidov, Wright and Wright101].

Isham and Jackson [Reference Isham and Jackson102] aimed to test whether having frequent flow experiences could influence the strength of people’s personal values. They focused on a specific category of values known as self-transcendent values. Self-transcendent values cover the importance people place on the well-being of the environment and other people [Reference Schwartz and Zanna103]. When people hold strong self-transcendent values, they are more likely to engage in pro-environmental and prosocial behaviors [Reference Daniel, Bilgin, Brezina, Strohmeier and Vainre104, Reference Schoenefeld and McCauley105], report greater support for environmental charities [Reference Joireman and Duell106], and have more favorable attitudes toward policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions [Reference Nilsson, von Borgstede and Biel107]. Promoting the uptake of self-transcendent values can, therefore, be an important step in encouraging practices that support ecological well-being.

The reason Isham and Jackson [Reference Isham and Jackson102] predicted that having experiences of flow may be able to encourage stronger self-transcendent values is because flow can be considered a self-transcendent experience [Reference Isham, Elf and Jackson95, Reference Elf, Isham and Jackson108, Reference Yaden, Haidt, Hood, Vago and Newberg109]. During flow, people lose self-consciousness and so are not focused on themselves as an isolated entity. There is also a reduction in the salience of the boundaries between the self and “other” as people start to experience a sense of oneness with the activity that they are engaged in. Given that people are less self-focused during flow, it may encourage them to care more about nonself-entities, such as other people and nature [Reference Leary, Tipsord, Tate, Wayment and Bauer110]. Indeed, other experiences that have been described as self-transcendent, such as mindfulness and awe, have also been shown to lead to greater engagement in prosocial and pro-environmental behaviors [Reference Sun, Su, Guo and Tian111, Reference Wamsler, Brossmann, Hendersson, Kristjansdottir, McDonald and Scarampi112]. To test their prediction, Isham and Jackson administered surveys to a sample of UK adults at three points over the six-month period. At each time point, participants completed measures of the strength of their self-transcendent values and how often they were experiencing flow in their day-to-day lives. Their analysis revealed that as people increased how often they were experiencing flow, they showed subsequent increases in the strength of their self-transcendent values. This study therefore offers a sign that flow experiences may be able to cause people to value ecological well-being more strongly; see Figure 16.1.

Figure 16.1 Graphical representation of materialism, flow, and their links to environmental and human health and well-being

16.5 Practical Steps for the Reduction of Environmental Violence

The reduction of environmental violence will require deliberate steps across governments, institutions, and individuals. In line with its theoretical focus, this chapter makes two general recommendations to support the reduction of environmental violence. First, the prevalence of materialistic values and goals needs to be reduced. Second, the experience of flow needs to be promoted. These two recommendations must both be undertaken, as neither is sufficient on its own. If materialistic values, goals, and activities are reduced, then people will need alternative values and actions to fill the void, which is where flow experiences can make a valuable contribution. Equally, research has shown that strong materialistic values and goals undermine people’s tendency to experience flow [Reference Isham, Gatersleben and Jackson113–Reference Isham and Jackson115]. Therefore, flow experiences are unlikely to be experienced frequently while materialistic values and goals are still rife.

There are several ways in which the strength of materialistic values and goals could be reduced [Reference Kasser116]. One key route would be to reduce the prevalence of consumer advertising within societies. Research demonstrates that exposure to consumer advertising and brand logos encourages materialistic values [Reference Bauer, Wilkie, Kim and Bodenhausen9, Reference Nairn and Opree23]. In São Paulo, billboard advertising is banned under the Clean City Law, with Mayor Gilberto Kassab calling outdoor advertisements “visual pollution” [Reference Madhawi117]. Advertisements targeted at children could also be banned, as they have been in places such as Norway and Quebec [Reference Kent118]. This latter point is especially important given the issues I have highlighted surrounding how children from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds are more susceptible to adopting materialistic values and goals due to more time spent watching television [Reference Nairn and Opree23]. If we cannot limit the amount of advertising people are exposed to, then parents should be encouraged to discuss the intent/accuracy of advertising regularly with their families. Research has shown that children are less susceptible to advertising and consumer messages if their family regularly discuss advertising and consumption issues [Reference Buijzen and Valkenburg119]. Such education around the purpose of advertising could also be included within the school curriculum.

Materialistic values are often viewed favorably by governments and advertisers in the belief that such values and associated behaviors help to fuel economic growth [Reference Ritzer and Jurgenson16]. Given this, consideration of alternative economic models may help to reduce encouragement of materialism on a more macro scale. Academic research in the fields of “degrowth” and “postgrowth,” for example, is exploring how we might live in societies whereby rising consumption, productivity, and economic growth are not at the heart of prosperity and government policy [Reference Jackson31, Reference Kallis120]. Governments would do well to pay genuine attention to such research and implement appropriate policies accordingly, in order to help mold societies that are focused on pro-environmental and prosocial practices, rather than the endless acquisition of materials goods.

