The production of hazardous pollutants is part of everyday life for most every human; the problem is that the degree of production per person today is greater than it has ever been – and only getting worse. We all participate in this process, but not equally. We are currently in a moment of geologic history where something living is now the single largest driver of planetary change: humans. In the process of creating this change we are also creating substantial and unnecessary human health hazards, what I call environmental violence. Environmental violence (EV) encompasses many activities and processes – but certainly not everything – that humans do, particularly processes of consumption and production that exceed well past meeting basic needs. In this chapter I work through the theoretical threads that underpin the concept of EV and work to situate EV in human evolutionary and geologic history. I also chart out the rest of the book, providing a roadmap of where we are going and the materials, evidence, case studies, and methods that I will employ along the journey.

In this chapter I take a deep dive into contemporary examples of EV including its sources and the pathways of EV to people’s lives, as well as the everyday life practices that both produce and are affected by EV. We will see how EV is both produced by everyday life practices, and how it harms or changes everyday life practices: it is both a product and transformer of the contemporary human niche, a recursive linkage. I more fully examine aspects of time, accumulation, and scale. I discuss the mutual emission and dynamism between toxic and nontoxic pollutants, since they are often emitted together, as copollutants. I close the chapter by reviewing the politics of EV and demonstrating why the anthropological ecosystems approach, informed by complex adaptive systems and human niche construction theory, is vital to the process of identifying, tracking, and measuring EV in the Earth system and its impacts on everyday life.

This chapter develops an analytically functional concept of EV and begins to identify its sources, pathways, and outlets into the global ecosystem and everyday life. The chapter then expands on the core concepts of Earth Systems theory, complex adaptive systems and human niche construction to address topics such as vulnerability and violence, especially cultural, structural, and direct violence. The next step will be to build and parse a heuristic model that conveys the range of the concept’s applications and traces EV’s production, pathways, mediators, and outlets, as well as its facilitators and effects throughout its cycling. Next, the chapter examines previously developed and related concepts of ecologically associated violence. The purpose of this is not to take issue with them, but rather to synthesize and build upon previous iterations. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of the nuances and politics of EV. These ideas will be developed further in Chapter 6. Nevertheless, a brief presentation is useful here because it helps to understand how EV has become normalized and ingrained in the everyday life of the contemporary human niche.