Part III - Environmental Violence Impacts, Responses, Resistance, and Alternatives

12 Environmental Displacement and Political Violence

Angela Chesler

Environmental Violence Statement

We live in an era of unprecedented environmental violence. Anthropogenic climatic changes and record pollution pulse through the fundamental architectures of society, shaping the geographies of human existence. Migration is among the most drastic consequences of environmental violence, which displaces more people every year than war. The purpose of this chapter is to examine how environmental violence impacts migration and how this displacement feeds into broader cycles of violent political conflict. By analyzing how environmental violence shapes society through processes of migration and conflict – two enduring global challenges – this chapter illuminates the dimensionality of environmental violence and how it reverberates across all levels and sectors of society. In turn, this highlights the multiplicative effect of environmental violence and the disproportionate impact it has on the most vulnerable populations.

12.1 Introduction

Displacement is among the most drastic consequences of environmental violence. While environmental shocks have always “pushed” people to more hospitable environments, anthropogenic changes in their intensity, frequency, and geographic distribution are accelerating displacement at unprecedented rates. Worldwide, human-induced environmental changes now uproot more people every year than war, and exponential increases are expected as the climate crisis unfolds. The alarming intensity of environmental displacement has generated significant speculation about its security consequences, with many arguing that large-scale environmental displacement has the potential to trigger violent conflict [1, 2]. Attention to the potential causal impact of environmental displacement on violence has been amplified by growing concern about the evolving patterns of human movement in response to climatic change, especially as modeled mitigation pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C become increasingly unattainable [3].

The last few decades have seen a sharp increase in scholarly interest in the relationship between environmental displacement and political violence. Nearly every scholarly publication examining the environment-conflict nexus mentions migration as a possible intermediary in the causal chain [4–10]. Policy discourse has echoed concern for the destabilizing effects of environmental displacement. In the 1990s, unease about the proliferation of environmental displacement first appeared on the docket of UN agencies, including the High Commissioner for Refugees and the Environment Programme. Environmental displacement is now a top policy priority among the world’s major intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and national governments, and is already influencing decision-making considerations across areas of defense, foreign relations, homeland security, and immigration.

This chapter provides a comprehensive review of the growing and diverse literature examining the environment-migration-conflict nexus. Despite the growing number of studies, the relationship between environmental displacement and political violence has generated unclear findings. Empirical research varies remarkably in focus and scope, mirroring broader trends in the environment-conflict literature [11]. Studies differ in how they define and operationalize environmental displacement, relying on both direct and indirect measures. Conflict is also defined and operationalized differently. Most prior research examining the security consequences of environmental displacement has focused on civil war [12], but understanding the impact of environmental displacement on other forms of political violence is equally important [13–16]. Variation across empirical studies has yielded inconclusive, and even contradictory, findings. Reconciling these diverse findings is essential, because inferences from research could influence policy, disaster response, adaptation assistance, and other decisions about where to put efforts to address environmental challenges and conflict.

By systematizing existing research, this chapter seeks to clarify the state of knowledge on the environment-migration-conflict nexus, identify points of consensus and debate, and chart a path forward for future research. It focuses on three broad categories of political violence: communal conflict, civil war, and state repression. To this end, the chapter proceeds as follows: the next section defines the core concept of environmental displacement and explores the relationship between environmental violence and migration; the following section maps the complex causal pathways linking environmental displacement to the onset and dynamics of different forms of violent conflict and evaluates the “state of the evidence” or available empirical support underlying theoretical claims; I then conclude with summary remarks and implications for policy.

12.2 Environmental Displacement

12.2.1 Concepts and Terminology

The focus of this chapter is environmental displacement, defined as relocation in response to an adverse change in the natural environment. Environmental displacement is one of the many consequences of environmental violence and differs crucially from related terms, such as environmental migration and environmental refugees. Environmental migration implies movement driven by both negative environmental factors in the place of origin and those motivated by positive environmental factors in the destination and, thus, is a more inclusive term. The use of the term environmental refugee – though conceptually closer to environmental displacement – has been fiercely contested. The term first emerged in 1985 when a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report defined environmental refugees as people who have been “forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of marked environmental disruption” [16]. However, the use of the concept has been highly controversial. The term “refugee” applies to a specific legal category, defined by the 1951 Refugee Convention as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” Because the legal definition does not currently include individuals who relocate in response to environmental hazards, environmental refugees do not have any official recognition. Nonetheless, policymakers, journalists, and scholars often use the term as a synonym for environmental displacement, often to emphasize the constrained decision-making calculus imposed by an adverse environmental shock.

There are ongoing debates about whether the refugee convention should be revised to incorporate environmental refugees. Proponents argue that the absence of legal protections for those displaced by environmental shocks means that vulnerable populations fall through the cracks of asylum law. Environmentally displaced persons have been recognized by the Global Compact for Migration, Paris Agreement, and UN High Commissioner for Refugees as part of the Global Compact on Refugees, among others. While these agreements reflect growing international recognition of the need to protect environmentally displaced persons (EDPs), they are legally non-binding and unlikely to immediately benefit vulnerable populations. In contrast, opponents argue that broadening the scope of the 1951 Refugee Convention would be legally complicated and time consuming, politically difficult, and may weaken its overall impact [17]. Others argue that the implication of forced displacement is inappropriate because it robs individuals of agency and subjects them to securitization [18]. Notwithstanding these challenges, the term is commonly used as a synonym for environmental displacement [19–21].

12.2.2 Environmental Change and Displacement

The record of human mobility is replete with examples, both ancient and contemporary, of people moving in response to environmental changes. In some cases, entire societies have been permanently uprooted. The great post-glacial rise of sea level coincided with mass population movements inland near modern-day Scandinavia and the Mediterranean [22]. Centers in ancient civilizations, such as Mesopotamia and the Zhou dynasty, are believed to have relocated due to centuries-long droughts. More recently, communities in Fiji and United States islands of Shishmaref and Isle de Jean Charles have been driven inland by rising sea levels. Naturally occurring shocks are not the only drivers of environmental displacement. Human-made environmental disasters caused by toxic pollution also caused mass movement. For instance, the Chernobyl nuclear accident dislocated over 400 000 people, and the area remains uninhabitable today. Research has also linked air and water pollution to dislocations in Vietnam, China, and Italy [23–25].

Migration has always been a strategy for coping with environmental challenges. When natural hazards threaten food and water security, physical safety, and economic prosperity, relocation to a more hospitable environment serves as an adaptation strategy that allows people to avoid and minimize hardship [26–28]. While environmental displacement is difficult to quantify, estimates suggest that a minimum of 26.5 million people every year are uprooted by environment shocks [29], and environmental displacement is expected to increase rapidly as the effects of climate change unfold. The World Bank predicts that climate change will generate approximately 143 million EDPs across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America by the year 2050 [30].

Patterns of environmental displacement are highly varied and complex. Temporal and geographic patterns of migration vary by type and magnitude of hazard. For instance, sudden weather shocks such as floods and storms tend to generate shorter-term displacement compared to slower-onset stressors, such as droughts and desertification [31–33]. In addition to exposure, vulnerability impacts displacement. Individuals, households, and communities whose well-beings are highly dependent on the environment are more vulnerable to changes in the ecosystem. In turn, adaptation capacity shapes vulnerability. Dislocation is not an automatic reaction to adverse environmental shocks. Faced with environmental stress, residents can either stay in place and take steps to compensate for the imposed hardship, stay in place and accept a lower quality of life, or relocate [34]. Because migration is often both costly and risky, existing capabilities to cope with environmental stress in situ play a key role in determining whether changes in environmental conditions trigger displacement.

Along these lines, environmental displacement must be understood in the context of social, political, and economic institutions. Marginalized social groups that lack access to political and economic power are most likely to be displaced by environmental shocks. Because of discrimination embedded in and perpetrated by state structures, politically excluded groups tend to populate areas most exposed to pollution and predictable natural hazards, and they disproportionately suffer losses due to substandard dwellings, poor infrastructure, and unstable livelihoods. Moreover, the costs, availability, and distribution of adaptation mechanisms are highly variable and contingent on the prevailing social, economic, and political conditions [35].

12.3 Environmental Displacement and Violent Conflict: Pathways and Evidence

12.3.1 Communal Conflict

Environmental displacement could increase competition over resources between migrant and native residents, leading to intercommunal violent conflicts. Native residents of host communities may view growing migrant populations as encroachment that threatens their own rightful claim to important rural or urban resources [43]. The rapid and high-volume nature of disaster displacement, combined with the fact that the dislocated are often only able to bring a few belongings or resources of their own, renders them particularly susceptible to being perceived as squatters infringing on the entitlements of incumbent communities. As newcomers attempt to establish settlements, acquire jobs, develop farm operations, and make use of other community assets, confrontations over the rights to and distribution of these resources are likely to ensue [36–39]. In the absence of adequate conflict resolution institutions or government intervention, these disputes have the potential to escalate into violent clashes [40, 41]. Violence, therefore, becomes a tool by incumbents to protect valuable resources and deter further encroachment, or a means by migrants to stake and protect a claim in the community’s resources. Contests for resource capture, in which elite representatives from migrant and native groups seize control of and hoard resources to restrict access to their core constituents, increase the intensity of violence and enable disputes over resource access to evolve into more fundamental conflicts over economic and political control [42].

Conflicts erupting over competition for local resources are most likely to start out as small-scale clashes, occurring between communal groups that organize along migrant and native identity lines. These types of conflicts may be particularly likely to erupt when EDPs and native residents belong to distinct ethnic or religious groups. Competition may trigger nativist claims, harden identities between groups, and accelerate the cycle of negative othering between migrants and incumbent residents in the host community, giving rise to “sons-of-the-soil” conflicts [43, 44]. Shifting the balance of ethnic demographics may also exacerbate perceptions of insecurity in areas where the ethnic groups have a history of conflict and mistrust [45, 46].¹

Case studies suggest that environmental displacement can provoke violent intercommunal conflicts under certain conditions, but comparative evidence has been constrained by a lack of available displacement data. Reuveny (2007) analyzes 38 episodes of environmental displacement, finding that 14 provoked violent intercommunal strife between native residents and newcomers across regions of South Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Notably, land-use conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa have often been attributed to environmental displacement, as land degradation has increasingly fueled resource competitions between livestock herders and crop farmers [47]. Studies have also linked interethnic riots to environmental displacement, particularly as a consequence of flood displacement in South Asia [48]. While violent communal conflict is not an inevitable consequence of environmental displacement, studies confirm that it can be a particularly likely outcome where conflict mitigation institutions and security governance are weak or absent [49, 50].

12.3.2 Civil War

Building on the extant literature linking migration and demographic change to violent conflict, there are two mechanisms through which environmental displacement caused by natural hazards may aggravate civil war. First, environmental displacement deteriorates living conditions in migrant-receiving areas, fueling anti-government political grievances that provoke violent mobilization against the state. Second, environmental displacement crises attract disaster relief and constrain state capacity, which, in turn, creates material incentives and opportunities for existing armed groups to intensify their violent campaigns. These mechanisms – discussed in detail below – are not mutually exclusive, and environmental displacement can influence the formation and evolution of armed challenges at different points in the conflict process.

The grievance framework provides multiple pathways through which environmental displacement may lead to civil war. First, environmental displacement affects political instability by imposing population pressures and corresponding hardships [51]. Human ecologists point out that all communities are endowed with finite pools of resources on which residents rely for survival and quality-of-life maintenance, including jobs, housing, food, potable water, electricity, infrastructure, and security [52, 53]. Rapid, large-scale population growth strains these resources, diminishes the quality and quantity available to residents, and overwhelms the built-in resilience of economies and state provisional structures that enable resources to expand alongside population growth.

In theory, a concurrent and proportionate increase in a receiving community’s carrying capacity can compensate for population pressures imposed by high levels of environmental displacement. Like other public services, governments are responsible for the distribution of disaster relief and can channel resources into shelter, food, water, and financial support for host communities to remedy hardships induced by population pressures. However, many governments are ill-equipped to meet the challenges posed by mass dislocations. Effective responses may be hindered by lack of capacity, corruption, authoritarian governance, and routine underinvestment in disaster relief [54–57]. Even industrialized democracies that are highly effective at distributing public goods under normal circumstances have been known to botch responses to large-scale displacements in the wake of major environmental disasters [58]. In general, the more people are displaced by an environmental hazard, the less likely it is that governments can effectively intervene to ameliorate population pressures.

Rapid population growth can fuel unemployment, homelessness, and breakdowns in security, sanitation, and food and water accessibility – hardships that have long been recognized as a rallying point of civil uprising [59, 60]. Aggrieved by the diminished quality of life and holding political leaders responsible, people have a strong motive to form and participate in armed conflict. Because displaced persons must scramble for livelihoods, housing, and other resources that are not already occupied, they suffer disproportionately from population pressures and are especially likely to perceive a mismatch between expected and realized life quality [61]. Displaced persons also tend to settle into makeshift neighborhoods and peripheral areas where government service provision is weak and resources are already scarce [62]. As a result, displacement-related discontent tends to be concentrated among the dislocated, and the clusters of migrant-dominated slums can become a breeding ground for anti-government mobilization [63].

Environmental displacement may also exacerbate and accentuate pre-existing socio-political inequalities and incite demands for more equitable resource distribution [64]. As noted earlier, politically excluded identity groups are more likely to be displaced by adverse environmental conditions than groups with favored socio-political status due to heightened exposure and depressed capacity to weather hazards in situ [65]. Once displaced, marginalized populations are less likely to receive assistance and remain dislocated for longer periods of time [66]. When environmental changes push disadvantaged groups into new communities dominated by privileged groups, they are often blocked from local resources, and government relief is steered toward political allies [67]. This process both increases intergroup inequality and heightens migrants’ awareness of their disadvantaged status. Under these conditions, deprivation among displaced persons, compounded by intergroup inequality, fosters discontent about the distribution of resources between groups and demands for more equitable allocation [68–71].

In addition to provoking grievances and new eruptions of political dissent, environmental displacement may affect political instability by increasing the intensity of existing armed conflicts. Where armed non-state actors are already engaged in a violent struggle with the government, displacement crises caused by sudden-onset natural hazards create new incentives and opportunities to accelerate violent campaigns. Disaster displacement attracts humanitarian aid operations that provide strategically valuable targets for armed groups. Disaster relief often brings a surge of material goods to migrant-receiving areas, such as food, cash, medical supplies, communication gear, and transportation equipment provided by both government and non-government actors. Violent raids increase where humanitarian support is concentrated as armed groups seek to expropriate aid materials, which can be distributed as patronage to garner public support or utilized directly in support of military operations [72–75]. Aid workers themselves can even be targets of strategic significance, and non-state actors often seek to kill or kidnap relief operatives to undermine the government’s legitimacy in public goods provision [76, 77]. Environmental displacement caused by sudden-onset natural hazards triggers an increase in violent attacks by armed groups, as these actors engage in predatory looting and seek to exploit humanitarian aid for strategic gain.

Environmental displacement crises also enable armed actors to more effectively launch violent campaigns at a lower cost and risk. The abrupt and often large-scale character of displacement caused by rapid-onset natural hazards contributes to an atmosphere of chaos in which armed non-state actors move more freely and expand their operations. Similar to conflict refugees, armed groups can blend in with civilian movements fleeing from and returning to disaster-affected areas at a lower risk of detection [78]. In so doing, environmental displacement facilitates the flow of weapons and combatants, allowing armed groups to penetrate and target new areas of the state. At the same time, state-led humanitarian missions preoccupy government attention and resources, further diminishing the government’s capacity to monitor and combat internal security threats [79]. Moreover, as militaries are increasingly mobilized to support relief operations [79, 80], armed groups can launch attacks with a lower chance of military confrontation and retaliation.

In sum, environmental displacement creates a set of conditions that armed groups can readily exploit for strategic gain in their struggle against the government. Humanitarian assistance, though intended to ameliorate the hardships associated with disaster displacement, drives an increase in violent raids by armed groups seeking to capture aid resources. In addition, the disruptive nature of abrupt population movements and the redirection of government attention toward disaster response ushers in a window of vulnerability in which armed groups can maximize the impact of violent campaigns at a lower cost and risk. Environmental displacement caused by sudden-onset natural hazards is, therefore, expected to increase violent attacks by armed opposition groups, as these actors capitalize on emerging incentives and opportunities favorable to strategic conflict escalation.

Existing evidence on the relationship between environmental displacement and civil war onset is mixed. Case study research suggests that dislocations driven by slow-onset hazards, such as drought and land degradation, have been linked to the initiation of conflicts in South Africa, Syria, Sudan, and Bangladesh, among others [81–83], though these claims have been contested [84, 85]. In contrast, several large-N studies show that displacement driven by sudden-onset events do not typically trigger civil war [86, 87]. Collectively, these findings hint that the effect of environmental displacement may be contingent on the type of hazard driving displacement. Because displacement caused by sudden-onset shocks tends to be short in duration and distance [88–90], the disruption of displacement may be too transient to generate grievances that motivate armed uprisings [91].

There is greater agreement concerning the relationship between environmental displacement and the dynamics of armed conflict. In their cross-national study, Ghimire et al. [87] show that flood displacement prolongs civil wars. Looking at displacement caused by six different types of environmental shock in Africa, Chesler [86] shows that resulting dislocations increase the intensity of armed conflict. However, there are important gaps in the body of work linking environmental displacement and armed conflict dynamics. First, existing studies focus on dislocations caused by rapid-onset environmental shocks, leaving open the possibility that displacement driven by slow-onset events – such as droughts – may influence patterns of armed conflict. Second, research has largely neglected the country- and conflict-level factors that may condition the effect of environmental displacement. Third, while large-N research shows a generally positive relationship between environmental displacement and conflict duration and intensity, these studies are ill-equipped to evaluate the specific mechanisms driving the relationship. More in-depth, qualitative research is needed to examine which causal pathways motivate the conflict-exacerbating effect of environmental displacement.

12.3.3 State Repression

While scholars and policymakers have long expressed concern for conflict-provoking effects of environmental migration, virtually no studies have examined the possibility that environmental migrants may be on the receiving end of violence. This omission is surprising because migrants and refugees have frequently been targets of state violence. Migrants are often associated with the diffusion of conflict and terrorism [92–94], although most migrants do not directly or deliberately participate in violence [95]. Along these lines, governments often use violence against displaced persons because they are seen as a potential threat or source of political instability [96, 97]. Displaced persons can also be strategic targets for repression when governments face domestic crises, such as economic, political, security, or environmental challenges. Because citizens are often supportive of government crackdowns against migrants, displaced persons can be easily scapegoated for domestic problems [98, 99]. This is particularly true for international migrants, who typically lack electoral power and the ability to impose sanctions against political leaders. Extrapolating from this body of work, it stands to reason that governments may similarly perceive environmentally displaced persons as a potential threat or strategic scapegoat, and target EDPs with violence. This becomes increasingly likely given emerging political challenges, such as populism, immigration restrictions, and border fortifications that reflect a new narrative in which migrants and refugees are viewed as a security problem.

In other words, EDPs may simultaneously fuel and experience insecurity, but existing research has largely focused on the former. This omission reflects a broader scholarly and policy discourse of “securitizing” migration, in which displaced persons are framed primarily as agents of conflict. Given this gap in the literature, more studies should be conducted to examine how and under what conditions states may target EDPs with violence and repression, despite a humanitarian obligation to protect them.

12.4 Conclusions

Policymakers and scholars alike have raised the alarm about the possibility of impending security crises and instability caused by environmental displacement. Understanding the linkages between environmental displacement and conflict is especially consequential given the context of evolving climatic change. Global warming is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme climate-related natural hazards, even under conditions of limited warming, with direct implications for environmental displacement [100]. Dislocations by accelerated climate-related risks will continue to accumulate with those driven by other environmental events, such as pollution and geological hazards.

