Causes and cures VIII: Environmental violence

- Environmental violence is an urgent topic for violence studies
- Violence over resources occurs as a result of the political economy
- Secondary violence from the natural world can be severe
- Irreversible damage to the earth's environment threatens human survival
- Climate justice and collective suicide prevention can help guide responsibility

The past two years have been a landmark moment for violence prevention, with the publication of The Global Status Report on Violence Prevention 2014; a historic resolution on violence by the 67th World Health Assembly; and the release of multiple documents on violence by international and United Nations entities, with a corresponding building of momentum in scholarship. Most notably, in September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, addressing the need for violence prevention at an unprecedented scale. In this context, more than ever, violence studies have become a field of its own right. Still, a systematic approach of the topic has been lacking, and no textbook yet synthesizes the knowledge of multiple disciplines toward a cogent understanding. This article is the eighth of a series of fifteen articles that will cover, as an example, an outline of the Global Health Studies course entitled, “Violence: Causes and Cures,” reviewing the major bio-psycho-social and structural-environmental perspectives on violence. Environmental violence, as defined here, includes: (a) the violence between people(s) over natural resources; (b) environmental policies that can be violent against people; (c) the secondary violence from the natural world as a result of human degradation of the earth; and (d) direct damage to the environment by humans that threatens their own survival. We discuss the link between perception of scarcity, access to resources, the political economy, and the urgent problem of environmental violence.