Violence calls for a response, especially in its relation to the environment, where it is inescapably directly linked to matters of justice. Ongoing neocolonial extraction comes with the profound effect of altering human lives and their environment, to such extent that parts of the planet have become or are rapidly becoming uninhabitable. The brutal inequity of this emergency continues to prioritise capital at the cost of humans and the marginalisation of environmental issues, with devastating impact, accompanied by pervasive social and political injustices.

The “Environment” strand of essays that is the result of the PARSE conference on “Violence” offers various examples and unpacks different conceptual propositions to counter imperialist legacies and patriarchal violences perpetrated against and upon the Earth. The contributions here engage in transdisciplinary research and with practices that confront, critique and reconfigure these environmentally and politically charged matters and the narratives that shape them.

This selection of contributions, alongside an additional text, aims to continue the trajectory of the discussions and exchanges across disciplines and artistic practices, offering considerations around representation and extractivism, aesthetics as ethics, archives and photography as a tool for witnessing the slow violence enacted on the Earth.

Drawing from and engaging with Black critical theory, environmental humanities, continental and contemporary philosophy, Axelle Karera’s keynote sets the framework for a series of reflections on the ethics of relationality in new materialist ontology, interdependency and species entanglement. Addressing racial ecocide, “The Black Anthropocene” intervenes into Western hegemonic discourse relating to the category of “human” and the Anthropocene. Karera’s theoretical intervention in Western philosophical thought provides an urgently needed revision through which to (re)consider the conditions under which race emerges as a category of human existence in the context of geo-ecological definitions.

Among the non-spectacle of slow violence, is it imaginable to live in peaceful accord with the Earth, in a state of interspecies co-existence? Among the ruins of neo-liberal caretaking, is non-violence realistic? “Peace with the Earth” is an artistic and translation project by Åsa Sonjasdotter, which features video documentation of a discussion with Åsa Elzén, Sanna Hellgren and Annalena Bergquist, held at KvinnSam, the Swedish National Resource Library for Gender Studies, located at the University of Gothenburg. “Peace With the Earth” presents a historic queer feminist movement that analysed and responded to the connections between agriculture and the claiming of ownership over land and war. The image selected for the cover of this issue features material from the Fogelstad archive at KvinnSam, where the 1934 drawing shows Elisabeth Tamm’s radical act of mapping five plots of hereditary leaseholds (“åborätter”) for the purpose of transforming her privately owned land to a commons.

In conversation with Pedro Aparicio Llorente and Catalina Mejía Moreno, Afro-Colombian socio-environmental leader Josefina Klinger shares the story of the Migration Festival in Nuquí, in the Colombian Pacific. In the article “Con la selva en la cabeza y la mano en el corazón (With the rainforest in one’s head, and the hand in one’s heart)” Klinger presents this festival as a critical proposition to interrogate violence through the lens of a non-violence project, where the festival empowers the community and their relationship to their land.

In the article “Slow Violence, Bergsonian Time and Climate Change—Contemporary Photographs of the Rhône Glacier”, Ruby Gilding draws attention to the role photography can play in representing “slow violence” and its effects on climate change. The photographs give an insight in the long (his)story of how human interventions have accelerated the impact on glacial formations.

In “Human: Parasites, Posthumanism and Papatūānuku”, Emmy Rākete outlines an alternative framework for thinking about planetary relations that draws on Māori philosophical traditions, where everything exists in deep and fundamental relation to everything else. It upends some of the assumptions made in contemporary Western thought about how interspecies coexistence might be a radically new proposition in materialist philosophy. Rākete argues that “Everything exists in deep fundamental relation to everything else, and while functions of the ecology may interact with one another, no relationship of sub- or superordination can be established between them.”

In the article “There are no Extinctions in Relations without Bodies: On the Violence of Flat Relational Ontologies”, Silke Panse critically engages with and expands the discourse on new materialisms, asking for a political accountability of the collapsing of categories:

Flat ontologies do not hierarchically differentiate between an endangered animal or plant, a human-made plastic bag, a quantum, a code, a dog, a hedge; between an image and what is in an image, a character and an actor, art and life, other-than-humans and humans. Posthuman ecologies are also post-nonhuman. They do not distinguish between the different kinds of affects and effects of violence by figures in images and on the planet. But while a medium can only be destroyed, a body can be violated.

In Panse’s view, with the poshumanist insistence on relationality, the question of differentiation of bodies further invites some form of radical intervention and response.

To take accountability for and address ongoing violences demands a disruption and change of the present, which requires a transformation of hegemonic conceptions of the world and our agency within it. This means not only re-articulating political ecologies, hierarchies and norms, but acting, supporting and collectivising. Urgent in this response is listening, observing, re-considering and demonstrating alternatives. The selection of texts we share here are aimed at initiating further responses; collectively they offer a range of historical positions and examples alongside contemporary artistic and theoretical attempts to bear witness, critique and make change possible. This struggle the authors highlight is ongoing, where solidarities among the contributors are forged through their practices.