This chapter aims to review the literature linking environmental displacement and political violence. Despite diverse findings in existing research, the balance of evidence points to some tentative conclusions. While environmental displacement is unlikely to trigger the onset of intrastate armed conflict, it tends to exacerbate existing conflicts, making them longer and more deadly. The finding that environmental displacement intensifies armed conflict attests to a threat multiplier effect [101, 102]. For governments already in the throes of violent conflict, this portends deepening security crises and potential conflict traps as a downstream consequence of environmental violence. Environmental displacement can also trigger intergroup conflict, particularly in the absence of a state mediator. A crucial gap in the literature is the absence of studies examining the impact of environmental displacement on state repression. Future research should prioritize this nexus to consider how, and under what conditions, states may use violence against EDPs, despite a humanitarian obligation to protect them.

What, if any, policy recommendations can be gleaned from existing research on the environment-displacement-conflict nexus? The conflict-exacerbating effect of environmental displacement highlights the need for more integrative frameworks of disaster preparedness, response, and recovery that incorporate elements of stabilization, security, and peacebuilding. Support for adaptation can limit the size and scope of environmental displacement and, in turn, reduce its destabilizing consequences. International actors can empower individuals, communities, and governments (at national and local levels) to reduce and manage environmental displacement with targeted financial, technical, and informational assistance. A wide range of adaptation options are available to reduce the incidence of catastrophic environmental displacement, and the most effective tools are highly contingent on local geography, economies, and socio-political relationships [103]. Decision-makers must work directly with communities situated in disaster-prone areas to support adaptation strategies appropriate to context.

It is also critical for policymakers to recognize that displacement is not inherently destabilizing and is often a vital adaptation strategy that saves lives and promotes development. Thus, relocation should not be categorically discouraged. Instead, policymakers can prevent displacement-related instability by supporting initiatives to anticipate, facilitate, and coordinate retreat through early warning systems and established evacuation plans. Governments can intervene in a variety of ways to limit displacement- related instability [104, 105]. Managed retreat from hazard prone areas, regulatory action on construction and settlement, investment in climate-resilient infrastructure, risk-informed land planning, and economic diversification are just a few strategies that can limit displacement [106]. Effective disaster response and humanitarian aid are also important for quelling grievances and discontent in migrant-receiving areas, but steps should be taken to secure disaster relief from predatory looting by armed non-state actors. Where governments lack sufficient resources to implement these measures, support from the international community will be critical in filling in the gaps to mitigate displacement crises and ensuing political instability.

13 A Catholic Peacebuilding Response to the Environmental Violence of Mining

Caesar Montevecchio

Engaging Environmental Violence

Mining is a prominent context for environmental violence, leading to ecological destruction and harm to communities impacted by that damage. The praxis and theory of Catholic peacebuilding have much to offer for dealing with these problems. Globally, the Catholic community is already deeply engaged on issues of mining and environmental violence. This chapter will describe this engagement and identify some of the key components that mark its potential for positive impact on the environmental violence of mining.

13.1 Introduction

Mining relates to violence in diverse ways, and frequently the relationship includes environmental violence. For example, in Colombia, mining is expected to help deliver a peace dividend for the government after it signed the 2016 Colombian Peace Accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). That means it is expected to be a source of revenue to incentivize the government’s commitment; however, a major challenge is that criminal organizations are seizing mining territories previously controlled by the FARC and perpetuating violence and doing serious environmental harm [1, 2]. Or there is the Philippines, where extortion of mining companies by paramilitary groups has led to more militarized security around mining sites, which has led to violence and criminalization of even legitimate protests to protect the environment and human rights [3].

New technologies, including technologies central to a clean energy transition, mean that mining will remain a necessary industry. As a result, the human community will remain in need of ways to minimize and cope with the environmental violence of mining. This essay describes the connection between mining and environmental violence, that is, how mining does direct harm to the environment and in turn the ability of communities to thrive in those environments. This includes consideration of the paradox by which anticipated long-term benefits of renewable energy technology are problematized in the short term by that ecological and human harm, as well as broader questions about the sufficiency and justice of renewable energy. After describing these connections between mining and environmental violence, I will turn to ways in which Catholic peacebuilding, both in teaching and practice, can offer distinct resources for dealing with these challenges. This includes the Catholic social teaching principles of subsidiarity, care for creation, and integral human development; the church’s extensive grassroots presence; and the church’s institutional structure that enables networking between impacted communities and between communities and higher social orders. The argument is not that these resources are unique to the Catholic community. Rather, the idea is that the Catholic community, particularly through its theory and praxis of peacebuilding, can array and marshal these resources in a distinctive way that gives it special potential for responding to mining and environmental violence. Throughout the world, Catholic actors are engaged on issues of mining, and this argument about the Catholic community’s potential and capacity will draw on some of these examples of engagement. The Catholic community has shortcomings in this area, but there are some practical ways that they can be addressed to improve impact.

13.2 Mining and Environmental Violence

In January of 2019, the tailings dam at an iron ore mine in Brumadinho, Brazil collapsed. Two hundred seventy people died. Twelve million cubic meters of ore tailings were released into the nearby Paraopeba River, causing increased water turbidity and contamination that spread as far as 242 kilometers downstream [4]. Staff from the mining company that ran the site, Vale, have been charged with murder, and the company has been ordered to pay USD 7 billion in compensation in socio-economic and socio-environmental damages with the possibility of more as remediation efforts advance [5]. Sadly, this incident is not one that can be brushed aside as a fluke or outlier given the data about how many other at-risk tailings dams exist [6]. Since the Brumadinho disaster, at least 16 known tailings dam collapses have occurred in countries around the world including Brazil, India, Peru, China, South Africa, Turkey, Angola, Myanmar, and Mexico [7].

Dramatic cases like Brumadinho demonstrate the environmental risks of mining and the severe damage they can do. But the environmental violence of mining can come in myriad forms, including social, cultural, and economic ones. The land scarring, deforestation, water depletion, and harmful waste associated with mining can increase climate vulnerability, hasten displacement, worsen resource scarcity, threaten cultural heritages, disempower already marginalized peoples, and cause illness and death. Severine Deneulin and Yvonne Orengo have detailed two powerful examples of mining areas, the Atacama region of Chile and the Anosy region of Madagascar, where predominantly marginalized peoples live and have had their ways of life almost completely undone [8]. With regard to illness and death, there is the noted case of the people of Cajamarca, Peru, who are still feeling effects more than two decades after a mercury spill at the Yanacocha gold mine [9]. There is also the near-genocidal generational violence against Native Americans as a result of uranium mining [10].

Mining also raises concerns about the environment’s well-being for its own sake. In Colombia, mining is responsible for an increasing share of deforestation, posing a major threat to Colombia’s massive biodiversity [11]. Birds in Colombia are not at high risk for extinction, but deforestation from mining and other activities, like agricultural expansion, are steadily raising the extinction risk level as the 2016 Peace Accord has opened new opportunities for land development as well as expansion of illegal mining and illicit crop activities [12]. A 2017 study by the Humboldt Institute in Bogotá identified 2700 plant and animal species as endangered due to forest and wetland loss, both of which are accelerating since the signing of the country’s peace agreement [13].

The Philippines is another case that brings together many of these environmental violence problems. Deforestation in the Philippines has accelerated in recent decades, with 151 000 hectares of primary forest lost between 2002 and 2020 [14]. This includes mangrove forests which are an important natural defense against storms and shoreline erosion. Logging, agriculture, dams, and other forms of land development are to blame, but mining is one of the chief culprits [15]. This large-scale loss of tree cover is a violence to the environment itself, a violence to communities for whom forests provide livelihoods and resources as well as cultural anchors, and it is a violence that worsens the country’s already precarious climate vulnerability. The Philippines is rated the third most at-risk country for climate change impacts, and economic development models that are overly reliant on environmentally violent activities like mining and logging are exacerbating that risk [16].

One of the biggest drivers today of increased mining is the push for renewable energy technologies, which require certain minerals to function. So, there is tension with this method of reducing the extraction and use of fossil fuels for energy, which comes at the cost of increased mineral mining: One kind of digging is replaced by another, and the adverse economic and ecological impacts on the communities where the mining occurs remain. Another dimension of the problem is that most clean energy technologies are being put to use in the global North, while the mining that enables them occurs in the global South. A report from the London Mining Network has detailed and critiqued this dynamic by which the global North simply displaces its climate change footprint to the global South by relying on solutions that depend on continued extraction ([17], p. 5).

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is a paradigmatic example. The DRC produces more than half of the world’s cobalt, which is used in many different technologies, but batteries for renewable energy are expected to account for over 50% of its projected market growth by 2025 [18]. This means increased capacity for renewable energy in the global North will come at the cost of human rights violations, state violence, social instability, environmental damage, and compromised economic development in the DRC where, ironically, mining in remote areas is bringing attention to a severe lack in energy infrastructure [19, 20].

Despite these problems, renewable energy has merits. It is a better option than continued fossil fuel pollution accelerating climate change. It would be naive, and perhaps even counterproductive, to suggest that all mining stop. Although many of the resources needed for renewable energy technology are highly recyclable [21], recycling is not a panacea that would completely eliminate the need for virgin ores [22]. The challenge then becomes how to untangle renewable energy from models of development and lifestyles that assume problems related to extraction can be solved by more extraction, and economic growth outweighs the damage that extraction may cause. If mining is necessary for renewable energy, a major ethical question becomes how communities might be empowered, politically and economically, rather than become victims of environmental violence.

13.3 Catholic Resources

Catholic peacebuilders have been engaged for a long time on issues of mining. Their work demonstrates the distinct, if not necessarily unique, assets possessed by the Catholic Church to address these challenges of mining and environmental violence. This is not to say that the Catholic Church is the only institution that has these capacities nor to say that the Catholic community can solve these problems fully of its own accord without other partners and collaborators. There are community activists and policy advocates working tirelessly and effectively to curb the sorts of problems outlined above who are not within the Catholic fold. Even the most dedicated Catholic actors on issues of mining, environmental protection, and defense of human rights need to partner with secular and interreligious groups, for example, to improve their technical knowledge, form more effective coalitions, recognize blind spots, or attain the scale of response needed for the massive scope of the problems related to environmental violence and mining. What “distinct” does mean here is that the Catholic Church, and related organizations that are not formally part of the church’s institutional hierarchy, has distinctly strong potential to address these problems and also offers a distinct ability to array and marshal the different levels of response that are needed. This distinct capacity comes substantively from the body of ethical reflection known as Catholic social teaching, and procedurally from the church’s grassroots presence and its institutional structure that enables vertical and horizontal integration.

The procedural aspects highlight ways in which the global network of the Catholic Church allows it to have local embeddedness and wide reach that are necessary for addressing problems of mining and environmental violence. Both of these problems are simultaneously radically local in that they have very specific contextual dynamics, and radically global in that they are driven by globalized economics and politics. They, therefore, need responses that have strong community roots and an ability to integrate levels and locations of response. The substantive capacity, Catholic social teaching, points at distinct content in the Catholic tradition that can support solutions to such multifaceted problems.

13.3.1 Catholic Social Teaching

The corpus of Catholic social teaching anchors and animates the efforts of peacebuilders and other actors and leaders in the Catholic community. This tradition encompasses formal magisterial teaching, praxis, reflection, and academic inquiry on matters of social ethics and justice. It is typically considered to have started in 1891 when Pope Leo XIII wrote his encyclical Rerum Novarum, which was the first document of its kind to address what we would now call social justice issues [23]. For Rerum Novarum, that largely meant workers’ rights and matters of economic justice. But later developments of Catholic social teaching have addressed a wide range of subjects, such as nuclear weapons, the environment, human rights, and development. The most direct distillation of this material is in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, published in 2004 by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, but it is very much a living tradition that exists in local praxis and lived reality as much as it does in formal institutional documents [24]. This dynamic has yielded a body of thought that offers a robust and honed set of principles that is nimble and adaptive to the changing “signs of the times,” yet firmly rooted in a 2000-year-deep foundation of moral tradition. Three prominent themes of contemporary Catholic social teaching that are relevant to environmental violence and mining and help to give substance to the procedural capacities are subsidiarity, care for creation, and integral human development.

13.3.1.1 Subsidiarity

Subsidiarity refers to the principle in Catholic social teaching that higher order social structures should not interfere with lower order ones when it is not necessary to do so ([24], §185–86). But when it is necessary, such as when smaller social orders lack the ability to safeguard their own integral well-being, or when higher-level policies for the common good necessitate coordination at the local level, higher orders have an obligation to step in. Put simply, it says problems should be handled at the lowest level possible but at the highest level necessary. This is because Catholic social teaching always has concern for the dignity of the person as its starting point and adheres to the idea that the family is the fundamental unit of society. As a result, it believes that structures of society ought to serve the good of the person and the integrity of the family and not vice versa. Therefore, governance structures need to respect as much as possible the self-determination and freedom of the person, so as to center his or her dignity, but also protect that dignity when forces threaten it.

Environmental violence, including forms resulting from mining, is very much related to issues of governance and regulation [25, 26]. Subsidiarity is a principle that aims to optimize governance. It recognizes that the closer things are to the local level, the sharper the ability to do what is best for the human dignity of individuals within their particular contexts. And so, the governance of the environment – including regulation of natural resources, pollution standards, ecological management for economic development plans, or environmental preservation – should be responsive to input from those closest to the environment itself. This does not only mean governments listening to grassroots leaders. It also means international regulations ensuring that international economic interests do not overwhelm national leaders and prevent them from prudentially protecting their ecologies and communities. This is precisely an argument that Pope Francis made about defending the Amazon from being “internationalized” in a way that would do violence to the freedom and dignity of communities in the region ([27], §50–52).

With regard to mining in particular, the principle of subsidiarity arrives at support for a key industry practice: acquiring free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC). FPIC is when a mining company gets the consent of impacted communities before beginning operations. Frequently, it amounts to a pro forma exercise in which a company needs to do only a bare minimum to meet the legal requirements in a given area. Or companies maneuver around laws to minimize their obligations. For example, in Peru, companies can skirt consultation legislation to protect indigenous communities by instead fulfilling less demanding laws for projects with significant environmental impacts. The latter only requires prospective concession holders to run ads in two newspapers, which are in Spanish and circulate predominantly in cities and do not reach rural indigenous communities who speak Quechua and are often the ones most impacted by a proposed mine ([28], p. 74). Additionally, indigenous communities that have tried to appeal to the stricter consultation requirements have had courts decide that they lack sufficient proof that they are in fact indigenous and, therefore, ineligible to claim those protections ([28], pp. 73–74). This is one area addressed in the legal advocacy work of Derechos Humanos y Medio Ambiente-Puno (DHUMA).¹ And collectively, Catholic organizations around the world have seized on “the right to say no” as a foundational tenet of mining justice, arguing that communities must be given a legitimate right of refusal during the consultation process about a mine [29]. This strident focus on the rights of communities to speak for themselves with regard to the governance of natural resources is grounded in the subsidiarity principle.

This scale-down dimension of subsidiarity is not the whole story, however. There is, as noted, also a scale-up dimension premised on the idea that lower levels of social order often lack the capacity or resources to defend human dignity effectively. This might be because of corruption at different levels of society, power imbalances that exist between communities and multinational corporations, societal breakdowns due to armed conflict or environmental problems such as drought, competing priorities that need coordination at a higher level, or the problems at stake being too large or complex to be dealt with locally. Whatever the reason, it is often appropriate for higher levels of social order with greater capacity, resources, and reach to step in to address problems lower levels cannot. The Brumadinho tailings dam collapse is an example. It was a case of direct environmental violence caused by failures of governance, as Catholic leaders in Brazil have argued [30]. But the local community would not have been in a position to force oversight or regulation that could have required the mining company to fix the problem that led to the collapse. The experiences of local communities like Brumadinho are vital for motivating that kind of governance change, but is not sufficient to do so, which is why the Catholic bishops of Brazil have continued to advocate at the policy level [31].

Colombia similarly serves as a demonstration of upscaling subsidiarity. Without the higher order coordination led by the National Episcopal Conference, territorial parishes and the communities of which they are a part would be much more vulnerable to the seduction of mining development and blind to the slow violence that mining can cause despite seemingly shiny benefits from corporate social responsibility projects [32]. The broader perspective from the national level helps mitigate these situations by providing fuller information, offering moral reasoning to help shift priorities, and, at least to some small degree, addressing the skewed power dynamics between mining companies and communities. By lobbying and advocating at the national level for better protections, the conference prevents communities from having to make judgments in isolation with a limited perspective. In Colombia, this may also mean finding the most just way to allow mining to proceed so that it can support the national peace agreement. Similarly, in some countries, higher order coordination may mean finding the most prudent way for mining to occur and not just be halted by local opposition. For example, materials for renewable energy or medical technologies are worthwhile to mine but minimizing local harms at mining sites will require complex measures that supersede the capacities of local communities.

More broadly and plainly, environmental violence is a global issue. Especially in the case of mining, violence occurs in particular places to particular persons, but many of the variables in the equation are inescapably global – globalized supply chains, emissions, the energy economy, and of course climate change. All these issues can cause or relate to diverse forms of violence at the grassroots level but cannot be managed from the grassroots level. Subsidiarity is a reminder that while there is value in staying rooted to the community level to ensure vulnerable voices and communities are represented, their dignity and lives are protected, and their empowerment is promoted, those goals are done a disservice without attending meaningfully to the higher-order levels of social organization that can effectively confront complex global problems.

13.3.1.2 Care for Creation

This is an area that is being critically rethought in Catholic social teaching. As pointed out by theologian Laurie Johnston, much of Catholic social teaching has presented environmental ethics as a corollary to human goods ([33], p. 266). For instance, a prominent idea in Catholic social teaching is the universal destination of goods, which states that the resources of the Earth should be equitably distributed for the good of all peoples. But as Johnston notes, it treats the environment as something merely instrumental to human flourishing. Arguments rooted in this sort of instrumental understanding of the environment are difficult to use to motivate people to action or change based on consequences that are far distant from them. They also make it harder to motivate action or change based on damage to the environment itself when an immediate human impact cannot be clearly recognized, even if those consequences might simply be harder to see, such as with biodiversity loss.

But care for creation for its own sake has been a growing idea in Catholic social teaching. Theologically, an important foundation for this is when St. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans (8:19–23), describes a salvation destiny for all of creation, not only humankind. Thinking of the entirety of the natural world as having a place in the divine order, not only instrumentally, but for its own sake, is the germ of what Pope Francis has called the Gospel of Creation ([34], ch. 2). The Gospel of Creation is a way of understanding the Bible and Christian revelation in a key that holds up the environment as something loved by God, or as a good in itself to which humans have moral obligations. Seeing the environment as “creation” is at the crux of this thinking ([35], p. 117). The well-worn critique of Lyn White about the culpability of Christianity for the current climate crisis is predicated on a Christian understanding of the environment as “nature,” as just the context in which the human drama of salvation history plays out. Nature is separate, the mere setting for humans to try to achieve their ultimate destiny. But the move to frame the environment as “creation” attempts to undo that separation. It is a statement that the natural world is imbued with a divine destiny that has moral standing. Being created by God is the source of the claim that all humans have dignity that must be respected and treated morally. Saying the environment is created gives it its own dignity that must also be respected and treated morally.

