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.

This case study incorporates the different plans discussed in Chapter 7 and the diffusion of an environmental innovation. This is a case history demonstrating how change agents working with the EPA developed and implemented Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in schools in 41 states in 18 years and how, for more than a decade, School IPM became a national initiative. The case study first appeared in A Worm in the Teacher’s Apple: Protecting America’s School Children from Pests and Pesticides (Lame 2005)

Be still and the earth will speak to you … Carl Moon – Navajo Nation, 1904

Matching legal authority to environmental goals. To develop and learn the language of the environmental management profession, with a specific focus on the terms and concepts of environmental law, to memorize the intent and major provisions of each environmental law, and to be able to compare and contrast the laws and their provisions for more effective and efficient diagnosis. Mastering this skill will enable the professional to better understand their legal accountability and the “arena” – i.e., the areas of operation and expectations of their work delimited by legal statutes – in which they are managing. In other words, to be able to respond to opposition and take advantage of opportunities.