Understanding the causes of intrastate armed conflict and civil wars – whether as individual cases or in a more general sense – is the most compelling but perhaps also the most elusive challenge in the study of such conflicts. In this field, causal relationships are complex and difficult to establish beyond doubt, and discrete direct causes rarely exist. This chapter explores the methodological challenges that arise when seeking to identify direct or indirect causes of civil wars, in particular across multiple cases. It presents key theories of civil war onset in relation to political, economic, social, institutional, ecological, identity, and governance conditions. It gives particular attention to “greed” and “grievance” as key concepts for understanding why intrastate armed conflicts occur, the association between democratization and increased risk of violent conflict, and the concept of “ethnic conflict” as a cause of civil war. The question of whether it is more helpful to focus on enabling factors – the conditions that allow violent uprisings to occur – or motivations for participating in armed conflict to understand the causes of civil war is also discussed. The chapter concludes by considering the implications these debates raise for policies designed to prevent violent conflict and build sustainable peace.

This chapter argues that such judicialisation before the ICJ has not developed international environmental law in a way favourable to victims of environmental degradation. It first observes that certain promising human rights-focused environmental disputes were discontinued, indicating that other forms of peaceful dispute settlement remain significant in the environmental context. It then argues that raising arguments in certain incidental proceedings in environmental disputes, such as counterclaims, have limited the potential for certain decisions to develop peoples’ rights in environmental disputes. Finally, it argues that the Court’s perceived judicial caution has limited its ability to clarify the role of local populations in environmental impact assessments (EIAs) and develop certain environmental principles in light of populations, such as the precautionary principle or the principle of intergenerational equity.

Hopkins developed an ecological poetics informed by evolutionary theory, energy physics, and Catholic theology, bearing witness to local devastations of an unsustainable Victorian global economy. His sensitivity to such degradation was heightened by exposure to a range of polluted regions and by the effort to convey poetically his embodied perception of environmental features and patterns. His poems present everything from flashing bird wings, to waves, to wheat fields as dynamically interrelated through the flow of energy, and therefore vulnerable to its squandering by human industry. Such waste is both ecologically and spiritually self-destructive for Hopkins, given that Christ is incarnate in every fibre and force of the material world. His later sonnet ‘Ribblesdale’ manifests these concerns by lamenting a river valley poisoned and denuded by globally destructive industry and industrialized agriculture, even as it affirms vulnerable, accountable membership in a wounded terrestrial body that is divinely indwelt.

This chapter traces the defects of the Chinese corporate-political ecosystem to a combination of lingering Maoist/Communist political practices and a short-term capitalist profit-maximizing mindset that was introduced during the Reform period. The chapter shows the devastating impact of this contradictory ideology on the environment, which has only worsened over the past three decades of reform due to self-interested alliances among local government officials, state-owned enterprises, and private corporations placing economic development and profit-making over the health of their surrounding citizens and natural environment. The result has been a massive ecological and public health crisis and increasing social tensions that threaten the Chinese Communist Party's hold on power.

In this chapter we focus on the intended and unintended side effects of Chinese development finance, which we address from two different angles, both at the country level and at subnational scales. In the first part of this chapter, we investigate whether and to what extent Chinese-financed aid and debt affect recipient countries’ propensity for civil conflict and environmental degradation. We then turn to the question of how Chinese-funded projects might affect the quality of governance in recipient countries and regions. China claims to follow a policy of non-interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign governments, which implies that its allocation decisions are made without considering the quality of governance, so that Chinese funds might prop up rogue regimes and delay much-needed governance reforms. The second part of this chapter turns to the popular claim that significant financial support from China impairs the effectiveness of aid from Western donors and lenders. Specifically, we investigate whether the effects of World Bank aid differ in countries or subnational regions that receive large volumes of Chinese support compared to other recipients.

Currently 7.8 billion people live on Earth, and by 2100 there will be 11.2 billion. As developing countries urbanize, their populations eat more meat and dairy. But if everyone on Earth eats the amount of animal products that we do in the US and Europe, we will need two Earths to feed us all. We are rapidly cutting down rainforests for agriculture, cattle farming, and palm oil production, which is not sustainable. Chronic diseases (heart disease, diabetes, stroke) are closely related to the foods we eat and are also the most common causes of premature death around the world. To reduce chronic diseases and feed a growing world population, many of us should transition to a healthier and more sustainable, plant-based diet. Additionally, new infectious diseases will be an even greater risk in the coming decades with so many people eating a meat-heavy diet due to increased interactions with wildlife – as we destroy their homes in the forests to grow the many animal products humans want to eat. To prevent both chronic and infectious diseases and agriculturally induced climate change, it is absolutely necessary that we transition to a more environmentally sustainable and healthy diet.

Agriculture was a major transition in human social evolution. After its adoption, the size of human communities increased from a few dozen to hundreds of thousands. Societies became organized around surplus food production with an extremely complex division of labor. Human society became ultrasocial. It began to resemble a superorganism – an autonomous, highly integrated network of technologies, institutions, and belief systems dedicated to the production of economic surplus. Agriculture and the institutions that supported it gave us two problems that now threaten our very existence as a species: destabilizing inequality and potentially catastrophic environmental degradation. With agriculture, world views arose to justify and reinforce the subjugation of most individuals to the new hierarchical socioeconomic system. In early state societies, divine right, caste systems, patriarchy, and state religions supported the exploitation of human labor and the domination of nature. Today’s beliefs include the inevitability of progress, selfish individualism, and the sanctity of the market economy.

The afterword focuses on the surprising connections of a century of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history to larger global developments outside of China, considering the potential future development of the Party, either towards more democratisation and power sharing, increasing focus on domestic challenges, or a new Marxist-Leninist world order with Beijing at it’s ideological center. The fate of international socialism is contrasted with the purges of both Stalin and Mao, which are shown to have led directly to the Sino-Soviet conflict from the late 1950s on. The lasting significance of the collapse of the Soviet Union for the CCP provides context for the increasingly close relationship between Xi and Putin, who share a mutual concern over Muslim separatism and demographic shifts within their countries. Connections are drawn between the more positive impacts of the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the Belt and Road initiative, and darker history of global Maoism in Peru and Cambodia, with the latter spurring modernization following a successful Vietnamese intervention. The CCP’s long-standing difficulty of separating Party from ethnicity, particularly in its Southeast Asian allies, is contrasted with inspiration drawn from Japan and Korea in the post-Mao era and the legacy of falling regulation in global trade over the subsequent three decades. The afterword concludes with an exploration of the gradual end of China’s “peaceful rise” during the Xi era, touching on the daunting problems of a declining workforce, environmental degradation, and continuing wide income gaps which face the country’s leaders today, while also praising its pragmatic macroeconomic policies, impressive technological development, and openness to trade relative to the increasingly divided, insular, and unstable US under Trump.

Chapter 5 frames the book’s narrative in the style of a lengthy coda. It is concerned with how the bark’s prevalence, wide fame and general ‘usefulness’ in therapeutic practice among geographically disperse and socially diverse societies affected its natural habitat in the central and northern Andes. The bark’s very ‘mobility’ and the popular demand that arose for it, the chapter argues, altered the harvest areas’ landscape of possession, commerce and demographics, the distribution and abundance of vegetation, and the livelihood, health and fate of the men and women implicated in harvesting, processing and conveying the bark. The chapter reminds readers, at parting, how plant trade, therapeutic exchange and epistemic brokerage are not extricable from time and space. Consumption and the imaginaries, therapeutic practice and medical understandings attendant to it invariably begins with changes to the material world, to physical nature and society.