A strong demonstration of this way of thinking came in June of 2022. The Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar, a continental council of African bishops’ conferences, published a statement in which they took a public position regarding biodiversity protection. The statement does maintain the language of humans needing to “exercise responsible stewardship over [emphasis added] creation,” but it also clearly highlights the good of creation for its own sake in parallel with concern for consequences on human well-being [36]. It begins with an assertion that the Earth itself is suffering, and that the cause is irresponsible human action. The starting point is not human suffering caused by climatological factors. The Earth itself is framed as an entity that is due moral responsibility. The statement goes on: “[A]n extractive, unsustainable economy is causing the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis, which is destroying God’s creation and harming the most vulnerable among us, those who have done little to cause the crisis, the poor and the Earth” [36]. Human suffering does matter, particularly the unjust suffering of vulnerable peoples in the global South who are impacted by environmental violence caused by activity by those in the global North, but that human cost is kept in clear balance with the suffering of the environment itself.

Such an ethical paradigm is crucial for advancing solutions to environmental violence. It grants importance to cases of environmental violence that primarily deal with harm to nature and might otherwise be brushed aside because human impact is harder to see or, as is often the case with mining, human benefit can cloud other negative impacts. This paradigm also grants greater weight and urgency to the complex realities of environmental violence wherein human consequences and environmental consequences are inextricably linked.

13.3.1.3 Integral Human Development

Pope Francis has been a champion of the idea of integral human development (IHD). Structurally, he made IHD central in 2016 when he merged several Vatican departments and created the new Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. Conceptually, though, the idea has been prominent since Pope St. Paul VI introduced it in his 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio. At the time, Paul VI was dissatisfied with purely economic definitions of development and instead advocated for a model of development that accounts for the whole person and giving opportunities to each person ([37], §14). The idea has grown significantly since, with Pope Francis, for example, helping to emphasize the importance of a “culture of encounter” for authentic IHD, which means accompanying people at the margins to understand their situations and needs [38]. In sum, the idea is an affirmation that variables that may not easily be quantified in economic measures are central to human flourishing, and that development is not legitimate when those variables are not included.

One such variable is the environment: “An economy respectful of the environment will not have the maximization of profits as its only objective, because environmental protection cannot be assured solely on the basis of financial calculations of costs and benefits. The environment is one of those goods that cannot be adequately safeguarded or promoted by market forces” ([24], §470). Pope Francis’s teaching has placed great emphasis on integral ecology, which is conceptually inseparable from IHD. Both ideas claim that human flourishing and ecological flourishing go hand in hand: “Frequently, in fact, people’s quality of life actually diminishes – by the deterioration of the environment, the low quality of food or the depletion of resources – in the midst of economic growth” ([34], §194). Given current understandings of climate change and the global scale of its causes and effects, the environmental well-being to which each person’s human well-being is tied is truly global in scope.

From this base, IHD can help assess one of the thornier issues of environmental violence connected to mining – mining in the global South that is necessary for renewable energy technologies that are predominantly used in the global North. As outlined above, renewable energy technologies come with environmental consequences of their own because of the need for numerous resources that must be acquired through mining, which leaves environmental, social, and economic wounds in the places where it occurs. In this way, these technologies frequently amount to global North countries trading the environmental violence of fossil fuels for the environmental violence of mining. This situation is problematic from the perspective of subsidiarity in that the rush for metals and minerals for renewable energy technology can overwhelm countries and communities trying to chart more effective development paths for themselves. It is problematic from the perspective of care for creation in that direct environmental violence with grave consequences is occurring. But the framework of IHD can help point to the beginnings of a solution.

If economic growth to benefit some is coming at the cost of a diminished quality of life for others, as Francis described, then IHD would criticize that economic growth. Francis, in fact, does argue that “the time has come to accept decreased growth in some parts of the world, in order to provide resources for other places to experience healthy growth” ([34], §193). Francis does not explicitly use the term, but his insights hew closely to the degrowth movement [39]. That is one of the strongest contributions IHD can make with regard to environmental violence. It can, surely, also offer ideas that critique specific instances of people and communities suffering from environmental violence or consequences of mining. If a community is having its standard of living diminished by a mine, whether through environmental problems, economic stagnation, or increased militarization, then that activity would not meet the standards of IHD. But it is a more powerful contribution to give a critique of the deeper source of that diminishment, which is resource and energy demand in places generally distant from those mining sites. And to repeat, this is the case even when that demand is met by renewable energy technology. The problem cannot be fixed without a change in the very economic and social paradigm that drives that demand.

Douglass Cassel, an expert in international human rights law, affirms that Catholic social teaching offers an expansion of the necessarily minimalistic standards set forth in international regulations concerning mining specifically and human rights and economic development more broadly. Cassel claims of international norms: “They accept cultures, however misguided, and development models, however short-sighted” ([40], p. 134). By contrast, Catholic social teaching, with principles like IHD, calls for a more revolutionary change in the underlying economic and political models that international norms accept as their parameters. As argued by Clemens Sedmak, a theological underpinning for the principles of IHD gives them greater depth and potential for motivating actual change and speaks to the reality that a majority of people on the planet do uphold religious values of some kind ([41], pp. 157–159). An argument for IHD from a theological perspective has a better chance to resonate even with non-Catholic religious communities.

The Catholic Church indeed has begun to take leadership in this way. In May of 2021, the Vatican launched its Laudato Si’ Action Platform, a campaign to educate and guide action for implementing the principles of integral ecology and IHD into the life of the worldwide church.² It includes goals like carbon neutrality and increased renewable energy use but also advocates for deeper and more radical change like reduced consumption, simpler lifestyles, and ecologically informed styles of spirituality. The platform has also encouraged fossil fuel divestment, with 36 Catholic organizations joining a divestment pledge in October of 2021 that included a total of 72 religious institutions [42]. The platform embraces the value of clean energy and looks for ways to conduct activity in the current economic system in the most ecologically responsible ways possible, but it also recognizes that continued dependence on present levels of extractive activity is untenable because of the impact extraction has on vulnerable peoples. Unfettered economic growth, even with an increase in clean energy, does not allow for real solutions to the climate crisis and the instances of environmental violence that it creates.

13.3.2 Grassroots Presence

In describing the peacebuilding strengths of the Catholic Church, John Paul Lederach has noted the church’s “ubiquitous presence” ([43], p. 50). In a similar vein, at a recent research colloquium, Raymond Offenheiser, former president of Oxfam America and a member of an ethics board for a major mining company, relayed a conversation that he once had with a group of mining executives. He told them that one of their biggest potential threats is the Catholic Church because of the presence it has in all of the places where mining occurs, even remote places that have little to no international presence.³ Whether through outreach to territorial dioceses in the Amazon by the Episcopal Conference of Colombia, diocesan observatories run by the Jesuits in the DRC, research by the Central American University in El Salvador, activism by watchdog groups like Alyansa Tigil Mina in the Philippines,⁴ or legal advocacy for indigenous peoples by DHUMA in Peru, the presence of Catholic actors on the ground at mining sites around the world is indeed pervasive and diverse. Just about anywhere that environmental violence from mining occurs, the Catholic community is present. An important characteristic of this Catholic presence is that it is locally rooted. In peacebuilding generally, church actors and other religious leaders add value by being more invested and committed than international organizations would be. While international groups remain engaged only for limited terms, often the term of a grant program or funding cycle, religious leaders working in their home countries and communities remain committed to the long, drawn-out process that durable peace requires.

The Catholic Church in the Philippines is a good example. The Catholic community in the Philippines developed a focus on ecology during the 1980s, largely due to logging activity that eliminated 29 million of the country’s 30 million hectares of primary forests ([44], p. 59). Catholic missionaries were present within peasant villages supporting base ecclesial communities. Base ecclesial communities proliferated during the liberation theology movement of the 1970s and 1980s and were community-level groups of Catholics who would regularly meet to pray and study scripture while also organizing around justice issues. This engagement within the Catholic community filtered to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, which published a pastoral letter in 1988 admonishing reckless environmental policies and practices that it deemed sinful violations against nature and the peasant communities that depended on nature for their well-being [45]. In 1995, the Philippines passed its new Mining Act that ushered a major liberalization of the country’s mining industry. The church’s concern with ecological issues evolved into concern with mining, and through the 1990s to the present, it has remained a consistent voice advocating for the rights of rural and indigenous communities impacted by mining development, as well as for the environment itself ([44], pp. 59–63). Recently, the Philippine Church started an initiative called Eco-Convergence that established regional hubs in areas heavily impacted by mining that are meant to lead sustained environmental campaigns, monitor and gather data on mining operations, and conscientize local communities about mining advocacy [46]. The Eco-Convergence initiative is the most recent effort in a sustained, three-and-a-half-decade engagement by the Philippine Church on issues of environmental violence, which is rooted in and continues to be guided by its presence in remote communities where acts of environmental violence might otherwise stay couched in obscurity.

13.3.3 Horizontal and Vertical Integration

The preceding Philippines example points to another asset in the Catholic community for addressing mining and environmental harms – the capacity for both vertical and horizontal integration. That is, the capacity to network and amplify the work of grassroots and community-level actors across countries and continents (horizontal), and the capacity to connect grassroots and community-level actors through the church’s organizational reach to higher levels where policy, governance, and regulation issues live (vertical).

Lederach refers to this horizontal and vertical capacity as part of how the church can deal with the challenge that can be created by its ubiquity – the challenge of being in “inevitable relationship” with parties on both sides of a conflict ([43], pp. 50–51). The context in which Lederach makes this observation is internal armed conflict and the way church leaders and pastors can end up being in places of sympathy for multiple competing stakeholders in the conflict. This dilemma can be easily transposed to a context of mining. A local pastor in one place might have a very different view of mining than one in a different place, or than a bishop working at the national level. The reasons may include a different experience with mining officials, a different political disposition, or a different judgment about the weighing of benefits and harms. In the context of mining, this sort of disunity can leave communities insulated and at the mercy of the enormous financial, legal, and political power of mining companies. But the church’s institutional network has the ability to prevent that insulation and create a coherent approach, even if it is not always fully actualized. This ability can be an effective tool to empower resistance to mining and various forms of environmental violence.

To expand on the horizontal dimension, the Philippines is again relevant, but in relation to El Salvador. In 2017, El Salvador became the first country to pass legislation for a total ban on metal mining. The ban was motivated largely by the harm gold mining could cause to the country’s primary watershed, threatening agriculture as well as the already precarious supply of drinking water. The ban itself was achieved with support from the leadership of the Catholic Church, which helped consolidate national support, and academics from the Jesuit-run Central American University, who drafted proposed legislation and provided data and research to make the potential harms of mining in the country known. This national effort itself shows the church’s horizontal reach with the way the church was central to creating a unified national front to support the legislation. One early key event extends the scope of that horizontal reach even further. To counter claims from a gold mining company that was downplaying the environmental impacts of its proposed operations, Salvadoran Catholic leaders were able to use their church networks to identify a mayor of a small city in the Philippines where the same mining company had operated. An audience with that mayor and his testimony about the environmental damage and negative social impacts brought about by the mining project helped galvanize El Salvador’s national movement ([47], p. 89).

In South America, this kind of transnational networking to lend better support to communities impacted by mining and other sources of environmental violence has been institutionalized. The Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network (REPAM)⁵ was founded in 2014 and is comprised now of hundreds of Catholic institutional bodies, missionary groups, religious orders, and others across South America’s Amazon region. It is a platform for sharing experience, services, and resources to articulate coherent advocacy on behalf of the environment and human rights, especially for the most vulnerable communities in the Amazon region, including the poor and indigenous peoples. Its success has spawned two similar groups in Central America and the Congo Basin. For mining in particular, the group Iglesias y Minería (IM)⁶ was first articulated in 2013 and became a structured entity in 2014. It is an ecumenical group that includes Catholics and non-Catholic Christians, as well as some non-faith-based organizations. IM is very much rooted in communities that have been directly impacted by human and environmental violations related to mining, and their mission is overtly faith-based. Values of the gospel that offer defense for human rights, justice, and peace drive the network’s activity, which includes producing educational materials, policy advocacy, reporting, and direct activism.

In the vertical dimension, there are many instances of Catholic groups channeling grassroots interests up to higher social levels to open dialogue or effect legal and policy change, and of higher-level coordination assisting better or stronger responses at the community level. One major example of the former dynamic is when the Holy See convened a series of meetings between executives from some of the world’s biggest mining companies, global church actors representing communities affected by mining, and leaders from the Methodist and Anglican Churches. The most recent of these convenings took place in 2019 [48]. It included Fr. Rodrigo Péret, OFM, the director of IM, along with a representative from the town of Brumadinho, Brazil, just months after the deadly tailings dam collapse occurred there. The impact of these meetings is very much in question, with Péret offering a strong critique of what he saw as too much capitulation to the mining companies in terms of setting the agenda for the dialogues [49], but the capacity to get a brutally victimized villager and top-level executives, whose industry caused the environmental violence, into the same room is in itself noteworthy. It demonstrates the church’s ability to bring the lowest grassroots levels together with the highest levels of corporate or political power. On smaller scales, it is seen elsewhere. In Peru, DHUMA has successfully tried several court cases at the national level to secure protections for indigenous communities struggling against mining companies [28]. In the DRC, Centre d’Etudes Pour l’Action Sociale⁷ helped to represent the experiences of local communities and to lead a study of mining contracts signed during the country’s civil war period that were deemed exploitative ([50], pp. 48–49). Few organizations have the ability to carry the voice of local victims of environmental violence to board rooms, courtrooms, and meeting rooms for government ministers as effectively as the church.

The church’s capacity for vertical integration does not only flow bottom-up. In some situations, a top-down vector for integration can be just as valuable, following the principle of subsidiarity. The El Salvador example above is a good demonstration. Pro-mining interests in the country engaged in a campaign to disparage mining resistance, and in 2009 five anti-mining activists were assassinated ([47], p. 85). In a context where ordinary people largely did not understand the environmental consequences of mining, specifically on the water supply, the population was susceptible to the pro-mining messages downplaying environmental issues and promoting economic benefits. Fernando Sáenz Lacalle, the Archbishop of San Salvador from 1995 to 2008, was educated as a chemist, and the dangers of cyanide runoff from gold mining made him a staunch ally of the anti-mining movement. While the anti-mining campaign in El Salvador began as a grassroots movement, the centralized leadership of the Catholic Church, under Lacalle and his successor as well as their brother bishops in the country, was key to creating a unified movement that could counter the pro-mining demonstrations and propaganda ([51], pp. 16–21). The bishops approved and promoted legislation drafted by Central American University academics, helped to focus the public advocacy campaign, and consolidated support around it. The legislation ultimately moved forward and became a major policy victory.

Colombia was noted above as an example of upscaling subsidiarity, and similarly demonstrates the value of vertical integration from the top down. After the country’s 2016 peace agreement was signed, territories previously controlled by the FARC could be opened up to mining development, which the government has aggressively pursued as an economic development strategy. However, many of these areas are in the highly biodiverse Colombian Amazon. On the ground, local church leaders and local communities have had and continue to have differing views about mining. The Episcopal Conference of Colombia, which was centrally involved in bringing about the 2016 Peace Accord and remains heavily involved in its implementation, has established a platform focused on ecological preservation. National church leadership has been advocating for pastors in the country’s territories to promote an “eco-theology of peace” [52], which is teaching and preaching focused on emphasizing the interconnections between peace, development, and the environment and their centrality to Christian discipleship. The goal is to unify the church’s voice and to ensure that environmental protection is held up as a major priority as the country’s peace implementation continues. An example of this platform being concretized is the way Colombia’s national arm of the Catholic Church’s Cáritas network has supported green job training for ex-combatants in territorial regions, such as hydroelectric and aquaculture initiatives [53]. If development and peace implementation can be woven together with environmental protection, then the need to develop environmentally violent industries like mining to implement peace can be avoided or, at the very least, greatly minimized.

13.3.4 Limitations and Areas for Improvement

Despite these capacities and their actualization in some of the cases outlined above, the Catholic community remains limited in what it can accomplish and to what degree it effectively fulfills its potentials. Catholic actors can improve in three particular areas to be more effective agents of change with regard to mining and environmental violence.

13.3.4.1 Improved Technical Capacity

According to Scott Appleby: “It is not enough … for Catholics to expect secular experts to understand the theology of Catholic peacebuilding. Catholics must provide translation services” ([54], p. 19). The Catholic Church has the capacity to interface with those in the political and business worlds, but if it is to translate its teachings and ideas on mining into the language of those worlds, it must become better versed in the financial and technical aspects of the mining industry. Catholic actors need to also be up to date with industry standards in environmental protection, FPIC, and other areas of ethical concern. If they are not, even if those industry standards leave much to be desired, then those trying to engage with the industry will lose credibility as dialogue partners and lose out on opportunities to push for improvement ([55], pp. 232–234).

Catholic peacebuilders are often toeing a line between being prophetic critics of worldly powers and compromisers and collaborators with those powers when they show goodwill and provide an opening for transformation. Improved technical knowledge, whether through increasing the capacity of Catholic actors or through partnerships with non-Catholics with similar values and goals but better technical knowledge, helps both directions of the prophetic-collaborative tension ([33], p. 264). A better knowledge base will allow Catholic actors seeking to minimize environmental violence or other harms from mining to elevate their critiques to the levels of policy and finance, where more lasting and effective change is possible. At the same time, when that prophetic posture does find willing audiences within the industry, increased technical knowledge will allow for more effective collaboration. However faithful efforts are to Catholic social teaching and however poignant the ethical critiques, they will be severely limited if they cannot be translated into the language that orients and drives the financial, business, and technical dimensions of the mining industry.

13.3.4.2 Women’s Leadership

The Catholic community’s record of holding up women’s specific roles in defending human rights and the environment is wanting. As Laurie Johnston observed: “The leadership of the mining industry and the leadership of the institutional church are both male-dominated. Yet the greatest negative impacts of mining accrue to women” ([33], p. 262). Case research bears this out [56, 57]. Data also indicate that women environmental defenders are more likely to encounter violence, particularly in connection to mining, and more frequently to have those perpetrators receive legal impunity [58].

Embracing the courageous leadership of women would enhance Catholic efforts for peacebuilding generally [59] and for addressing environmental violence and mining specifically [60]. The disproportionate harms experienced by women also make centering women’s experiences a matter of justice. The Catholic community includes lay women and women religious engaged deeply on issues of mining. Putting a greater emphasis on the work these women do could significantly improve impact. This should mean having women in prominent roles when Catholic leaders engage with policy and business leaders, fostering grassroots programming aimed at strengthening women’s community leadership, and highlighting the gendered consequences of environmental violence and other forms of violence related to the mining industry.

13.3.4.3 Making Good on Network Potentials

Although the Catholic Church’s capacity for both horizontal and vertical integration has had instances of success, there is still room for improvement. Theologian Vincent Miller has argued that the institutional network of the Catholic Church is a potentially powerful counterbalance to the inexorable market networks that set the terms of much of the contemporary world’s interactions, especially on an international scale [61]. For Miller, the church can imbue our globalized interconnections with a sense of solidarity to combat the way that economic markets obscure and entrench various forms of harm, especially at resource origin points like mining sites. Miller’s argument is based on the idea that for change to happen in a globalized industry like mining, people in the global North need to be included in the integration that the church makes possible. Consumer-end pressure is important for influencing legal changes in the home countries of mining firms and can exert investor pressure on companies. But for that to happen, those consumers need to be brought into solidaric empathy with the people in the global South who are bearing the brunt of the consequences for their modern lifestyles. Miller cites the example of the Central American Solidarity movement in the 1980s that was able to mobilize North American Catholics to support and influence policy change regarding Cold War–era proxy wars in Central America ([61], p. 213).

