Conflict activities produce a complex array of environmental vectors of violence. Environmental violence is excess human-produced pollution that directly harms human health. In conflict, most often all pollution produced is in excess. Beyond the reduction in environmental quality and ecosystem services from degradation, the environment as a vector of violence directly assaults human health, often with impacts lasting well beyond the end of a conflict. This chapter focuses on environmental violence from conflict and highlights the complex and myriad ways in which conflict activities, materials, and damages can directly and indirectly harm human health.

The environment is almost always a victim in conflict. Conflict activities generally reduce environmental quality, resulting in a loss of ecosystem services that can be cultivated. The environment as degraded covers the range of pathways of environmental degradation from conflict activities, the implications for economic outcomes, and the environmental remediation needed to restore ecosystem functioning.

This chapter argues that the discussion of pollution in Victorian environmental writing was often cross-wired with an oppressive and dehumanizing moral rhetoric. The confusion of the moral and material valences of words like “pollution,” “impurity,” “contamination,” and “filth” meant that, in practice, the very persons and communities that were suffering the most at the hands of extractive capitalism were imagined to be the cause of environmental breakdown, rather than its most grievously suffering casualties. In this way, the profound human cost of industrialism and the profit logic could be obscured under a victim-blaming rhetoric of social respectability, sexual purity, and moral righteousness. Drawing on key passages by Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the chapter shows some of the ways in which this troubling conflation of the moral and material was both critiqued and reinforced in the literature of the period.

This chapter looks at nineteenth-century visual arts with an ecological eye. The first section considers distance: the air, haze, clouds, and atmosphere in a painting. Next, closely observed detail in images, often influenced by John Ruskin’s beliefs, is related to the importance of close attentiveness, as well as to the global networks in the study and transport of plants. It then considers the use of visual material in publicizing environmental harms and in bringing home their emotional impact, as well as considering the long-term, as yet invisible effects of climate change on landscapes. Finally, it looks at the role of visual art in providing aesthetic escapism, whatever the realities of pollution and urbanization, as with James McNeill Whistler’s misty Thames views, or with nostalgic pastoral. All sections ask what environmental futures these images contain. The chapter highlights four images: John Constable’s View on the Stour Near Dedham (1823); Albert Goodwin’s A Sunset in the Manufacturing Districts (1884); Henry Warren, The Black Country Near Bilston (1869); and George Vicat Cole, At Arundel, Sussex (1887).

Theatrical presentation encompasses diverging perspectives on water ecologies, ecological divisions and extremes of wet and dry in tropical and desert climates. While twentieth-century drama points to how water sources in Australia have been divided up to restrict access through land proprietorship, polarising attitudes and racial injustice, innovative twenty-first century performance emphasises the interconnectedness of water flows, seepage and below ground storage. An appreciation of water flow is particularly evident in First Nations performance, which includes the influential work of Bangarra Dance Theatre. Performance explores values and practices that resist the way water is polluted and detrimentally reconfigured in binary divisions to restrict access and divert flows and highlights the need for water availability for all species in a climate change era. Australian theatrical performance points to emotional feelings and values that protect and preserve water and its river flows even as human impact on the climate means its patterns are no longer predictable.

Despite the neoliberal wave solidarity capitalism has remained important in Europe. Since it was impossible to tame capitalism globally, promoters of solidarity turned to the European Union, and strove to strengthen its ‘flanking’ welfare state. The early 1990s brought a first peak of international awareness regarding environmental protection and interest in social Europe, but that was shattered by a neoliberal reaction from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s. Since then, social and environmental policies have been on the rise again, only to be challenged by the Russo-Ukrainian War. Three expressions of solidarity will be examined. The first deals with the legal regulation of globalisation through social legislation and trade regulation. The second involves financial redistribution towards the neediest, with transfers to poor regions (cohesion policy), and later with specific measures during the Covid-19 crisis (2020–21). The third addresses the rising importance of environmental regulation in general (air and water pollution, biodiversity, etc.), especially with regard to climate change (Kyoto Protocol, 2015 Paris Agreement), despite the lobbying of the ‘Merchants of Doubts’.

This manifesto argues that education is crucial to equipping people with the knowledge and skills, confidence and optimism to navigate the challenges of the twenty-first century. Human-induced environmental change - including climate breakdown; species extinction; pollution of the air, soil, freshwater and oceans; and resource depletion - is destroying the very systems that humans need for life. When these effects are coupled with a set of global economic constraints that prioritise unsustainable consumption, and interact with underlying social inequalities, the challenges we face are severe. The manifesto stresses the importance of fostering values-based education that promotes active citizenship, creativity, resilience, knowledge, compassion, systems thinking and local action with global impact.

Kerri Woods surveys how, when it comes to the environment, the anthropocentrism of most of the history of human rights politics meant that its incorporation of claims on behalf of nature and those most affected by its degradation have waited a long time. Nonetheless, in recent decades they have exploded. At stake is not just the recognition of who in particular among human beings environmental degradation hurts, or recognition of the moral significance of future generations, but potentially turning rights language into a tool for non-human protection as an intrinsic good, just as Davies suggests when it comes to artificial intelligence. At the same time, Woods shows, the intersection of environmental concern and rights history opens up new quandaries about assigning responsibility for harm and regulating supraterritorially.

Peru’s Amazon is the site of a violent and fast-moving gold-mining rush, which has caused divides within Indigenous communities and devastating environmental impacts from the mercury used in gold extractivism. There has been a massive increase in illegal or informal gold mining, especially in Peru’s Madre de Dios province. Tens of thousands of miners operate on rafts in the rivers or dig for gold by increasingly mechanized means. In Madre de Dios there is a gold-mining RDPE that explains the bulk of land and forest use. In addition to an exploration of the dynamics of gold extractivism, this chapter also assesses the conflicts and resistance at play in this context. Indigenous communities, especially in the Amazon, are currently facing huge extractivist pressures, which has started to polarize many communities and change their relationship with the extractivist phenomena. Some community members have started to extract gold illegally and destructively, while most resist these temptations, invoking nonmodernist cosmologies and understandings that place barriers to extractivist expansions.