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

Deep learning changes one’s perspective on how the world works and, by extension, how one should be in the world. Thus, whenever new knowledge threatens to disturb the existing political equilibrium, learning becomes a political act. This chapter considers the work of Paulo Freire, Myles Horton, Michel Foucault, and John Dewey, and ends with four recommendations for making political dynamics more conducive to deep learning: identify existing systems of power relationships, surface hegemonic assumptions, speak truth to power, and cultivate procedural justice.

The research evidence is unmistakable: deep learning is most powerful, and often necessary, in social discourse. Learning in the presence of others allows us to understand the world as others see it, and to try on perspectives that we would not have known about otherwise. Learning with others is perilous, often leading to the hardening of beliefs and attitudes, and so the chapter also includes a discussion of how social discourse can be most productive, focusing on four facilitators: empathy, social capital, participatory forms of engagement and learning, and minimal power differentials and shared responsibility.