To achieve this, Miller argues, the church needs to better activate its ecclesial networks along vectors that connect global North and global South. The examples noted above of horizontal integration are limited to connections between communities in the global South. As powerful as those connections are, ones between the global North and global South are needed. Concrete relationships between persons and communities, as in the Central American Solidarity movement, could help, but an even easier starting point would be more attention on environmental issues from Catholic leaders in countries like the United States. As much as Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’’ has given the twenty-first century Catholic Church an ecological agenda, bishops in the United States have largely ignored it [62]. Stronger pastoral focus on ecology is needed, especially environmental impacts on vulnerable peoples thousands of miles away from North American churchgoers whose lifestyles often increase the suffering of those vulnerable peoples. The full power of the Catholic Church’s network capacity will not be realized until the church in the global North is solidarically incorporated.

13.4 Conclusion

Mining and environmental violence are closely related. Mining is a major cause of environmental violence, and it also muddies one high-priority means of addressing environmental violence, that being renewable energy technologies. Mining and environmental violence are phenomena that are intimately local in how they impact specific communities and specific ecologies, while being expansively global in how they are part of complex global structures of economics, consumption, and political and corporate power, all of which are beset by vexing patterns of injustice and inequity.

The Catholic Church is an entity that is distinctively situated to respond to these issues, and its peacebuilding theory and praxis offer promising resources to support such a response. The Catholic Church has its tradition of Catholic social teaching, which gives a robust system of moral reflection to help critique problems stemming from mining and leading to environmental violence, while showing pathways to solutions. Subsidiarity demands that the dignity of persons and communities be kept at the center, which sometimes means acceding authority to higher social orders with more capacity and resources to protect community well-being and the global common good. Care for creation situates creation itself as an entity with moral standing apart from its utility to human flourishing. IHD asserts that models of economic development that do environmental violence and reduce the quality of life for some, while improving it for others, are inauthentic and need to be transformed with revolutionary changes to the patterns of consumption that drive narrowly growth-focused models of development. The Catholic Church also has a pervasive presence in local communities impacted by mining and related forms of environmental violence. Its institutional structure and network nature make it able to integrate communities horizontally so that marginalized voices can be amplified and community experience more effectively shared. It is also able to integrate communities with higher orders of authority vertically so that responses can be coordinated, and grassroots concerns can be represented at the levels of policy and regulation.

The Catholic Church is not the only institution that possesses these capacities. It could exercise them much more effectively, and it is not capable of fixing problems of mining and environmental violence without a wide coalition of partners. However, the Catholic community is capable of offering distinct value to the effort of addressing such problems because of the distinct way in which it can array and marshal these resources.

14 Environmental Violence and Agriculture Incorporating Jacques Ellul’s Theory of Technique and Technological Morality into the Environmental Violence Framework

Paul Stock

Engaging Environmental Violence

In this collection we take, as a given, that environmental violence (EV) is the sum total of harm (e.g., direct illness, lost years of life, climate change) caused by the release of both toxic and nontoxic pollution. Within the EV framework, Marcantonio argues that “the major driver behind the production of EV is everyday life behaviors and patterns of consumption that are so internalized and normalized that the violence they ultimately produce is either made invisible, seen as inevitable, or is incorrectly disconnected from its true causes” ([1], p. 3). In this chapter, I explore a set of social science theory, particularly that of French sociologist Jacques Ellul, around the role of technology in the wider culture. Ellul’s theory of technique argues that, not just technology, but the cultural faith in technology, leads to the creation, production, use, misuse, and inability to control the harmful consequences of technology. To illustrate Ellul’s theory in relationship to EV, I highlight the example of the violence in agriculture, while then describing one potential counter to the harm.

14.1 Introduction

This chapter explores environmental violence (EV) in relationship to agriculture. More specifically, I will examine EV and agriculture from the wider lens of Jacques Ellul’s theory of technology with an emphasis on technique as it relates to violence. Ellul is an underappreciated theorist of technology, particularly in the United States, yet offers us a wider cultural and historical understanding of the role of technology and technique in relationship, especially to the unintended consequences of technology adopted uncritically. Next, I examine how technique interacts and causes violence through our interaction with nonhuman species and ecosystems. I then extend that relationship to our specific relationship with agriculture and look at both the violence through agriculture and the consequences. I conclude with an examination of what an agriculture of flourishing might look like through the example of the Catholic Worker farms.

14.2 Environmental Violence

Marcantonio and Fuentes define EV as “direct and indirect harm experienced by humans due to toxic and nontoxic pollutants put into a local and concurrently the global ecosystem through human activities and processes” ([2], p. 3). The well-documented outcomes of EV include not only death, but also harm to physical and mental well-being. One of the most difficult things about EV is that, while we know that humans are the cause of this violence to other humans through the environment, it is difficult to see and assign responsibility. Further, many of those who are the victims of EV prioritize values other than their environmental well-being when considering their political choices [3].

The difficulty of seeing the harm done can, in part, be described as slow violence. O’Lear focuses on the process of science that occludes environmental harm as slow violence [4]. The harm to the environment from human activity is less able to be seen and much less talked about because the harm is often wrapped up in “complex” scientific explanations, rather than media-digestible bits. We can then see slow violence to the environment and through the environment. On the news we hear of oil spills, for instance, and instantly comprehend the damage to animals, watersheds, and ecosystems. It is more difficult to process the damage to humans, say, from consuming fish that have ingested oil drenched foods or swum in water poisoned by toxic releases. This kind of EV through the environment is far more difficult to see because it takes longer, both in the number of steps and the actual time. This picks up where Marcantonio and Fuentes [2] were discussing EV as pollution that, yes, harms environmental systems and nonhuman species, but for our purposes, harms humans with “the environment” as the vector of delivery of the violence.

While much of the harm from EV, as defined by Marcantonio and Fuentes, may not have the direct cause and effect visibility of, say, homicide, we can interrogate and draw conclusions about the effects of the systems that engender harm through the environment. I will offer the example of EV through agricultural practices, but, prior to that, I want to offer a wider theory of one of the causes of EV.

14.3 Ellul’s Theory of a Technique, the Technological Society, and Technological Morality

Most of our critiques of technology, including the methods to produce the pollution at the heart of EV, tend to focus on particular technologies, or families of technologies, that either bear closer scrutiny or not. For instance, with the rise of social media, it is apps and particular regulations that come under fire, not cell phones in general, much less a wide critique of technology in our culture [5]. Historically, individual advances in technological development made their way into people’s hands and then those advances were either adopted, discarded, or manipulated to work better over an appropriate period of time and in particular contexts. While a too brief summary of technological adoption, that scenario is just not what happens today. In fact, we are deluged with new, shinier, “better,” technological options all the time at a rate far too fast for culture to make decisions about what is best in a given context. Within a milieu of advertising, venture capital, and eroding systems of moral norms, the consequences are many. Related to the environment, we have been inundated with synthetic chemicals, especially in combination, that within a lax regulatory system, have led to significant harm to human persons [6, 7]. In particular, much of this harm comes from agricultural chemicals and synthetic fertilizers. The harm to human persons (mainly in the form of various cancers and other diseases) accrues primarily to those who apply these chemicals or ingest water drawn from a polluted watershed or to their children.

French sociologist Jacques Ellul’s wider theory of a technological society starts from the premise that technique, not capital, is the determining factor in all of our societal relationships. By technique, Ellul emphasizes “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity. Its characteristics are new; the technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past.” ([8], p. xxv, emphasis in the original). With this emphasis on efficiency, Ellul articulates that, while we commonly think of technology as only referring to machines, our current technological society seeks control and efficiency (that is, power), not just in our machines and digital tools, but in every area of life. In short, Ellul argues that technology has become a system unto itself under a wider culture of technique thus making it nigh impossible for the kinds of cultural checks outlined earlier to occur. As Ellul scholar, Richard Stivers articulates:

Technology is the paramount sacred force in modern societies. It has supplanted nature and society in this regard. Ultimately what is experienced as sacred is one’s life milieu. The myth of technological utopianism expresses our deepest desires and expectations for technology. The myth goes something like this: Science and technology (applied science) are directing us to a state of maximum production and consumption, a utopia. Technology provides the solutions to all environmental and human problems, thereby allowing society to achieve ever greater efficiency. The technological utopia is the “promised land of total consumption” [from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle]. People are free to choose among the myriad of goods, services, and experiences … that will bring them maximum happiness, perfect health, and eternal youth.

([9], pp. 66–67)

In our current milieu in which efficiency (in profit, in production, in consumption, in academics, in parenting, in politics, etc.) becomes the primary measure of success, we have turned winning into a value. We also seek to control and make efficient, not just our relationship with machines and the planet, but one another. Stivers contends that, “Manipulation leaves the other less free because it does not work rationally; human technique bypasses reason in its effort to control the other’s instincts and emotions” ([10], pp. 85–86).

In a technological society dominated by technique, EV, as the release of toxic and nontoxic pollution, is understood to be an efficient way of controlling material resources; creating wealth; and manipulating other human beings. EV is considered rational in spite of growing evidence that the costs of such perceived efficiency leads to terrible harm both to specific human persons and to the wider flourishing of social and ecological communities.

These techniques pursue efficiency in all things, and that pursuit of efficiency creates metrics of success (e.g., test scores, crop yields, workplace productivity) that then become the goals of society. The creation of these metrics creates incentives to erode planetary systems and turn human relationships into ones based on competition, as opposed to dignity. Thus, technique erodes sociality, tradition, civility, and modes of operating entrenched in context. Ellul’s is a historical theory. Prior eras looked to either the needs of survival (a milieu of nature) or institutions (the milieu of the social) that evolved over many years of interaction and trial and error. Ellul’s insight about technique is that it pursues its own ends as it operates as a system, and all of our institutions are tied to it in a pursuit of efficiency for its own ends, without regard for the consequences to persons or communities.

Hannah Arendt connects violence to the loss (or even perceived loss) of power ([11], p. 63). That power, not enriching oneself, becomes the measure of success. For Ellul, this is technique at its height. Power for power’s sake becomes the mark of efficiency. But power is for something to be able to do something. However, in a technological society, power becomes a goal in and of itself – a value. Those who have power are valued, those who do not are devalued or eliminated, as in the case of the Holocaust and other genocides [12]. Given that power is a value and any means necessary will be employed to get it, including violence. That violence will then be looked upon as appropriate because we culturally value power. We then turn science and technology into a tool to appropriate power, not to solve problems.

Ellul’s wider theory of technique and the wider technological society offers us a few strengths, as opposed to, say, Marcuse or science and technology scholarship (STS) that does not engage Ellul. First, Ellul offers an alternative to Marxian (only) political economy that, in spite of really incisive critiques of capitalism, still tend to rely solely on the Revolution as the solution. Ellul offers a framework that allows for critique without necessarily offering a solution. That can be an unsatisfactorily hard pill to swallow. Ellul contends that our institutions, including the state, are as mired in technique as all the problems and cannot necessarily offer a remedy through more regulation, or better leadership, or green capitalism, or any other way. As I will point to later, while Ellul was a Christian, I think the more apt takeaway for what Ellul offers as a path forward more closely tracks with an interpretation of nonviolent anarchism as opposed to solely sanctioning Christianity as the solution to political and environmental problems, including agriculture. Second, Ellul has been dismissed as a technological determinist because, to his critics, he does not offer viable (or any!) solutions. Ellul fails to give in to a desire to develop a pathway forward simply because we want the possibility of a happy ending. The wider question is, does offering palatable solutions, in spite of their unlikelihood, warrant the cancellation of scholarship in today’s language? I contend that it does not. I also put forward that I think there are some pragmatic reasons why Ellul, despite a brief moment in the 1960s with the English translation of the Technological Society, is dismissed, not only by STS scholars, but most social scientists [8]. Much of Ellul’s work should be seen as a complement to that of his collaborator, Bernard Charbonneau, which has only recently been translated into English. Charbonneau, like Ellul, also suffered some of the parochialism of the French academy for deigning to not live in Paris. Charbonneau suffers the secondary indignation of having published explicitly about environmental issues prior to the global academy sanctioning them as anything more than the foray of scientific disciplines. This constellation of factors leaves Ellul and Charbonneau, and others in their wake, as an untapped resource of thought to help us frame today’s issues, including that of EV.

Charbonneau, following Ellul, does not paint us a rosy picture for those actively concerned about politics or achieving outcomes that protect or enrich environmentally positive outcomes, whether we employ violence (in response to and then a self-perpetuating cycle) or resist using violence. In fact, Charbonneau illustrates the environmentalist’s struggle at witnessing EV and feeling helpless while cautioning us with: “But by answering violence with violence, [the environmentalist] places himself on its turf and, in his turn, risks being seized by a rage driven this time by impotence” ([13], pp. 175–176). Overall, technique overrides the ability to care (sociologically) and, thus, build and maintain flourishing communities for all. Under technique all are devalued when power is the only form of success; people and places are devalued along with everything in them, including other species, food, or ecosystems.

Technique pursues any means necessary for efficient outcomes, without guardrails as to what might be considered appropriate. As Weisberg writes, technique only seeks technical solutions to the exclusion of how we typically understand ethics and morality ([14], p. 48). Technological morality seeks only power [15, 16]. By concluding that we live in a technological milieu dominated by technique and a pursuit of efficiency with its own independent technological morality (it is out for efficiency and power), then violence as harm will only be understood as a necessity in pursuit of that self-same efficiency. We see examples in the managing of the Vietnam War, where the metric of success became body count (not limited to enemy combatants and, thus, we get My Lai) and previously during the Holocaust success was measured in the number of bodies “processed” [17, 18]. These distortions of living in a world, where success is measured by the number of human lives extinguished, are perhaps the most extreme examples and, yet, in a consideration of violence, the fact that these are just two among many examples, speaks to the pervasiveness of the relationship between technique and violence.

14.4 Technique, Agriculture, and Violence

In her work Every Farm a Factory, Ruth Fitzgerald outlines the rise of industrialization in agriculture. Efficiency – more than anything, including profit – guides the cultural shift [19]. Capitalism dominates the largest and wealthiest agribusinesses and farmers, while also entrenching an ideology of technological utopia in global agriculture under the phrase “Feed the world” ([20, 21], p. 343). James Scott offers: “If the logic of actual farming is one of an inventive, practiced response to a highly variable environment, the logic of [industrial] agriculture is, by contrast, one of adapting the environment as much as possible to its centralizing and standardizing formulas” ([22], p. 301). The practice of industrial agriculture has become sacred, inviolable under technique. Further, it actually undermines efforts of raising food within a community, with things like homeowners’ associations that demand front lawns of grass, rather than food-producing gardens. With specific consideration to agriculture, we can talk about violence through the environment, both the spectacular, like the explosion of a fertilizer plant, and the slower effects of pollution, water, and financial destruction that sometimes take decades to become visible. The sacred logic of technique in agriculture also precludes advocating for solutions to abate said violence.

In our current situation, where EV is conceptualized as harm done to persons, the pursuit of efficiency in agriculture requires that we accept that success (in terms of yield, profits, and quarterly growth) costs human harm. Yet, this system that is deemed efficient and profitable, is only such for a very few and is propped up by billions of dollars in subsidies and other systems. On the whole, the consequences of this system lead to poisoning [23]; water pollution [24]; dead zones [25]; algal blooms [26]; hunger [27]; human harm [6, 7]; lower sperm counts [28]; lawsuits [29]; and hollowed out communities [30]. The EV of agriculture is clear. For the rest of this chapter, I would like to illustrate how Ellul’s theory of technique, and those in its wake, help us further utilize and expand the EV framework.

The broadest example of technique in agriculture is the historical and continuing colonization of land that falls within the United States. Further, the development of agriculture under a settler colonial regime built, and continues to maintain, institutions that marginalize many persons with historical ties to the land [31–33].

An EV framework applied to agriculture might exclusively focus on the toxic and nontoxic harm to human beings. By incorporating EV in dialogue with Ellul’s understanding of technique and technology as a system, we can see that the harm goes beyond poisoning. I would like to briefly extend the ripple effect of damage from EV in agriculture related to persons and communities. Despite all the claims of technique of efficiency in modern agriculture, many rural communities, and those in them, are considered externalities and the outcomes to their livelihoods, communities, and selves are considered collateral damage.

14.4.1 Dispossession and Debt

Beyond the settler colonial reality of much of the United States, even those doing the colonizing have not been universally supported by technique. In the United States, we hear of the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. But in many ways the “crisis” was technique at work. Following agricultural secretary Earl Butz’s “Get big or get out” pronouncement, farmers sought to grow – in terms of acreage and scale of production – aiming for higher yields to offset the excessive loans that banks encouraged, despite inflationary rates. The increased yields flooded the markets, leading to lost income, rather than the predicted windfall. A flooded market, in combination with dismantled price supports, led to financial chaos for many over-leveraged farmers [34, 35]. As a result, many American farmers became heavily indebted, particularly as land prices then took a tumble. In the pursuit of efficiency, banks created a farm bubble with the purpose of decreasing the number of farmers without regard to the impact on people’s lives ([36], pp. 15–16).

Banks then foreclosed on the very people they had encouraged to borrow beyond their means.

Today’s disintegration of rural life, the breakup of family small town organizations and whole communities fits the pattern established by colonial powers throughout the Third World, a process happily described as the smashing up of social structures in order to extract the elements of labor from them.

([36], p. 159)

Farmers in Aotearoa, New Zealand, went through similar upheavals to their rural economy in the 1980s [37]. Those that survived foreclosure then took on a mantle of victors; those that were foreclosed on or went bankrupt or committed suicide didn’t win. The logic of technique here then is about winning and power. Those that don’t win are losers. In the wake of such upheaval, the communities that farmers and farms are embedded in change, often shrinking.

14.4.2 Depopulations and School Closures

Depopulation is defined as “chronic population losses that prevent counties from returning to an earlier period of peak population size” ([38], p. 3). The consequences of the move toward both industrial agriculture and technique have set much of rural America into a depopulation slide ([38], p. 5), emphasizing that “more than 80 percent of all rural farm counties today are depopulating” ([38], p. 15). Related to depopulation, but without a clear indicator of the causal direction, are school closures. Sageman argues: “The costs of school closures to communities can be substantial, even if they go unacknowledged” ([39], p. 21). Tieken and Auldridge-Reveles argue: “School closure, then, might be best understood as a form of educational redlining [40], continuing a cycle of marginalization, outmigration, and appropriation that, ultimately, furthers spatial injustice” ([41], p. 939). Using certain metrics of technique, city, county, and state bureaucrats then make policies to make the most efficient use of available funds without a wider lens to the harm that shrinking communities intentionally might have.

14.4.3 Devaluation

Further, there is a devaluation of persons using similar techniques. When farmers’ farms are foreclosed, it is not just a process of turning property over to a bank, but it forecloses on the identity of many farmers. What becomes of a farmer who cannot farm? [42]. As Davidson argues: “To fail several generations of relatives … is a terrible and for some an unbearable burden” ([36], p. 95). And that failure is felt as a “collective trauma, a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that an important part of the self has disappeared” ([43], p. 154).

A key passage of Bell’s book that examined Iowa farmers in the late 1990s describes:

The devastation of local communities wrought by economic dislocation is also a devastation of selves … I was in the presence of the deeply wounded. Of farmers without farms. Of men deprived of much of the means to masculinity as they understand it. Of people whose principal source of connection with their heritage (again, as they understand it) has been ripped away from them.

