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

The contributors to this book represent a wide breadth of scholarly approaches, including law, social and environmental science, and engineering, as well as from the arts and humanities. The chapters explore what environmental violence is and does, and the variety of ways in which it affects different communities. The authors draw on empirical data from countries and regions around the globe, including Ukraine, French Polynesia, Latin America, and the Arctic. The variety of responses to environmental violence by different communities, whether through active resistance or the creative arts, is also discussed, providing the foundation on which to build alternatives to the potentially damaging trajectory on which humans currently find themselves. This book is indispensable for researchers and policymakers in environmental policy and peacebuilding. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The use of global positioning system (GPS) units attached to collars is becoming increasingly common in primate studies (Anderson, pers. comm.; Crofoot et al. 2014; Di Fiore & Link 2013; Dore, pers. comm.; Klegarth et al. 2017; Markham & Altmann 2008; Markham et al. 2013; Sprague et al. 2004; Stark, pers. comm.). By deploying GPS collars, researchers can gain enhanced knowledge of primate group whereabouts and overall ranging and landscape use patterns at a high resolution (Crofoot et al. 2014). The utility of these systems has greatly expanded with the increasing spatial accuracy, reliability, and mechanisms (remote data download and drop-off units) of units that facilitate reasonably low impact on study animals (Klegarth et al. 2017; Matthews et al. 2013). While these collars open up new methodological and analytic possibilities for assessing primate ranging patterns and habitat use, they also present a diverse array of technical, structural, and ethical concerns with doing so (Hebblewhite & Haydon 2010; Todd & Shah 2012)

Humans can see the world around them, imagine how it might be different, and translate those imaginings into reality ‥ or at least try to. This ability plays a significant role in our lineage’s evolutionary success. Meaning, imagination, and hope are as central to the human evolutionary story as are bones, genes, and ecologies. Paleoanthropological, archaeological, and biological data make it abundantly clear that the human lineage, over the last 2 million years, has undergone specific morphological changes alongside less easily measurable, but significant behavioral and cognitive shifts as it has forged and been shaped by a new niche, a highly distinctive way of being in the world – a human niche, a niche in which imagination is a key factor. This chapter offers a brief overview of this history and highlights how developmental processes of the human body and brain evolve as a system that is always in concert with, and mutually co-constitutive of, the linguistic, socially mediated and constructed structures, institutions, and beliefs that make up key aspects of the human niche.