3 - Environmental Violence across the Earth System and the Human Niche

Summary

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.