([42], p. 135)

Bell then quotes anthropologist Kathryn Marie Dudley, who writes: “The loss of a farm is not just the loss of material possessions, it is also the loss of a sense of community and one’s place in the world” ([44], p. 164). For farmers dislocated from their farms, it means that it is not just their material life that has been upended, but their sense of self. That includes damage to both their masculinity and their personhood that has been wrapped up in their relationship with the land [45–47]. In contemporary agriculture, not only the farmer specifically [48], but their sense of self, their personhood, is devalued. Technique, in this case, the EV of the harmful farm practices, first, combined with the financial and cultural violence that took away what they held sacred and what provided stability to their sense of self – owning and running a farm, identity as a farmer, an intact notion of masculinity, and a sense of community belonging [16, 49]. Kansas dairy farmer, Jason Schmidt puts this in the context of honor culture and writes: “In these cultures, a person’s reputation and the perception of invincibility are of utmost importance” [50]. The notion of being considered a good farmer feeds into a rural and farmer honor culture. The cultural expectations of tidy farms and new technology (whether they are effective or not for growing food) contributes to agricultural violence by expecting farmers to use toxic chemicals and machinery that contributes to GHG emissions [51]. Again, under technique, the biggest achievement is to appear like one is pursuing efficiency, even if the farming methods at play are not necessarily growing more food nor making a profit. So the cultural expectations of being a good farmer then also require indebtedness for the chemicals and new tractors, while also leading to outcomes that may indicate failure or losing. Thus, the same logic that seeks efficiency, leads to EV and the devaluation of actual farmers and the hollowing out of their communities.

Farmers are, thus, devalued, along with country and rural people in general ([52, 53], p. 274). The consequences of this devaluation take many forms including violence to others and oneself. Domestic violence rates increase in the wake of foreclosures. Especially during the 1980s, there were many stories of farmers (again, almost exclusively men) killing bankers or others they blamed for the loss of the farm. Others committed suicide. In fact, “farmer” often ranks near the top of the list of professions with the highest suicide rates [54–56]. Davidson noted that suicides are vastly underreported in rural areas, as they are often reported as farm accidents or hunting accidents ([36], p. 94).

One last consequence of technique in agriculture related to violence after economic and personal dislocation, is a period of disorientation that leads many to seek a new story to help rebuild their identity. Bell refers to this as seeking a phenomenological lifeline that leads to a tendency for farmers to join militias and point their rage to the bankers and the government [42, 53, 57].

The violence in agriculture, and how technique plays out in mainstream agriculture, encourages the use of land, soil, water, animals, and persons associated with it, as cogs in machines’ ever-renewable and shinier technology. Much of our agriculture is practiced on colonized Indigenous land, continuing a long separation. The agricultural economy privileges commodity production that, neither feeds the world, nor enriches local economies, while at the same time, draining aquifers unnecessarily and prioritizing technological fixes that lead to ever increasing reliance on pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides that directly poison persons and watersheds. This agricultural system uses huge amounts of fossil fuels, while producing methane that contributes to climate change through GHG emissions. In addition to these direct examples of EV in agriculture, rural communities lose population and, thus, the ability to maintain themselves or develop in meaningful ways. Last, farmers and rural persons are (morally) devalued, which can lead to involvement in further violence that is either interpersonal (the killing of a banker) or more sociological (via involvement in militias and events like the January 6th insurrection). The future of agriculture is being shaped now and the following section imagines a few pathways.

14.5 The Future of Agriculture

If technique is as violent as it is, what can we expect in the future? Many will look to more institutional control – regulations, subsidies, and partnerships between public and private finances. If technique unfolds, as agribusiness and many investors believe, then we will continue to see major investments and policies geared toward colonizing space, lab innovations, and promises of Big Data breakthroughs.

EV comes from the gap between presumption of technology as magic and its reality as technique of manipulation and adjustment. In his book Technology as Magic, Richard Stivers indicates how technique continues to mystify us because it creates illusions like magic [58]. We are swayed by the utopian promises, both in our day-to-day lives and in the contributions of technology to solve our social and ecological problems. Despite clear indications otherwise, most people perceive, and we write about, new technologies as if their introduction is one of neutrality; a new gadget is created and it enters society and is, thus, either adopted or not depending on its usefulness. Ellul’s great insight was to understand technology/technique as a system [59]. Within this system, technique is not, nor can it be, neutral. It is embedded and implicated in the logic of power and violence [60]. As the limits of Earthly production take shape in parallel with unprecedented indications of ecosystem collapse, some have taken up the notion that humanity should seek to colonize space as the future of the species. Taken to its logical conclusion, we will see agri-business increasingly partner with the mostly private industries pursuing a new space race. If we can’t feed the world, we’ll feed the worlds! It is not a coincidence that people who do not live in a community on a daily basis – for they are walled off by their wealth – demand and create systems that dismiss Earth as a spent resource. To talk of repair is weakness. As Kendra Pierre-Louis writes: “The false belief that the only way we can deal with current and future problems is to expand outward is an extension of colonialist ideals” [61].

14.6 Agriculture of Flourishing

If we then take, as a given, that there is EV in agriculture, what response do we, as persons, have? Ellul, Stivers, and others, as opposed to many, see the state and other large-scale institutions as compromised by technique and, therefore, unable to counter technique’s effects. This would carry over to asking for state regulations and policy or restructuring to counter effects of technique because the state is technique as well [62].

On one hand, we could argue that the strength of Ellul’s critique and the example of the Catholic Worker, offered later, rely solely on their basis in Christianity [63]. However, personalism or nonviolent anarchism are not confined to Christianity and offer widespread possibilities for flourishing that aligns with other arguments, including bioregionalism, traditional ecological knowledge, and more contemporary openness to bridging Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of being in the world. Rather than looking to the state or other institutions corrupted by technique, the argument is to live in the world cooperatively with others without resorting to manipulating them. So what recourse do we have to understand and survive an environmentally violent world? For Ellul, our hope comes in a stance of nonpower [64]. By this, he means that whenever we are given the chance to hold power over others, we must abdicate in the hope of re-establishing or creating a new sacred that does not revolve around power. This stance of nonpower, to reject a technological morality that prioritizes winning as a value, like nonviolence, does not equate to passivity or indifference. As Stivers argues, “It is an ethic that must find some tiny crack in a structure of near total power” ([12], p. 181).

We can interpret that idea of nonpower in a number of ways – I tend to focus on care and community – both ecological and social – that follows and merges the ideas of Tove Pettersen [65] on mature care and Wilkinson [66] on both social and ecological community well-being [49]. By mature care, Pettersen means “The notion of mature care, however, involves as much concern for oneself as it does for others. Mature care implies a balancing between the interests of self and others” ([65], p. 14). Others might refer to this combination of mature care and community well-being as flourishing [67]. These examples share a focus on decentralized power structures and an emphasis on cooperation.

The counter to technique and a technological morality is the pursuit of caring relationships in community toward social and ecological flourishing. As Robin Kimmerer puts it: “All flourishing is mutual” [68]. What do we mean by an agriculture of flourishing?

As Michael Bell writes, with an emphasis on creating phenomenological lifelines and what I would describe as re/creating new sacreds: “But growing food is only one dimension of what I would argue is the purpose of agriculture: cultivation—the care and tending of creation, human and nonhuman, social and ecological” ([42], p. 248).

As I have written elsewhere:

The focus on values means we have to better articulate what it is a just agri-food system looks like – we have to articulate what a flourishing food system(s) means. Sociologist Christian Smith [67] argues in the wider idea of societal flourishing that, “the promotion of personal flourishing toward the common good is the criterion by which all societies must be judged, the central standard of any social ethic” ([67], p. 212). By extension then, how persons experience food systems is just as important, if not more so, than the food system’s market successes. To get there, to that teleological end, of better food systems, then we have to flex our imaginations. [69]

([49], p. 95)

It is only in recognizing the power of nature as the real, actual, physical home, and life-giving place of being human, that we can pursue actual freedom from our knowledge of nature, from the state, and from institutions that seek to undermine that freedom. Bernard Charbonneau wrote: “Freedom is but a sham if it fails to take into account the necessities (clean air, clean water, access to land for food) ruling any reality” ([13], p. 80). Both Ellul and Charbonneau conclude that an emphasis on specific relationships with specific persons and specific places is the antidote to the totalitarian (from both Left and Right) impulse of modernity.

What, then, are some examples of farmers practicing and enjoying freedom and mature care that counters technique and technological utopianism? Who are these farmers working in a morality of flourishing? Examples include movements to return land [31]; care for and with nonhuman species and ecosystems that are seen as relations in and of themselves [68, 70]; the Landless Peasants in Brazil [71]; encouraging autonomy like in repeasantization [72, 73]; reclaiming historical narratives like White’s Freedom Farmers [74]; and those pursuing agricultures of nonpower, wherever they may be, including small farms in the midst of industrialized agriculture [32] or new farmers in Kansas [75]. Other examples can be found in iterations of agroecology, regenerative agriculture, and permaculture.

I would like to conclude briefly, with a focus on some of the farmers I have worked with in the United States, to offer some specific illustrations, but more so, to look forward to hearing examples that you may have to share with me.

14.6.1 Catholic Worker Farms

The Catholic Worker movement began in the 1930s, combining the journalistic talents of Dorothy Day and the everyday theology of Peter Maurin. What began as a newspaper focused on justice and translating the Catholic Church’s social teaching, quickly grew into a series of decentralized houses of hospitality with a self-declared mission to care for one’s neighbor. Without government funding or any official role in the Catholic Church, the Catholic Worker movement defies easy political spectrum pigeonholing. On one hand, Catholic Workers (it is not a membership organization) tend to support and live out the social justice teachings of the Church, including operating in a decentralized power structure, supporting unions, feeding and housing the poor, and protesting for nuclear disarmament, which aligns more with those on the left. On the other, many Catholic Workers also support Church teaching on things like abortion, birth control, and hierarchy that tend to align with the political right. For our purposes here, what is important is that from that original newspaper in 1933, the Catholic Worker movement has grown to over 175 houses of hospitality (www.catholicworker.org/communities/directory-picker.html) and many more organs of communication, including newspapers, newsletters, blogs, websites, zines, and multiple farm efforts. These farm efforts began with a small farm in Easton, PA in 1936, with more efforts sponsored by New York City (where Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the co-founders lived most often) and other Catholic Workers since the 1930s.

In recent years, Catholic Workers’ farms can be found on multiple continents, including Aotearoa, New Zealand, Europe, and North America. In North America, a cluster of farms have emerged in the Driftless Bioregion of the Mississippi River, including farms in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Much of this comes from the longstanding efforts of Anathoth Community Farm (www.catholicworker.org/communities/houses/wi-luck-anathoth-community-farm.html), but also many others that call this region home and have come to be Catholic Workers [16, 76–78].

In terms of an agriculture of flourishing and resistance to technique, I highlight these Catholic Worker farms, for they grow their own food, intentionally make less than the taxable threshold for income as a war protest; read; and educate themselves about issues, not only related to fair and just food production methods, but on how to build and maintain community, including doing significant work learning and teaching about Indigenous ways of being, and are in dialogue with their Indigenous neighbors. These Catholic Workers, who have access to land, education, and networks of communication, use them to build community, healthy soil, protect water, and educate neighbors and future generations, all of which exhibit ways of understanding an agriculture of nonpower or an agriculture of flourishing.

I have seen similar examples of farmers in Kansas, both Christian and not, who work the land with the hope of producing food for their families and their customers in ways that reflect love, cooperation, and community building, not competition or power-seeking [75]. “According to Ellul, re-gaining some control over technological development … requires extricating from the public’s mind the spell of the ‘technological bluff’, breaking their fascination for technologies” ([79], p. xvi, [80], p. 220). In some ways, it is through food that it is both most difficult and easiest to understand technique’s violent role in agriculture. Difficult, because technique aims to occlude the harm it does to the water, the soil, the animals, and the persons involved in picking our fruit and vegetables, driving the trucks, or working in the restaurants and grocery stores. But food also offers the easiest path to flourishing because we each have some way of connecting to food in personal ways that can effect change either through growing, learning online or in person, or through cooking, sharing meals, and asking questions. In our daily habits, we may not affect the complete necessary sociological changes to call this bluff, but we can equip ourselves to practice the eating and growing of food based in nonpower and cooperation. And we can do it together.

15 Artistic Witness and Response to Environmental Violence

Antonia Sohns

Engaging Environmental Violence

This chapter engages with the concept of environmental violence to explore how art has witnessed and responded to human-produced pollution and its associated violence on human health and well-being. In this application of the environmental violence framing, this chapter seeks to deepen our understanding of the role of art in drawing our attention to the direct and indirect risks associated with anthropogenic pollution, ecological impacts, and climate change.

The most effective alert to the threat of climate change is likely to come from the world of art rather than of science, because art has such an extraordinary way of cutting across human society.

—Thomas Lovejoy, conservation biologist

15.1 Introduction

Climate change is a current form of profound environmental violence that disproportionately affects the quality and length of life of people that live in minority, Indigenous, or poor communities. Climate change and environmental violence systematically impact socially and economically disadvantaged communities due to factors such as the historical legacy of where certain peoples were forced to live, a limited access to resources, and existing income and language barriers. As climate change impacts manifest, the physical and mental health of these communities are threatened.

Due to the slow onset of climate change and its impact across vast geographies, people struggle to comprehend the magnitude of disruptions and how those impacts are being personally experienced. Many other issues of environmental violence, such as air pollution or water contamination are also invisible, diffuse, and incremental in nature. Artists focus on those intimate details of place, observing and documenting ephemeral and abrupt changes. Artists, therefore, offer a means of witnessing and communicating environmental violence through the creative production of aesthetic works. The word aesthetic comes from the Greek, aisthētikos, of sense perception and aisthanesthai, to perceive. Thus, through works of art, music, and literature artists interpret and depict elements of the environment so that others may become aware of those other existing realities through direct sensory experience. These works give us the experience of being woken up to the world and encourage us to look closer – seeing things for the first time, even if they have always been there. Across artistic mediums, music and writing, artists communicate what is often intangible, helping us to cope with, or draw attention to, social and environmental issues such as climate change.

Artistic responses to environmental violence are often place specific. Intimate connections with a landscape allow for detailed insight into the emergent impacts of climate change on our health, well-being, and knowledge. As landscapes are open, dynamic, and adaptive systems, they provide immediate experience in which we deepen our knowledge and develop ideas. The language we employ describes the present-day landscape, telling what we see or recalling what we have seen, and conveys the history of place through its named features often revealing how we try to make “what is separate from us a part of where we are.” As Barry Lopez wrote: “A neck of land, an arm of the sea, rock nipples, the toe of a slope, the mouth of a river, a finger drift, the shoulder of a road … We put a geometry to the land – backcountry, front range, high desert – and pick out patterns in it: pool and riffle, swale and rise, basin and range” [1]. Through the naming of places, knowledge is concretized.

Memories are inscribed in the names, geometries and patterns of the physical landscape. The places are written, engraved and printed in our minds, drawn within us to be sensed as deeply as possible. “Returning to a place, experiencing its material presence, plays an active role in recollection in a profound sense, linking persons and events, situating them in a landscape” ([2], p. 295). Those memories may return with the sight of familiar landscapes, the smells, sounds, or tastes, or through the touch of landscape beneath hand, between fingers, or under foot. Robert Macfarlane describes remembering the terrains of travel through his bare feet as “textures, sensations, resistances, durably imprinted memories … footnotes, born of the skin of the walker meeting the skin of the land” ([3], p. 159).

As places are changed with the loss of native species, and disappear under rising seas, our ability to recall memories is challenged, and new memories are born from the transformed landscapes. The lost landscapes and the memories that inhabit them, have resulted in long-term emotional impacts. This existential distress caused by environmental change or human activity that transforms the landscape one inhabits is referred to as solastalgia [4]. The new terms of eco-anxiety and climate anxiety that are emerging describe the stress of perceived and anticipated threats to existing ecosystems and landscapes [5]. Ecological grief and climate grief are rising in use to describe feelings of grief related to ecological loss, vanishing forms of ecological knowledge, and the disappearance of place-specific activities, such as ice skating on local ponds that no longer freeze in warming winters [5–7]. These ecosystem distress syndromes are tied to both nostalgia of place that arises as people must move away from landscapes no longer habitable, and the pain of solastalgia that arises from staying in place and watching a familiar landscape be “rendered unrecognizable by climate change or corporate action” [8]. The climate crisis is thus woven into our individual and community identities, our personal and communal landscapes, and the future we will collectively inhabit.

While the psychological effects of climate change are not fully understood, it is clear that the impacts of climate change are disproportionate and differential. Those most reliant on land for livelihood, such as fishermen, farmers, and Indigenous Peoples, are more exposed to the climate crisis. Geographical differences in where we live manifest in our health. Where some people are advantaged, and others are disadvantaged by the patterns and processes of place. This difference in place has been referred to as “place poverty” and “place affluence” [9]. For example, communities that live in sparsely treed urban environments will be disproportionately impacted by the urban heat island effect due to rising global temperatures and occurrences of extreme heat.

Experiences of environmental violence, such as climate change and insecurity related to land, food, water, or energy resources, manifest in our bodies, as they tell a story about the conditions of our existence [10]. In water security research, scholars have documented how lack of access to drinking water and perceptions of acceptability of drinking water supplies are a lived experience [11–13]. The impacts of which are embodied, become internal, and arise in our mental health [11, 14, 15]. People without basic water services have been found to experience higher rates of personal water-related injury due to the mental toll and physical burden of fetching water [16, 17]. Mental health impacts include feeling unsafe while collecting water or while using sanitation facilities, and chronic stress due to constant uncertainty and concern of water-borne illness [16]. Globally, research has shown that water insecurity increases psychosocial distress, risk of depression, anxiety, and negative emotions like anger, shame, humiliation, and frustration [18–24]. Those incarnated health impacts can have intergenerational effects [15].

Similarly, studies of climate change and extreme weather have revealed that stress, anxiety, depression, and fear are increasing as people experience flooding and storm surges that threaten property, communities, cultural places, and human life [25, 26]. Globally, the mental and physical impacts of climate change are diverse and nuanced. How climate change and environmental violence are affecting mental well-being will continue to evolve, especially as its full impacts on cultural resources, historical places of subsistence and tradition, and spaces of shared memory and kinship are realized.

Compounding the concern of the changing environment is the recent trend of language to use non-descript words and terms, such as lake, bird, mountain, instead of the specific or a name. This movement of language reveals societies’ growing lack of familiarity with nature [1, 27]. This disconnection between people and nature may mean people do not see the changes or do not have the words to describe the impacts and, therefore, may be unmotivated to protect the environment from continued degradation [28, 29]. Art offers a means of joining us to nature, bringing us in closer association to landscapes and experience at this critical time of climate crisis and distancing.

This chapter focuses on works that combine artistic enterprise and environmental communication to provide sensory experiences that convey the intimate manifestations of environmental violence [30]. The chapter is organized around the elements from Indigenous and spiritual knowledge, and their associated sensory organ in living creatures: space (ears), air (skin), fire (eyes), water (tongue), and earth (nose). The art forms and artistic expressions respond to the harm and impacts at different scales, such as individual, community, and global. Through this chapter, I hope to encourage examination, not just of the elements and associated five senses, but consideration of other means of perception that may not be captured here, and how those faculties may perceive environmental violence. While artistic responses included in this chapter are categorized in one of the elemental and sensory groups, perception is intersensory [31]. The information derived from one sense influences what is perceived by another [31]. As a result, our senses are engaged in a constant interplay, entangled with one another.