A further means of reducing materialistic values and goals is to encourage the types of personal values that conflict with materialism. Individual values do not exist in a vacuum, but are rather part of a complex, interrelated system [Reference Schwartz and Zanna103]. Within this system, some types of values are complementary and so easy to hold at the same time. For example, it is logical to both be concerned with upholding family traditions and conforming to rules. However, some types of values conflict with one another and are, thus, harder to hold at the same time. For example, it is difficult to care strongly about helping other people while also highly valuing having power and control over others. If certain types of values are hard to hold at the same time, then emphasizing and promoting those values that conflict with materialism could help to reduce the strength of materialistic values and goals. Materialism conflicts with self-transcendent values, which place importance on nonself-entities such as family, charity, and the environment [Reference Burroughs and Rindfleisch121, Reference Schwartz, Sander and Brosch122]. Research has shown that getting people to reflect on two personal self-transcendent values [Reference Lekes, Hope, Gouveia, Koestner and Philippe123] can successfully increase the strength of this value type. This form of reflection could therefore be practiced by individuals to reduce the strength of their materialistic values. Advertisers are also well equipped to use their creative skills to help people see alternative, positive visions of the future. Organizations such as Purpose Disruptors (www.purposedisruptors.org/) and Glimpse (https://weglimpse.co/) in the UK are already developing campaigns which focus on promoting the importance of self-transcendent values such as love, nature, and community.

It is my hope that encouraging the incidence of flow experiences could also act as a means of reducing materialistic values. For one, flow experiences appear to be able to encourage stronger self-transcendent values [Reference Isham and Jackson102] which conflict with materialistic values. Further, research shows that when people are experiencing self-doubt or poor well-being, they are more likely to orient toward materialistic values and goals [Reference Chang and Arkin26]. This is because they may view material goods either as a distraction or as a means of building a “better” self [Reference Kasser124]. Existing work has shown that gratitude could reduce materialistic values because it boosts people’s feelings of security be enhancing their awareness of other people’s kindness [Reference Froh, Emmons, Card, Bono and Wilson125, Reference Polak and McCullough126]. If flow experiences can enhance individual well-being, then they may reduce the need for people to seek satisfaction through material goods.

Encouraging flow experiences can involve two processes. On the one hand, we can focus on altering the environment to make it more supportive of flow. On the other hand, we can try to alter the individual such that they hold the characteristics or capabilities that make them more suited to crafting flow experiences. One way in which we could alter the environment to make it more supportive of flow would be to increase free access to flow-supportive activities. Local provision of sports or arts clubs would help to give people the opportunity to find flow. It is important that these activities are free and accessible to all to make sure that participation is not limited to certain socioeconomic or demographic groups. It is also important that people have time to engage in activities that may be supportive of flow for them. To this end, a shorter working week may be beneficial. Several organizations are currently trialing a four-day work week, with advocates arguing that it could raise individual well-being while reducing carbon emissions [Reference Stronge127]. On top of this, it has been suggested that a shorter work week could help create jobs for groups (e.g., women) who might otherwise be excluded from work due, for example, to greater caring responsibilities [Reference Harper, Stronge, Guizzo and Ellis-Petersen128]. This may, therefore, also increase access to flow experiences at work for different demographic groups. When participating in flow-supportive activities, it is important that people are not being externally motivated, as research shows that flow experiences are more likely when people are intrinsically motivated (i.e., doing something primarily for enjoyment) [Reference Mills and Fullagar129]. Therefore, parents should not try to force their children to partake in activities using rewards such as new toys or more pocket money. Instead, they should allow children to explore and let them know that it is okay to do something just because you like it.

There are several individual characteristics that research has shown to be linked to more frequent experiences of flow. When an individual holds many of these characteristics, we might suggest they have something like a “flow personality” [Reference Baumann and Engeser130]. Examples of traits that might be part of this flow personality include high levels of openness to new experiences. This trait encourages individuals to seek opportunities to engage in new, challenging activities that may be better suited to supporting flow, rather than staying on routine or boring actions that are not conducive to flow. While research suggests that interventions to encourage the trait of openness often do not result in significant or large changes [Reference Roberts, Luo, Briley, Chow, Su and Hill131], some studies have had success using cognitive training such as learning new puzzles [Reference Jackson, Hill, Payne, Roberts and Stine-Morrow132]. Another quality of highly flow-prone individuals is that they often have good self-control [Reference Isham, Gatersleben and Jackson114]. This characteristic allows people to be better at regulating and focusing their attention, such that they are not so easily distracted and are more likely to have the high levels of concentration that occur during flow. Research has shown that higher levels of self-control can be developed through practices such as mindfulness [Reference Masicampo and Baumeister133] and cognitive training that focuses on exposure to reward delays, goal setting, or breaking habits [Reference Allemand, Keller, Gmür, Gehriger, Oberholzer and Stieger134, Reference Smith, Panfil, Bailey and Kirkpatrick135].

16.6 Conclusions

Environmental violence refers to the process through which humanity comes to harm its own health and well-being through unsustainable patterns of action [Reference Marcantonio and Fuentes32]. In this chapter, I have outlined how materialistic values and goals, and the corresponding lifestyles that they promote, can be considered as a form of environmental violence that is normalized across consumer cultures. I also suggest that flow experiences can be a beneficial means of reducing environmental violence and improving human health and well-being because of how they can both directly enhance human well-being and promote more sustainable values and behaviors. The key aim now is to find pathways that orient people away from lifestyles dominated by materialism toward lifestyles that provide ample opportunities for finding flow.