Human-produced pollution is the single leading cause of mortality today, yet it is not widely considered a form of violence. On July 28, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voted—with 161 in favor and eight abstentions—that living in a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a human right. Building on a similar declaration by the United Nations Human Rights Council in October 2021, the UNGA has now reinforced the notion that the growing assaults on human health through environmental hazards are transgressions against the basic rights and freedoms of people. Efforts to create a human right to a healthy planet, and even a planetary right to health that would signifying potential rights of nature, are growing both in real activity and demand.

But why are such declarations and efforts needed?

Likely because of the current human-modified conditions of our planet. For example, more than 90% of the world’s population is not able to enjoy this alleged human right due to toxic pollution exposures alone. We are now believed to be exceeding several critical earth systems’ planetary boundaries, which could result in rapid deleterious changes rippling through the global ecosystem—an outcome many suggest is already transpiring today, to varying degrees, such that massive systemic ecological collapse and increased global suffering may be no more than a few decades away. 

Environmental security is one of the most important conditions for human security. Yet currently, most people are living in environmentally insecure conditions—that is, exposed and experiencing environmental violence.

The environment-conflict nexus has been explored extensively, but often through the lens of “the resource curse,” climate-conflict interactions, or similar concepts where direct violence is the outcome of interest as opposed to other forms of violence. In fact, between 2000 and 2021, the annual average number of conflict deaths (including state-based, non-state, and one-sided conflicts) was around 90,000 per year. While salient and important, this has left out a critical vector of human-produced violence.  By today’s estimate, at least 9 million people die early every year from just toxic pollution—i.e., not including the likely thousands dying from anthropogenic climate change driven by human greenhouse gas emissions.

Two recent examples show why the need to consider environmental violence’s impact is so great. During the almost 11-year Sierra Leonean civil war, an estimated 60,000 people died, or about 5,500 people a year. Today an estimated 12,200 people die annually from human-produced toxic pollution, almost half of which is attributed to mining, and many thousands more suffer the health effects of climate change from malnutrition to increased heat. Many communities in remote rural areas, the same areas where much of the war was fought, note the spike in experienced environmental violence—especially water pollution—after the war ended and as post-war development arrived.

Similarly, In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an area where active conflict has transpired or brewed over the last several decades, about 30,000 people suffered violent deaths between 2011 and 2021. In 2018 alone, some 100,000 deaths were attributable to human-produced toxic air and water pollution—again a figure that also does not include deaths attributable to climate change. In no way do these data points detract from the salience and visceral reality of direct violence. Instead, they indicate the need for critical attentiveness to human-produced environmental vectors of violence given their outsized impact on human mortality and well-being.

Our new edited volume, Exploring Environmental Violence, brings together peace scholars, economists, engineers, artists, political scientists, and others to engage, document, and interrogate this idea of environmental violence and how it is experienced around the world. With case studies from Ukraine, Peru, the South Pacific to the Arctic, and from the theoretical to legal to empirical analysis, this volume offers a broad and diverse account of environmental violence and its impact. It invites people to better understand and recognize environmental violence as a pernicious and prolific form of human-caused suffering. But it does much more than just finger pointing and hand waving, by offering tangible and practical pathways toward a more sustainable, flourishing trajectory.

It is not always easy to find hope when thinking about the environmental challenges that humanity faces today. So where should we look? One often cited source of hope is the platitude that “we created the problem, so we can fix it.” While true, it is not very descriptive. It is neither actionable, demonstrable, nor self-evident. Instead, we point to three key sources of hope.

First, the humans most responsible for environmental violence through excessive consumption would, on average, be both healthier and happier using less and thus contributing less to environmental violence. This idea is a critical source of hope. While reducing consumption is still fraught and challenging, were this not the underlying reality then there would be little chance of reconciling with environmental violence.

The second source of hope is the possibility of regenerative production—that is, production that restores an ecosystem and works with nature, rather than solely extracting from it, while producing goods for human use. Whether through the application of holistic management practices for regenerative agriculture that promotes food production and ecosystem vitality toward an agriculture of flourishing or through myriad other regenerative production schemes that have been evaluated to date, regeneration makes it possible to concurrently care for human and planetary flourishing. Producing enough to meet human needs and optimize flourishing is thus not inherently antithetical to ecosystem flourishing.

The third is that cooperation, coordination, and collaboration are the predominant mode of humanity’s action. For more than 2 million years, the genus Homo (human ancestors) have been navigating the ecological, social, and structural challenges of living on and with the Earth and its other inhabitants by working, thinking, and acting together, constructing niches and shaping worlds and we are in turn shaped by them. Thus, our dominant and default mode as a species is to cooperate.

First recognizing, and then second reconciling with, environmental violence is critical to human security. Our volume explores the contours of this great challenge and offers pathways to collectively and equitably not only survive but flourish.