Finally, given the space limitations of this chapter, it is not possible to include all of the artworks responding to environmental violence. This chapter seeks to provide an introduction to some of the artworks witnessing environmental violence, in the hope that it will inspire consideration of the role of art in addressing the challenges of our time. Further, through art we can consider the stories told through deep traditions of art, such as in Indigenous cultures, including through storytelling, chant, basketweaving, carving, weaving, canoe building, pottery, fashion, tattooing, petroglyphs, and floral arts. These art forms and artworks often capture mythology, folklore, and celebrate nature, convey proximity to landscape, and act as witness to environmental violence.

15.2 Space (Ears)

In her print The Poetic Body: Poem Ears (1992), Lesley Dill considers the relationship between language and the human body [32]. Dill’s print shows two sketched ears connected by a U-shaped string of Emily Dickinson’s words: “I heard, as if I had no Ear/ Until a Vital Word/ Came all the way from Life to me/ And then I knew I heard.” Dickinson’s lines underscore the importance of hearing to processing sound into language [33]. Those sounds emerge from place and shape the listener’s perception of reality. As we construct language from sounds, they inform human consciousness and thinking. As Mosab Abu Toha writes: “When you open my ear, touch it/ gently./ My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside” [34]. These memories are sound based and live in the ear, then mind. These memories emerge through notes, tones, and pitches, and may be remembered and recalled through voice, poetry, storytelling, and music.

As poems give form to memories, they encourage us to pay attention to specific moments unfolding all around us, to “… hear the singing of the trees when they are fed by/ Wind, or water music—” [35]. In capturing these moments, poems may act as a means of attestation to environmental violence and articulation of environmental hope [36]. Poems also allow for exploration of potential futures or possible realities. For example,

One doesn’t often hear a tree calling in the distance./ Although once, in a windy hardwood forest, I thought/ I heard “oak” slowly being sung in the deepest, fullest/ bass voices rising up from the earth to surround me,/ and a whistling soprano “suuuumac” coming/ from the open foothills, accompanied by the whispering/ “ceeceecedar” in the background for rhythm …. [37]

These ideas have us consider what it is we do not hear, not because it does not exist, but because we cannot sense it. These living worlds of vibrant matter speak to the vital force inherent in all beings and material forms [38]. Upon recognizing this, we are challenged to reflect on our relationship with landscape and nature, what we know, and how our senses contribute to that ever-developing knowledge.

“Poetry is not purely a personal concern or event; its spiritual evolution comes from one’s responsiveness to a community” [39]. It helps us to learn to “turn to, not from, an earth we are perilously close to ruining for ourselves as well as for the nonhuman” [40]. For example, Rita Wong’s poetry collection, undercurrent, draws attention to the destruction of the environment by focusing on water [36]. Wong’s references “unceded streams” that were stolen “from the salmon who swam them,” acknowledging the other life forms that depend on the waters we also use. This perspective offers alternate ways of living with water replacing the “pipe grid” where water and fish are commodified as “resources” with a belief that respects them as inhabitants of a shared “riparian” home [36].

Poetry pushes us to acquire new perspectives, to

try to remember that the wood and cement walls/ Of this room are being swept away this very moment,/ Molecule by molecule, in a slow and steady wind,/ And that nothing at all separates our bodies/ From the vast emptiness of space …/ I try to recall that at this moment/ Somewhere millions of miles beyond the dimness/ Of the sun, the comet Beila, speeding/ In its rocks and ices, is just beginning to enter/ The widest arc of its elliptical turn. [41]

Simon Ortiz also stresses the relationship between humans and nature in his poetry, as he celebrates the relationship he has with everything, encouraging us to let the vastness of the universe into ourselves [42]. Poetic images juxtapose “the green fields” of the native landscape to the “yellow / and dry” lands that have become useless without water [43]. Ortiz’s poetry emphasizes the violence that has been borne by the Earth, and by Indigenous Peoples as he shares stories of harsh environments that have been endured and survived, of the living forms encountered along the way, and of the colonialization of the lands that forced relocation of Indigenous Peoples [43]. These poems allow us to hear personal experiences of environmental violence and destruction. Through the rhythm and words, poetry negotiates between the personal and the evolving world, its history, and the present-day realities. The words chosen and used in poems can be a form of prayer, where words effect meaningful change [44].

Music too is being used as a powerful medium to communicate environmental violence. As Bertolt Brecht wrote: “In the dark times, will there also be singing?/ Yes, there will be singing./ About the dark times,” music has featured nature’s sounds in order to warn of impending threats [45]. For example, Judy Collins’s 1970 album Whales and Nightingales adapted the traditional whaling song, “Farewell to Tarwathie” to include the songs of humpback whales to call attention to the diminishing numbers of humpback whales and their risk of extinction due to commercial hunting until 1965. “Farwell to Tarwathie” introduced millions of listeners to the haunting sounds of the humpback whale, and helped to launch the anti-whaling movement of the 1970s along with biologist Roger Payne’s album, Songs of the Humpback Whale [46, 47]. Similarly drawing attention to threatened animals, naturalist David Stewart and the Bowerbird Collective recorded the songs of 53 Australian birds that are at risk due to human activity and climate change for the album, Songs of Disappearance. The album went viral and was number three on Australia’s top 50 albums chart in December 2021, helping to call attention to the plight of many native Australian birds [48].

Music has also been used to convey Earth’s rhythms and the rhythms of climate data. Judy Twedt transforms decades of numerical scientific data, such as the loss of Arctic sea ice into piano pieces that audibly relay the disappearance of sea ice by moving from high notes to low notes [49]. As data changes over time, the dynamism of music allows listeners to experience that longitudinal change. In this way, Twedt uses music to help listeners emotionally respond to climate data, to approach the science from a new perspective, and to connect with one another in the face of loss and change [49].

Musicians, such as the Halcyon String Quartet, use music to stimulate discussion around environmental issues. Halcyon incorporates spoken word and background displays of photography and artwork during their live musical performances in order to compel the audience to consider what changes they observe in their landscapes and seascapes. In this way, their music contributes to dialogue, promotes learning, reflection, and understanding, and responds to the tragedy of climate change [50].

An innovative, historical means of portraying humanity’s relationship with nature in the pre-industrial era was Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Each of the four concertos has a corresponding sonnet, believed also to have been written by Vivaldi. The sonnets and music were meant to accompany one another, and in their bounded way describe aspects of each season through word and music, such as when “[s]pringtime is upon us/ the birds celebrate her return with festive song” and “[t]hunderstorms … heralds of Spring, roar,/ casting their dark mantle over heaven …” [51]. Reflecting the unfolding climate crisis, musicians took The Four Seasons and altered the scores using the data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report’s RCP 8.5 future scenario, which assumes no restriction on greenhouse gas emissions. The new compositions transpose knowledge into feeling, evoking a new sense for what climate change would mean for humanity in 2050 [52]. The medium of music to convey this possible future is powerful and evocative, and can draw a response of tenderness, grief, love, joy, and sadness from its audience that inspires action.

As poetry and music help us to hear new perspectives, storytelling and oral tradition offer a means of collecting stories of environmental violence, and a tool for building community [53]. Indeed, through sharing stories, communities create bonds and a narrative of understanding that becomes collective knowledge [53]. Stories help to give structure and coherence to ideas that allow us to view reality through a new framing [54]. Through those frames, elements of reality are magnified or minimized to affect their salience. This facilitates the processing of new information by evoking mental structures and helps to naturalize ideologies [54]. Stories from the local context allow people to experience realities from a distant geography or gender and share representations of their different lived experiences related to environmental violence. For example, story narratives communicate how acts like fetching water from the land are personally embodied by women, and imbued with social relations involved in water procurement and consumption, and preferences related to water’s appearance and taste [55]. Stories help make differential injustices visible, offer a tool to conceptualize and confront asymmetries of power and inequalities in societies, and create space for dialogue that shares knowledge and cultural exchange. Through stories people can represent themselves and promote other forms of knowledge and alternate epistemologies in the communication of complex issues, such as environmental violence in the onset of climate change. This representation allows for visibility and inclusion, as diverse voices from Indigenous Peoples and marginalized groups shift narratives and perception of climate impacts on their communities. In this way, our ears facilitate knowledge of our landscape, society, and selves, through the lessons and memories shared through spoken words, music, and sound [27].

15.3 Air (Skin)

Through our skin we breathe, we feel all the tactile aspects of life, from pleasure to pain. Our skin provides an intimate connection to place, as Pattiann Rogers describes through the “rejuvenating powers” of “[l]ying down naked every morning in the dew.”

As a toad in the forest, belly and hips, thighs/ And ankles drenched in dew-filled gulches … [a]ll of the skin exposed directly to the killy cry/ Of the kingbird, the buzzing of grasshopper sparrows,/ Those calls merging with the dawn-red mists/Of crimson steeplebush, entering the bare body then/ Not merely through the ears but through the skin. [56]

In those experiences, our bodies tell a story that cannot be “divorced from the conditions of our existence” (p. 350) [10]. Therefore, understanding how environmental violence may affect our bodies and well-being necessitates first understanding the relations between a person and place.

While our skin seems a boundary separating oneself from the outside, as skin breathes and experiences the humidity, the visibility, heat, or precipitation of space, the perceived sensorial boundaries between areas become unclear [30]. As Louise Ho describes in her poem Storm: “… the enveloping hot air, ungiving, with not a flicker/ of movement, a still thermal from which there is no relief. You are/ surrounded by hot air, buoyed up by hot air, weighed down by hot air./ You inhale hot air, you swallow hot air, you feel hot air behind the ears,/ between the legs, between the toes, under the feet” [57]. In air, aspects of the atmosphere, such as breath, particulates, aerosols, and humidity are aggregated, thus, blending the edges between people, regions, and events [58]. Indeed, our bodies sense and experience the connectedness of scales and quickly recognize the fluctuating conditions of space like air pollution through more or less exhaust or fresh air, or pollution’s severity depending on time of day, season, or personal perception [30]. Air then scales down global environmental politics to the personal politics of health [58]. Through air, the atmosphere becomes tactile.

Despite air’s presence floating above and all around us, it is often less studied. Artists have sought to make the relations and movements between body and air more visible, asking us to consider the dialectics of solidity from solids to permeable skin, and all things’ impermanence and eventual return to dust [59]. Even in the absence of solidity, there is substance around us. “Air is not a one, it does not offer fixity or community, but it is no less substantial. The question is whether we can feel it” [58]. In his work, Timothy Choy explores air as medical fact, bodily engagement, constellation of difference, and index of international comparison, helping to draw attention to how air orients us to social and cultural practice, as well as weather events and economic relations [58]. For example, through smell, breath, air conditioning, anthropogenic emissions, smoking, wind, weather, and topography, air is recognized to be co-produced by the engagements between people and air, and to reflect the evolving relationship of humans and the environment [58, 60].

Due to air’s differences in composition and distribution, and how it flows across space and geographic scales, questions of justice and equity emerge. How are air spaces distributed? Who breathes the cleanest air? Disadvantaged communities have higher rates of health conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and asthma as they are disproportionately exposed to environmental conditions like extreme heat and smog [61]. Death has become a proxy for air’s effects as scholars map daily mortality risks of poor air quality, the lack of trees to mitigate extreme heat, and the high asthma rates experienced in marginalized communities [62, 63].

To explicitly examine ideas around air pollution and ownership of air, artists from Kitchen Budapest and Baltan Laboratories in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, created an installation series, Air Slaves [30]. The installation invited visitors to use wearable masks to collect their own breath in bags that were then displayed in the installation space. Amassed, the bags of air visualized the process of breathing, created connection to the exhaled breath of others, showed the bodily proximity to air, and underlined the physicality of “used” air. In versions of the art installation, the audience could consider access to good quality air as a commodity, not as a basic right [30].

Differences in air quality and geography have been shown to be a determining factor in whether a community is at higher risk of coronavirus (COVID-19) due to underlying lung diseases and asthma resulting from regular exposure to air pollution from nearby automobile and industrial pollution [30]. Breath, the quality of air, and the slogan, “I can’t breathe” have become central to understanding systematic racism of failed environmental protection laws, environmental violence, civil rights, zoning and housing laws, and international human rights laws [30, 64]. Air invites us to consider the connection between breath and justice, the breath that is vulnerable, unacknowledged, plain, or labored. To think of moments where we held our breath in fear, in anticipation or in excitement. To consider the last breath, and how many African American men have used that singular breath to say “I can’t breathe.” Through the exploration of our breath, the exhaled or held breath, the breath which emerged in chest-tight breathlessness or in buoyant laughter, we begin to recognize the connections between justice and air. Who breathes cement? Who breathes specific landscapes?

15.4 Fire (Eyes)

Through the eyes, art bears witness to the times in which humans have lived. Artists have sought to remind us through the “poetry of witness” of the loss, joy, wonder, grief, and destruction being experienced daily around the world [65]. The images conjured in the words of poems and stories recreate moments in time and call people to action. Theater uses language and body to visually address environmental violence through productions or staged readings that respond to the ecological crisis [66]. Plays can enliven and transform our experience of the world, introduce us to new perspectives, inspire us to listen better, and instill a deeper sense of community [66].

For example, in an effort to affirm and deepen our collective memory of the passenger pigeon, Feral Theatre of Brighton, UK created a memorial of tributes to the bird. Emily Laurens’s drawings in the sand depicted a flock of passenger pigeons as shadows moving over the beach [67]. The drawings were beautiful and haunting, appearing as full body silhouettes pressed into the wet sand, the pigeons’ wings arched and moving toward the sea. Laurens’s art compelled the viewer to consider when passenger pigeons were so abundant, they would blacken the sky as they flew overhead. From billions of birds to none, the passenger pigeon went extinct in 1914 due to commercial hunting and habitat loss [68]. Feral Theatre has also organized events focused on extinction and ecological loss, including “Remembrance Day for Lost Species” and “Funeral for Lost Species.” These events seek to display grief for ecosystems and species and allow for the release of suppressed emotions through ritual. After the grief rituals, mourners may move forward with strengthened practices to grieve environmental destruction they bear witness to. Theater may also explore change. A series of eight plays by Chantal Bilodeau examined the social and environmental impacts of the climate crisis on the eight Arctic states, such as the competing interests shaping the future of the Canadian Arctic and the local Inuit population.

Artists have used photography, painting, and public art installations to help people to see the unseeable effects of environmental violence. Some works use time-based media to show the longitudinal impacts of climate change on mountain and ocean ecosystems, while others display variation over time, creating art such as “tideline as timeline” where people can witness the tideline’s fluctuations over thousands of years due to geological, social, and historical changes [69, 70]. Art pieces also share underrepresented voices or reverse perspective. For example, Jenny Kendler’s Birds Watching features a single eye from 100 bird species that are threatened by climate change [71]. The exhibit’s use of birds’ eyes allows the viewer to become the subject of the birds’ fixed gaze in the hope that this inspires people to engage more deeply with the natural world [71]. Exhibitions such as “Big Weather” at NGV Australia’s Ian Potter Centre featured Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ cultural knowledge of the weather and its changes. The artworks detailed social and environmental issues, such as the legacy of colonialization, slavery, water policy, and climate change [72].

To make visible the environmental violence of air pollution, the artist Amy Balkin symbolically purchased emission trading certificates and created a “clean air” park above major cities [30]. In these parks, Balkin created imaginary blocs of cleaner air that hovered above the city skylines. This allowed Balkin to evoke a desire for better air quality through an almost sensory experience of the desire for clean air. These parks encourage people to think about air pollution, the commodification of air, and air as a public good [30].

These works build on a history of art that sought to capture the ephemeral quality of nature, and preserve the memories attached to fleeting moments of beauty. From the ancient petroglyphs of Alta, Norway and Lascaux, France, to the land art of Andy Goldsworthy, artworks often used found materials to create pieces that emerge and merge from the surrounding environment and erode over time. During the US land art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, installations like Lightning Field by Walter De Maria helped people to meditate on changing perceptions of time and place, and the role of land in modern society [73]. While Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield—A Confrontation sought to draw attention to US society’s misplaced priorities and values through an artistic act to protest climate change, economic inequality, and world hunger [74]. Created structures in land art help people consider natural forms and beauty in a new way, and increase awareness regarding the importance of environmental preservation. Further, sculptures created in abandoned surface mines, such as those by Robert Morris sought to highlight the traumatic impact humans have had on the environment in pursuit of coal, ore, and other minerals.

To spark environmental and social change, especially around tree planting and urban renewal, Joseph Beuy developed the project “7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks)” in 1982 [75]. Over five years, the project planted 7000 oak trees throughout the greater city of Kassel, Germany [75]. Beuy believed the tree to be “an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time …. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet” [76]. Each tree was paired with a columnar basalt stone approximately four feet high that pointed upwards and was positioned above ground. The basalt column sought to mark the planting of the trees as the beginning of the tree planting movement, the “transformation of all life, of society, and of the whole ecological system” [76]. The visual language of these installations and of art allow concepts to be captured and depicted in innovative ways; they and challenge us to consider what we are paying attention to.

15.5 Water (Tongue)

In response to environmental violence, artists have used taste as a mechanism to convey and call memories of place and to reveal the consequences of climate change at the table, to your dishes, and to taste. These artworks convey the power of the tongue in shaping experience. Indeed, how:

[w]ater soothes, food pleases, song delights it/ … Fluent in a language of unspoken yearning./ Dull at the tip, dull edged, and dull of color;/ But by taste, by touch, keen; by articulation/ Into the consonant and vowel, noun and verb,/ The curse, the invocation, keen and capable/ Of moving faster than we know to move it;/ … Untrustworthy, seduced by flavorful/ And deadly toadstools …. [77]

The tongue, with its taste and sensorial qualities, and its possible attributes as loose-tongued, two-tongued, lost or tongue-tied, guides our experiences and informs our understanding.

Norwegian media artists Zane Cerpina and Stahl Stenslie created a multi-media Anthropocene Cookbook that explores the relationship between humans and food, our dependence on food and the environment for our survival, and changes humans have caused due to consumption and the development of synthetic sources of food [78]. The book proposes tastes of anthropogenic pollution that stage both utopian and dystopian imaginaries [78]. For example, it describes cuisines that include powdered meteorite, speculates on what an era characterized by smog could taste like, and offers concoctions such as Highway Blend, a “cocktail of exhaust particles” and salts and minerals extracted from the snow of city roads [78]. By asking us to consider these fantastical edible futures, the book challenges us to think about whether it is ok for us to eat the mythical creatures of today, such as the overfished, endangered, or threatened species that may be traditional to or coveted by certain cultures. The book invites us to think about who will eat what, by what choice and, therefore, who eats what today, and by what choice.

Many places, too, are defined by taste and cuisine. Regional cookbooks often have recipes for dishes that call for local plants and animals, foraged, hunted, or picked from nearby forests, streams, and fields. Drawings and photographs often included in the cookbooks display the beauty of the food. These traditional recipes, subsistence activities, and local food security will be threatened by climate change. Such transformations and environmental violence force us to consider what will happen when those ingredients of place are no longer possible. What will it mean for memory, for connection to landscape?

In many places, access to sufficient food, and food of high-quality nutrition are challenging. In the United States, many neighborhood environments contain stimuli that encourage food addiction, overeating of low-nutrition foods, and obesity. These places, sometimes referred to as “obesogenic,” are often populated with unhealthy food advertisements that contribute to childhood and adult obesity [79, 80]. Food marketing that uses “sensory marketing” is based on “embodied cognition,” where bodily sensations help determine human decisions without conscious awareness [79]. Our health is not only impacted by sensory marketing, but we also embody neighborhood environmental stressors and toxins, such as the presence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) substances in water, the use of prescription drugs, or bisphenol-A (BPA) in food and water containers [80].

People experience and perceive the taste of food and water differently. In Labrador, Nunatsiavut, Alaska, and Nunavut there is a cultural attachment to raw, non-chlorinated drinking water, such as from melted ice and rivers, as the communities believe that raw water is of superior quality in terms of taste, health, and safety [81–83]. In Alaska’s northwest Arctic region, people associate the taste of chlorine with cancer, and distrust the centralized water system due to colonialization [13, 84]. Research has shown that violations of interpersonal justice can trigger a heightened sense of taste and smell, where disgust joins “dis” and the Latin word “gusto,” meaning taste [85]. People then experience a distaste toward those who have violated their sense of dignity and respect.

Taste is, therefore, influenced by historical trauma and present-day environmental injustice. Flint, Michigan became the site of a public health crisis in 2014 when it was revealed that water was polluted with lead. Flint’s poor and largely African American population were less protected from the water pollution than other communities [86]. The artist, Pope.L drew attention to this water contamination crisis through art installations, such as “Flint Water Project” which bottled water from Flint and turned the bottles into a series of art objects [87, 88]. As perceptions of the environment change, so too do concerns regarding water quality and the way that residents use water resources [89]. In an act to remember clean water and undammed rivers, the artist Betsy Damon brought together papermakers and artists to create a paper casting covering 250 feet of a dry riverbed in Castle Rock, Utah. The art piece was installed in seven venues across the United States from 1986 to 1991 and brought attention to dry riverbeds to serve as a living memory of missing water.

15.6 Earth (Nose)

Trash, wet grass, lilac blossoms, smoke. Every day we are exposed to fragrances and odors, that “… walk right through, transparently,/ … all day long they saunter/ In and out my nose:/ Orris-root and camphor,’/ And wild wet rose./ … Strange, the daily habits-- / Informal at the most-- / Of smells that act like fairies,/ Or nothing, or a ghost” [90]. Smells can signify a place, such as salt air close to the sea, or

… driving through north Texas,/ past thirty miles of stockyards,/ hundreds of thousands of cattle,/ … The smell was immense, it soaked/ through the car: I held my breath,/ but I just burst when I drove past …/ … After a while you lose your sense of smell./ Life is gentle that way, and cruel. The world/ renders itself senseless for us and/ we get used to everything.

Whether it is cattle’s mud in Texas, or basil in Greece, scents may be so common to a place that they become imbued with meaning and conjure memories of home [91].

Scents leave a lasting mark on human perception and memory [30]. Those smells conjure living and past people and places, “… a tree smelling/ of citrus & jasmine that knocks/ me back into the arms of my dead/ mother …/ a tree I can’t see, but can smell/ … my mother’s skirt twirls/ & all i smell is her ghost, perfume” [92]. Despite smell’s power, it is often forgotten in the company of the other senses [31]. It has suffered a “reversal of cultural fortune” so that it is rarely captured, and existing historiographies are narratives of decline and deodorization [93]. For those in the late eighteenth century, there was a witnessing of a “lowering of olfactory tolerance” where societies moved graveyards to the edges of cities, to cleanse streets and markets, and to ventilate buildings in order to make them simultaneously healthier and sweeter-smelling [31].

Much of the effort to deodorize arose from the concern that certain foul odors were fatal. In the 1880s and 1890s, belief moved from the perception that although noxious fumes may indicate unhealthy conditions, they were not in themselves hazardous. Yet, foul odors were still viewed negatively as they continued to be perceived as indicative of germs and disease [31]. In the twentieth century, the concerted effort to bathe, shower, and deodorize societies continued, with soaps and other hygiene products promoted by advertising campaigns that stigmatized bodily odors [31]. By the 1960s, anthropologists said “the extensive use of deodorants and the suppression of odor in public places” had made America “a land of olfactory blandness” [31].

In recent years cultural historians have begun to examine not only when and where odors mattered more in the past, but also how and where particular odors mattered or were said to matter. Scholars have drawn attention to the ways in which odor terms have been used to stigmatize and stereotype social and ethnic groups in contexts such as slavery and segregation [94]. While other scholars have shown how the metaphorical and symbolic languages of odors used in late medieval and early modern pageantry and drama constructed social and sexual distinction [95].

Smell is cultural, with each smell coming into being in the nose of the perceiver [31]. The sense of smell is therefore “uniquely visceral” and personal [96]. Smells may provide a sense of security, well-being, and pleasure and enable learning experiences beyond language [97]. A study that sought to understand how olfaction affected geographical knowledge in children explored how scents tied to six cues informed their understanding of space, including the smell of pastries to illustrate bakeries, rubber to represent traffic, and fresh grass to illustrate green spaces or the countryside [97]. Such studies have helped confirm smell’s role in informing experience, knowledge, and well-being.

Due to smell’s qualities as subjective and volatile, olfaction is a vital tool for sensing and staging environmental risk and inequality [96]. In these environmental contexts, risk perceptions tied to an industrial plant have been measured through interpretations of odiferous hydrogen sulfide emissions [98]. Workers in factories that emitted hydrogen sulfide began to realize that they would physically change due to gas inhalation, as it diminished their olfactory abilities [31]. With a reduced sense of smell, the signaling system between olfaction and satiation is diminished. This negatively impacts mental health through lack of satiation and impeded sociability as links between meaningful olfactory signals and perception of emotions are lost. Environmental violence may therefore be perpetuated through physical damage to olfaction as smells transform a person as they are taken into the body [91, 96]. This violence is differentiated given specific livelihoods or geographies.

To raise awareness of the unpleasant smells connected to urban air pollution, and the impact of scent on the body, artists created Smog Perfume. The art installation invited the audience to spray the distilled scents, such as “rotten egg,” “burning alcohol,” and “salted fish” on their skin [30]. Through this, the art seeks to draw attention to daily exposure to these smells and their impact on lived experience, such as the smell of waste correlating positively with disgust and sadness and negatively with joy [99]. Other artists have explored how Latino communities exposed to freeway exhaust and pesticides are impacted, while other artists respond to racialized discourse about Asiatic odors, and the destruction of Indigenous smellscapes due to colonialism [96].

These artworks demonstrate the power with which smell affects memory, and the violence that air maintenance and control enact on poor and marginalized communities. Unevenly polluted airspaces are distributed across social landscapes, and smell communicates “risk perception in literature, olfactory art, and environmental justice discourses” [96]. Air and the smell carried in it become the “element for theorizing social relations and affect in material terms” [96]. Smell connects urban geographies with agricultural landscapes, or freeway construction with abandoned oilwells or coal mines. The resulting geographic inequities manifest in the body and health. Olfactory perception should, therefore, be considered beyond the individual sensory experience, in order to explore smellscapes and the larger frames of decolonization, emancipation, and environmental violence [96].

15.7 Conclusion

Artistic responses to environmental violence in the context of climate change outlined in this chapter highlight how works can mobilize a sense of urgency and empower multi-sensory understandings of the impacts of environmental violence. These artworks develop narratives that encourage us to remember former landscapes and witness contemporary conditions [55]. They make visual what others cannot see, such as embodied geographies and the consequences of injustice. Art provides an emotional language for us to discuss environmental violence through its affective, experiential, and embodied qualities. By diversifying the stories told so that they include the perspectives of many people, and other species and material forms, art can encourage new ways of knowing and of experiencing. As the art communicates these perspectives, we develop shared memories through spoken or written words, and visual works that inform how people understand environmental violence, its causes, and potential remedies. Through this collective understanding, we will be empowered to address environmental violence and work toward a more just and inclusive world. A world that recognizes the diversity of lived experiences, the embodied impacts of change and loss, and the interconnected nature of humans with all earth.

16 Materialistic Lifestyles as Facilitators of Environmental Violence Can Flow Experiences Offer an Antidote?

Amy Isham

Engaging Environmental Violence

The first half of this chapter is dedicated to outlining the detrimental consequences of materialistic values in order to highlight how materialism can be considered a form of cultural violence, which facilitates the persistence of environmental violence. In outlining the problems presented by materialistic values, I also want to highlight that all hope is not lost. The second half of the chapter is, therefore, dedicated to a potential antidote to materialistic values and lifestyles, in the form of flow experiences. Flow experiences could thus offer a means of limiting environmental violence. I end by considering how to encourage flow experiences and reduce the prevalence of materialistic values across society.

16.1 The Emergence of Materialism

Striving for happiness and well-being has long been considered a feature of the human experience [1]. However, understanding of the factors that lead to happiness differs across time and space [2]. This is because the understanding of what makes for happiness or “the good life” is socially constructed and results from the interaction of people with each other and their environments. In the contemporary societies of Europe, North America, and Australasia, the materialistic understanding of the good life is commonplace.

On an individual level, materialism is considered a value or goal orientation [3, 4]. People with strong materialistic values and goals consider the acquisition and ownership of material goods to be a major life goal [5], which takes precedence over concerns for freedom, aesthetics, and civil power [6]. They also consider the acquisition of material goods as essential for their own happiness [7], with Richins [8] highlighting that, for materialists, the possession of goods is seen as a means to achieve life satisfaction, rather than religious contemplation, a simple life, or social interaction. Materialism, therefore, seems to involve viewing consumer objects as a determinant of happiness and placing relatively more importance on their acquisition than other life aspects, such as relationships or religion.

Definitions of materialism also commonly emphasize the use of material goods to portray status or a particular image. For example, Bauer et al. [9] stressed that highly materialistic individuals are not only engrossed by possessions, but also the social messages they are able to project. The inclusion of possessions as a means of portraying a certain image and status was echoed by Dittmar et al. [10], p. 880, who defined materialism as “individual differences in people’s long-term endorsement of values, goals, and associated beliefs that center on the importance of acquiring money and possessions that convey status.” Likewise, Csikszentmihalyi [11] emphasized that materialism not only involves excessively wanting to own material items, but also the desire to showcase possession of them. Therefore, there appears to be a strong social aspect to materialism whereby individuals seek to influence how others perceive them through a public display of their possessions.

Accordingly, materialism is more than just an interest in getting and spending. It involves placing material possessions at the center of one’s existence and pursuing their acquisition as a means of becoming happier and appearing successful, both in your own eyes and the eyes of others. Note also that, although the definitions outlined here have been concerned with individual materialism, materialism is sometimes discussed at the cultural level, with certain cultures (e.g., the USA) considered to be more materialistic than others [12]. A materialistic culture is one in which the majority of the members place a lot of value on material objects [13]. This aligns with definitions of “consumer culture” which emphasize a social system whereby consumption is used as a means of allocating status and prestige, perceived well-being, and creating social bonds [14]. Materialistic values could, therefore, be seen as the individual manifestation of participating in a consumer culture.

The extent to which someone holds materialistic values is typically determined using one or more survey assessments that have been devised within the fields of consumer research and applied social psychology. Popular measures include the Material Values Scale, which includes items such as “I like a lot of luxury in my life” and “I’d be happier if I could afford to buy more things,” [15] and the Aspiration Index [3], which asks individuals to rate how important different goals (e.g., “to be rich” and “to grow and learn new things”) are to them. Respondents rate their agreement with each item on Likert-type scales, with responses to individual items being summed to create an overall materialism score. The extent to which an individual is considered materialistic is therefore represented along a continuum with some individuals scoring higher and, therefore, considered to be more materialistic than others. There are no strict cut-off points from which an individual is either considered to be materialistic or not.

Prevalent materialistic values and goals are a logical consequence of consumer capitalism, which remains the dominant economic framework within the Western world [16]. Under this paradigm, the success of a nation’s economy is judged via its gross domestic product (GDP), which rises as a greater number of goods are produced and consumed. While no theory of GDP explicitly proposes this measure to be indicative of societal welfare, it has often come to be viewed as such [17]. A nation’s economic development and social well-being would, therefore, require that individuals within that nation choose to go out and shop. To stimulate these increasing levels of consumer spending, the advertising industry projects messages that happiness can be achieved via the acquisition of material goods [18].

In line with the association between materialistic values and consumer capitalism, much academic research exploring materialism has been focused on the contemporary societies of Europe, North America, and Australasia [19]. Scholars have suggested that materialistic values may be expressed differently across cultures [20], and although studies using samples from non-Western and less developed/developing economies are emerging [21], findings concerning how materialism links to well-being and the environment in these contexts in less well established [19]. In this chapter, therefore, I focus primarily on the consequences of materialistic values in contemporary societies, and how flow may be a means of reducing environmental violence for individuals in these contexts.

Research shows that exposure to advertising is a key promoter of strong materialistic values and goals, especially among children and adolescents [22, 23]. The relationship between television advertisement exposure and materialistic values may also be reciprocal, such that those individuals who already hold stronger materialistic values and goals show greater interest in television commercials [24]. Hence, once an individual starts adopting materialistic tendencies, they are susceptible to falling into a cycle of increasing materialistic values and goals due to heightened attention to consumer advertising. Materialistic values and goals can also be passed down through generations. Studies have shown that highly materialistic children tend to have parents who are also very materialistic [24] and that mothers who greatly value their teens’ financial success are more likely to have children who value their own financial success, over and above self-acceptance [25]. The experience of personal or economic insecurity has also been suggested to encourage stronger materialistic values and goals [26, 27]. Evidence suggests that the prevalence of materialistic values increased over the latter half of the twentieth century in the USA [28] and, when global news reports are documenting increasing levels of economic insecurity and a mental health crisis [29, 30], we may predict that the prevalence of materialistic values and goals will continue to increase.

16.2 Materialism as a Form of Environmental Violence

Despite the apparent encouragement of materialistic values and goals within consumer capitalist societies, such values and goals are highly problematic for human health and well-being [31]. Here, I will argue that there are two key pathways through which materialistic values and goals can work to have detrimental impacts on human well-being. The first is a direct pathway, informed by findings from psychology and consumer research documenting that increases in the strength of materialistic values and goals lead to reductions in different facets of personal well-being. The second is a more indirect pathway through environmental degradation. Research increasingly documents that individuals with strong materialistic values and goals are less likely to care for the environment and engage in pro-environmental behaviors. The environmental degradation that materialistic values and goals contribute to can then negatively impact human health and well-being. This latter pathway represents an instance of environmental violence.

Environmental violence describes the process through which human-produced pollution and other forms of environmental damage have subsequent negative impacts on human health and well-being [32]. It can operate at individual, community, regional and global scales. The founders of the environmental violence framework discussed in this volume, Marcantonio and Fuentes, highlight that environmental violence arises through dynamic, socio-ecological processes, whereby structural, cultural, and behavioral factors all have a role to play. Materialism represents an individual action that can cause environmental violence, and this individual action is facilitated through a consumer culture that normalizes materialistic behaviors, thus, allowing them to continue to occur unchallenged.

16.2.1 Materialism Directly Impacts Individual Well-Being

Although highly materialistic individuals believe that acquiring more money and material possessions will improve their well-being, evidence disputes this idea. On a more macro level, the well-being consequences of consumerism and economic growth appear to be capped. While increases in consumption can help to raise subjective well-being in less economically developed countries [33, 34], the relationship between consumption and subjective well-being for nations, such as the UK, US, and Australia is weak at best [35, 36]. This is not to ignore any positive role of wealth and consumer goods in our society. Our possessions can help us to construct and express our identity as we age. They signal our interests, in-groups, and interpersonal relationships [37]. However, when we become too focused on the apparent value of money and consumer items, we can come to neglect those things that really matter for personal well-being.

Evidence of negative associations between materialistic tendencies and personal well-being help to support the case that the endless pursuit of material goods fails to provide any significant benefits to individual well-being. A wide-ranging meta-analysis [10] demonstrated that holding strong materialistic values and goals was associated with various indicators of poor personal well-being, including lower life satisfaction, poorer self-esteem, symptoms of depression and anxiety, and even somatic symptoms of ill health and health-risk behaviors, such as alcohol or drug addiction. While much of the research included in this highly cited meta-analysis is only cross-sectional, hence eliminating the ability to draw causal conclusions, more recent work has documented that increasing the strength of materialistic values and goals can directly cause reductions in personal well-being. This causal evidence is derived from longitudinal [38, 39] and experimental [9, 40] studies.

16.2.2 Materialism Impacts Individual Well-Being through Environmental Degradation: A Case of Environmental Violence

Alongside reductions in well-being, materialistic values and goals have also been negatively related to pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors [41]. On a societal scale, the endless pursuit of increasing rates of production and consumption places devastating pressures on the Earth’s ecological resources [42, 43] as more energy and materials are needed to produce in-demand products [44]. Consumer culture and associated behavior patterns have been identified as one of the key drivers of unsustainable resource use [45] and it has been documented that the more a nation values the distribution of resources as a means of indicating power and hierarchy, the higher its CO₂ emissions [46]. On an individual level, highly materialistic people tend to be untroubled by the environmental impacts of consumption [47] and are less likely to accept that the world is currently facing environmental issues [48]. The negative relationship between the strength of materialistic values and the extent to which individuals care about the environment has been replicated across different nationalities, including participants in the USA [49], Sweden [20], the UK [50], Turkey [51], and China [52].

Given that materialism is associated with less concern for the environment, it is not surprising that findings have also documented that materialism is linked to less engagement in pro-environmental behaviors and lifestyles. Pro-environment behaviors are actions that are usually undertaken with the purposeful intention to help the environment, such as recycling, reducing household waste, eating more seasonal or vegan produce, and driving less [48, 53–55]. Pro-environment lifestyles encompass choices that individuals make to alter their way of living on a larger scale. For example, voluntary simplicity describes a lifestyle whereby individuals aim to reduce material consumption to have more time and money to dedicate to non-material sources of satisfaction and meaning [56]. It is similar to a sufficiency orientation, where individuals try to consume just enough for optimal well-being [57]. Strong materialistic values are associated with a reduced likelihood of engaging in both voluntary simplicity and sufficiency [58, 59]. The evidence here also points to a causal effect of materialism on reduced pro-environmental behaviors, using longitudinal designs [21] and experiments which prime (or temporarily heighten the salience of) materialistic values and goals [60].

As well as reducing the tendency to engage in pro-environmental behaviors, materialistic values and goals have been associated with a greater amount of time spent engaged in activities that we may intuitively expect to have higher environmental impacts. For instance, given the importance they place on acquiring material goods, it is not surprising that individuals with stronger materialistic values and goals tend to be more likely to engage in both impulsive [61] and compulsive [62] buying. They have also been shown to spend more time shopping and a greater amount of money when they do so [63]. Materialism seems to be particularly associated with greater consumption of “conspicuous” products such as branded items which help to signal status [64].

Outside of retail contexts, there are also patterns of time-use that could link materialism to higher environmental impacts. For example, Andersson and Nässén [20] reported that Swedish adults with stronger materialistic values did tend to cause higher greenhouse gas emissions than their less materialistic counterparts, and this was largely due to more frequent air travel. Travel to distant locations could be seen as a form of conspicuous consumption, as destination holidays can showcase wealth. On top of this, materialism has been linked to less time out walking in nature [54] but more time spent using electronic devices, such as watching television or playing computer games [65]. When looking at the overall association between the strength of materialistic values and the size of an individual’s ecological footprint, Brown and Kasser [53] reported a positive association.

When materialism leads to these adverse environmental consequences, it also then indirectly harms human health and well-being. Unsustainable levels of consumption and associated resource extraction compromise the health of the natural environment [43] and contribute to anthropogenic climate change. Environmental degradation and climate change present significant risks for public health, both physically and psychologically [66, 67]. When ambient temperatures rise, so does the risk of heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and mortality [68]. A lack of access to green spaces is associated with higher levels of cortisol, diastolic blood pressure, and incidence of Type II diabetes [69]. When exposed to environmental degradation and extreme weather events, people often report feelings of distress and hopelessness [70]. Through these effects, materialistic values and goals represent a form of environmental violence that is enacted by individuals and supported by pro-consumption cultural norms.

There are also moral issues at play here. As research shows that coming from a background of economic insecurity can lead to greater increases in materialism into adulthood [25, 71], disadvantaged children are more likely to experience the adverse effects of materialism on their well-being. This relationship between socioeconomic insecurity and materialism has been suggested to be partly attributable to the fact that children from deprived backgrounds tend to have higher rates of advertising exposure and a stronger belief in the credibility of advertising [23]. TV is an inexpensive form of entertainment compared with sporting, musical, or other social and recreational activities that are less easily afforded by families that are more financially stretched or have fewer amenities in their local area.

A further moral issue is that the negative environmental effects of materialistic lifestyles will not be uniformly felt across the globe. Those individuals in developing countries, especially in Africa and across South Asia, will be the first to feel the negative effects of global warming [72, 73]. However, despite being hit hardest by the environmental consequences of consumer lifestyles, those in developing countries contribute least to the problem. An individual in Europe consumes three times as many resources as an individual in Asia, and four times as many as an individual in Africa [74]. Accordingly, it appears that both the direct and indirect adverse consequences of materialism as a form of environmental violence are more likely to hit less advantaged groups.

16.3 Flow Experiences

Given the problems presented by materialistic lifestyles, it is important that we explore alternative ways of living that may enhance both human well-being and planetary health and, hence, be a means of combating environmental violence. I wish to focus on the potential benefits that flow experiences can offer to these areas. Flow describes a state of optimal experience whereby a person’s attention is completely focused on the activity they are engaged in [75]. This state of concentration can be so intense that individuals become temporarily unaware of their everyday worries and feel transported into a new reality. There is no attention left over that can process any stimuli other than those directly relevant to the activity [76, 77]. Although normally one would need to expend a lot of effort to maintain such intense concentration, during flow there is less perceived effort required to stay focused on the task [75].

This intense concentration helps create other phenomenological characteristics of flow. For example, individuals often stop perceiving themselves as separate from the actions they are performing [77]. This blurring of the boundaries between the self and the action can give rise to an experience of effortless movement, as individuals are not aware of any conscious effort to initiate their actions. They can also begin to experience a sense of oneness with the activity for the same reasons. Granting all attention to the activity also means that there is no attention available for self-scrutiny, and self-consciousness temporarily disappears. Rather than being pre-occupied with living up to a certain standard, one is free to engage with a challenge in the absence of fear of failure, ridicule, or embarrassment. Self-consciousness returns after the flow experience subsides [76, 77]. Similarly, individuals are not paying attention to the passing of time and, hence, during flow, perception of time is altered such that hours may seem to go by in minutes, or alternatively, minutes may feel like hours [77]. The former experience appears to be more common [75]. Descriptions of what it feels like to be in flow are given as follows [78].

My mind isn’t wandering. I am not thinking of something else. I am totally involved in what I am doing. My body feels good. I don’t seem to hear anything. The world seems to be cut off from me. I am less aware of myself and my problems.

My concentration is like breathing I never think of it. When I start, I really do shut out the world. I am really quite oblivious to my surroundings after I really get going. I think that the phone could ring, and the doorbell could ring or the house burn down or something like that. When I start I really do shut out the world. Once I stop I can let it back in again.

I am so involved in what I am doing. I don’t see myself as separate from what I am doing.

Being in a flow state is highly enjoyable. So much so that the experience is said to be intrinsically motivating. That is, it is so enjoyable and rewarding to be in flow that individuals will choose to engage in the activity providing flow for them simply for the sake of doing the activity, and not to gain any external rewards such as money or praise. This may occur even if engagement in the activity incurs great costs against the person. For example, a person who experiences flow when playing football may choose to continually practice the sport, even in bad weather or when dealing with other life pressures. For these reasons, the flow experience is often referred to as an “autotelic” (auto = self, telos = goal) experience because the activity is seen as an end worth striving for in itself. Each experience of flow increases the actor’s motivation to experience it again [75, 76].

Flow experiences are suggested to be more likely to occur when certain conditions are present. Often flow is spoken of as a “high challenge high skill” experience because it is suggested to occur when there is both a matching of the level of challenge presented by an activity and the individual’s skillset, and this matching occurs above an individual’s average skill level for the activity [79]. This means that people feel that they are being stretched to perform at a level that is good for them, but still able to eventually overcome any challenges. It is important to highlight that everyone’s own perception of their skills in comparison to the challenges present in a situation is more important than their objective skillset. If an individual perceives there to be a match between their skills and the activity, then this is more important than any objective matching in terms of experiencing flow [80].

Other conditions that support flow include that the task has clear goals. Having clear goals helps people to know what they need to achieve and, thus, what they need to focus on to get there. Being aware of the purpose of one’s actions also helps to maintain connection with the task [75]. Alongside perceiving clear goals, flow is also more likely to occur if individuals are receiving unambiguous feedback concerning their progress toward these goals. Feedback could be in the form of bodily awareness or cues from the environment [76]. Feedback does not have to be positive; its purpose is to help the actor adjust their behavior appropriately in response to the demands of the task. Receiving feedback concerning the consequences of one’s actions also helps to support the feelings of control that are common during flow [77]. Individuals feel as though they are acting freely and can directly influence the outcome of the activity.

Although Csikszentmihalyi [77] highlighted that, theoretically, any activity could be molded to support flow, certain activities have been shown to support flow experiences more frequently than others. For instance, work activities have been suggested to be well equipped to support flow in that people often have clear goals that they are working toward. Outside of work, the leisure activities that have been found to better support the experience of flow include reading, sports, and creative activities [81]. Many of these are “everyday” activities that do not have to require significant investments of time or money. In line with this, recent work by Isham and Jackson [82] has explored the demographic associates of the extent to which people experience flow among a largely representative sample of adults in the UK. Findings document that factors such as age, gender, educational attainment, and socioeconomic status had a very little role to play in accounting for how often individuals reported experiencing the characteristics of flow, explaining less than 7% of variation in scores overall. Accordingly, within contemporary societies, such as the UK, flow experiences appear to be fairly dispersed across different demographic groups. Much of the research that has been conducted on flow to date has tended to focus on individual experiences of flow. Nevertheless, emerging work documents that flow can also occur in group contexts whereby flow is sometimes experienced on a more collective level as teams effectively cooperate to perform a task together [83].

16.4 Flow as an Antidote to Environmental Violence

It may not be immediately obvious why flow experiences should be an antidote to environmental violence. Within the field of positive psychology, flow is considered an optimal and largely beneficial experience. However, many of these benefits have been confined to the areas of individual well-being and performance. Athletes who experience flow during practice and competitions, or students who experience flow when studying, are shown to have better finishing positions and grades than those who do not experience flow [84, 85], for example. In this chapter, I aim to highlight that flow’s benefits extend beyond individual outcomes to ecological well-being. By being able to enhance individual and ecological well-being in tandem, flow experiences offer a powerful tool for limiting environmental violence.

16.4.1 Flow Enhances Individual Well-Being

Having frequent or intense experiences of flow has consistently been linked to higher levels of individual well-being. People who spend more time in flow tend to say that they are more satisfied with their lives [86]. Similarly, experiencing flow in particular contexts such as work can enhance satisfaction with that specific life domain [87]. In addition to influencing people’s evaluations of the quality of their lives, flow can also impact the degree to which people experience both positive and negative emotions. Especially in the moments immediately following a flow experience, people have been shown to experience a boost in positive feelings [88, 89] and a decrease in negative feelings [90]. As people increase or decrease their engagement in flow, they have been shown to display concurrent increases and decreases in their self-esteem [91]. This increase in self-esteem as people come to experience flow more often may be because, following an experience of flow, the “self might be said to grow” ([76], p. 41). It has developed new skills by stretching the mind or body to its limit.

Parallels have also been drawn between the characteristics of eudaimonic well-being and the experience of flow [92, 93]. Eudaimonic well-being describes an individual’s sense of well-being that is more focused on meaning, personal development, and purposeful action than simply feeling good [94]. It has been suggested to have similarities with flow experiences in that flow involves successfully completing a challenging task (therefore acting at the top of one’s ability level), when the purpose of the activity is clear, and the individual has chosen to engage in the activity because they themselves want to. For these reasons, Fullager and Kelloway [88] highlighted that flow may represent a transient state of eudaimonic well-being. In line with this, Asakawa [86] reported that the more time an individual spent in a flow state, the greater their sense of fulfillment (referred to in Japanese as “Jujitsu-kan”). Because one of the main components of eudaimonic well-being is that individuals work to fulfill their potential, a sense of fulfillment can imply greater levels of eudaimonic well-being.

16.4.2 Flow Supports Ecological Well-Being

While research has been documenting a positive association between flow and personal well-being for several decades, academics and practitioners have only recently turned their attention to the links between flow and ecological well-being [95], which describes the well-being of the Earth’s natural systems alongside that of its inhabitants. One of the first studies to explore this link came from Isham et al. [96]. They examined experience sampling data taken from the members of 500 families in the United States. Experience sampling is a method whereby people are prompted to report what they are doing, who they are with, and how they are feeling at random times during the day. It is a useful method for getting real-time measures of people’s everyday experiences. Isham et al. used data surrounding how participants were feeling to infer in which cases they were having stronger experiences of flow. They then correlated this with the greenhouse gas intensity of the activities in which they reported having varying degrees of flow. Results demonstrated that people reported having stronger experiences of flow in activities with lower greenhouse gas intensities. In other words, flow experiences appeared to be more likely to occur in less environmentally costly activities. There were particular types of activities that appeared to often support the experience of flow while having low environmental costs. These revolved around the five categories of: (1) positive, romantic relationships (e.g., spending time with a partner and physical/sexual intimacy); (2) contemplative activities (e.g., prayer, yoga, and meditation); (3) creative activities (e.g., arts and crafts and performing arts); (4) sports and physical exercise (e.g., cycling, running, aerobics, and ball games); and (5) social engagement (e.g., playing with children and talking with neighbors). The authors of this work were at pains to note that they are not suggesting that flow experiences only occur in less environmentally costly activities, but the fact that these types of actions can effectively support flow is a promising sign that well-being can be achieved in the absence of a reliance on material consumption.

By allowing people to find intrinsic reward in more sustainable activities, flow experiences should prompt further engagement in those activities due to the intrinsically motivating nature of flow. This is one way in which flow can encourage participation in more sustainable lifestyles [97]. A more recent study can be seen to further support this notion. Whittaker et al. [98] found that if people experienced flow as they were using an app that featured games promoting sustainable behaviors, they evaluated the act of engaging in sustainable behavior more positively and had stronger intentions to enact sustainable behaviors themselves in the future. Accordingly, when people experience flow in more sustainable activities or those promoting sustainable behaviors, they may come to have more positive views on acting in ways that will support environmental well-being.

A further way in which flow may support environmental well-being is by influencing the strength of personal values. Values represent people’s beliefs about what is important to strive for in life [99]. They are important because they are a strong guide for people’s judgments and actions. People will act in ways that are in line with their values. For example, as we have already noted in this chapter, if someone has strong materialistic values, whereby they believe it is important to acquire money and material goods, then they are likely to spend more time shopping [63]. Although values are suggested to be somewhat stable over time [100], they are still subject to change as an individual matures or experiences situations which challenge their perceptions of what is desirable [101].

Isham and Jackson [102] aimed to test whether having frequent flow experiences could influence the strength of people’s personal values. They focused on a specific category of values known as self-transcendent values. Self-transcendent values cover the importance people place on the well-being of the environment and other people [103]. When people hold strong self-transcendent values, they are more likely to engage in pro-environmental and prosocial behaviors [104, 105], report greater support for environmental charities [106], and have more favorable attitudes toward policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions [107]. Promoting the uptake of self-transcendent values can, therefore, be an important step in encouraging practices that support ecological well-being.

The reason Isham and Jackson [102] predicted that having experiences of flow may be able to encourage stronger self-transcendent values is because flow can be considered a self-transcendent experience [95, 108, 109]. During flow, people lose self-consciousness and so are not focused on themselves as an isolated entity. There is also a reduction in the salience of the boundaries between the self and “other” as people start to experience a sense of oneness with the activity that they are engaged in. Given that people are less self-focused during flow, it may encourage them to care more about nonself-entities, such as other people and nature [110]. Indeed, other experiences that have been described as self-transcendent, such as mindfulness and awe, have also been shown to lead to greater engagement in prosocial and pro-environmental behaviors [111, 112]. To test their prediction, Isham and Jackson administered surveys to a sample of UK adults at three points over the six-month period. At each time point, participants completed measures of the strength of their self-transcendent values and how often they were experiencing flow in their day-to-day lives. Their analysis revealed that as people increased how often they were experiencing flow, they showed subsequent increases in the strength of their self-transcendent values. This study therefore offers a sign that flow experiences may be able to cause people to value ecological well-being more strongly; see Figure 16.1.

Figure 16.1 Graphical representation of materialism, flow, and their links to environmental and human health and well-being

16.5 Practical Steps for the Reduction of Environmental Violence

The reduction of environmental violence will require deliberate steps across governments, institutions, and individuals. In line with its theoretical focus, this chapter makes two general recommendations to support the reduction of environmental violence. First, the prevalence of materialistic values and goals needs to be reduced. Second, the experience of flow needs to be promoted. These two recommendations must both be undertaken, as neither is sufficient on its own. If materialistic values, goals, and activities are reduced, then people will need alternative values and actions to fill the void, which is where flow experiences can make a valuable contribution. Equally, research has shown that strong materialistic values and goals undermine people’s tendency to experience flow [113–115]. Therefore, flow experiences are unlikely to be experienced frequently while materialistic values and goals are still rife.

There are several ways in which the strength of materialistic values and goals could be reduced [116]. One key route would be to reduce the prevalence of consumer advertising within societies. Research demonstrates that exposure to consumer advertising and brand logos encourages materialistic values [9, 23]. In São Paulo, billboard advertising is banned under the Clean City Law, with Mayor Gilberto Kassab calling outdoor advertisements “visual pollution” [117]. Advertisements targeted at children could also be banned, as they have been in places such as Norway and Quebec [118]. This latter point is especially important given the issues I have highlighted surrounding how children from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds are more susceptible to adopting materialistic values and goals due to more time spent watching television [23]. If we cannot limit the amount of advertising people are exposed to, then parents should be encouraged to discuss the intent/accuracy of advertising regularly with their families. Research has shown that children are less susceptible to advertising and consumer messages if their family regularly discuss advertising and consumption issues [119]. Such education around the purpose of advertising could also be included within the school curriculum.

Materialistic values are often viewed favorably by governments and advertisers in the belief that such values and associated behaviors help to fuel economic growth [16]. Given this, consideration of alternative economic models may help to reduce encouragement of materialism on a more macro scale. Academic research in the fields of “degrowth” and “postgrowth,” for example, is exploring how we might live in societies whereby rising consumption, productivity, and economic growth are not at the heart of prosperity and government policy [31, 120]. Governments would do well to pay genuine attention to such research and implement appropriate policies accordingly, in order to help mold societies that are focused on pro-environmental and prosocial practices, rather than the endless acquisition of materials goods.

A further means of reducing materialistic values and goals is to encourage the types of personal values that conflict with materialism. Individual values do not exist in a vacuum, but are rather part of a complex, interrelated system [103]. Within this system, some types of values are complementary and so easy to hold at the same time. For example, it is logical to both be concerned with upholding family traditions and conforming to rules. However, some types of values conflict with one another and are, thus, harder to hold at the same time. For example, it is difficult to care strongly about helping other people while also highly valuing having power and control over others. If certain types of values are hard to hold at the same time, then emphasizing and promoting those values that conflict with materialism could help to reduce the strength of materialistic values and goals. Materialism conflicts with self-transcendent values, which place importance on nonself-entities such as family, charity, and the environment [121, 122]. Research has shown that getting people to reflect on two personal self-transcendent values [123] can successfully increase the strength of this value type. This form of reflection could therefore be practiced by individuals to reduce the strength of their materialistic values. Advertisers are also well equipped to use their creative skills to help people see alternative, positive visions of the future. Organizations such as Purpose Disruptors (www.purposedisruptors.org/) and Glimpse (https://weglimpse.co/) in the UK are already developing campaigns which focus on promoting the importance of self-transcendent values such as love, nature, and community.

It is my hope that encouraging the incidence of flow experiences could also act as a means of reducing materialistic values. For one, flow experiences appear to be able to encourage stronger self-transcendent values [102] which conflict with materialistic values. Further, research shows that when people are experiencing self-doubt or poor well-being, they are more likely to orient toward materialistic values and goals [26]. This is because they may view material goods either as a distraction or as a means of building a “better” self [124]. Existing work has shown that gratitude could reduce materialistic values because it boosts people’s feelings of security be enhancing their awareness of other people’s kindness [125, 126]. If flow experiences can enhance individual well-being, then they may reduce the need for people to seek satisfaction through material goods.

Encouraging flow experiences can involve two processes. On the one hand, we can focus on altering the environment to make it more supportive of flow. On the other hand, we can try to alter the individual such that they hold the characteristics or capabilities that make them more suited to crafting flow experiences. One way in which we could alter the environment to make it more supportive of flow would be to increase free access to flow-supportive activities. Local provision of sports or arts clubs would help to give people the opportunity to find flow. It is important that these activities are free and accessible to all to make sure that participation is not limited to certain socioeconomic or demographic groups. It is also important that people have time to engage in activities that may be supportive of flow for them. To this end, a shorter working week may be beneficial. Several organizations are currently trialing a four-day work week, with advocates arguing that it could raise individual well-being while reducing carbon emissions [127]. On top of this, it has been suggested that a shorter work week could help create jobs for groups (e.g., women) who might otherwise be excluded from work due, for example, to greater caring responsibilities [128]. This may, therefore, also increase access to flow experiences at work for different demographic groups. When participating in flow-supportive activities, it is important that people are not being externally motivated, as research shows that flow experiences are more likely when people are intrinsically motivated (i.e., doing something primarily for enjoyment) [129]. Therefore, parents should not try to force their children to partake in activities using rewards such as new toys or more pocket money. Instead, they should allow children to explore and let them know that it is okay to do something just because you like it.

There are several individual characteristics that research has shown to be linked to more frequent experiences of flow. When an individual holds many of these characteristics, we might suggest they have something like a “flow personality” [130]. Examples of traits that might be part of this flow personality include high levels of openness to new experiences. This trait encourages individuals to seek opportunities to engage in new, challenging activities that may be better suited to supporting flow, rather than staying on routine or boring actions that are not conducive to flow. While research suggests that interventions to encourage the trait of openness often do not result in significant or large changes [131], some studies have had success using cognitive training such as learning new puzzles [132]. Another quality of highly flow-prone individuals is that they often have good self-control [114]. This characteristic allows people to be better at regulating and focusing their attention, such that they are not so easily distracted and are more likely to have the high levels of concentration that occur during flow. Research has shown that higher levels of self-control can be developed through practices such as mindfulness [133] and cognitive training that focuses on exposure to reward delays, goal setting, or breaking habits [134, 135].

16.6 Conclusions

Environmental violence refers to the process through which humanity comes to harm its own health and well-being through unsustainable patterns of action [32]. In this chapter, I have outlined how materialistic values and goals, and the corresponding lifestyles that they promote, can be considered as a form of environmental violence that is normalized across consumer cultures. I also suggest that flow experiences can be a beneficial means of reducing environmental violence and improving human health and well-being because of how they can both directly enhance human well-being and promote more sustainable values and behaviors. The key aim now is to find pathways that orient people away from lifestyles dominated by materialism toward lifestyles that provide ample opportunities for finding flow.