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Summary: From climate change to toxic pollution and the interactive effects of multiple pollution streams, human health is under siege. Human-produced environmental risks to health and wellbeing are high and contributing to patterns of global morbidity, mortality, economic inequality, displacement, and insecurity. The implications of human-produced environmental harms to global health are complex just as are their causes. The concept of environmental violence offers a potentially robust frame for engaging this issue. We argue that a more specified and structured framework and definition of environmental violence—focusing on human-produced harms by way of pollution emissions—is both timely and beneficial for engaging the complexities of global public health. To clarify why and how this is the case, we review the literature for publications that use the term environmental violence and we subsequently propose a specific definition focused on human-produced pollution along with a framework for tracking and analysing environmental violence and its constituent components. Finally, we discuss the potential value of our framework for research and policy making regarding human health.

Wildlife that inhabit urban landscapes face the dual challenge of negotiating their positions in their group while navigating obstacles of anthropogenically modified landscapes. The dynamics of urban environments can result in novel injuries and mortalities for these animals. However, these negative impacts can be mitigated through planning, and onsite veterinary care like that provided by the Ubud Monkey Forest in Bali, Indonesia. We examined 275 recorded injuries and mortalities among six social groups of long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) brought to the veterinary clinic from 2015–2018. We fit the probabilities of injury vs. death among macaques brought to the clinic using a multilevel logistic regression model to infer the relationship between injury vs. death and associated demographic parameters. Males were more likely to sustain injuries and females were more likely to die. The frequency of injuries and mortalities changed over the four-year study period, which was reflected in our model. The odds of mortality were highest among young macaques and the odds of injury vs. mortality varied across the six social groups. We categorized injuries and mortalities as “natural” or “anthropogenic”. Most injuries and mortalities were naturally occurring, but powerlines, motorized vehicles, and plastic present ongoing anthropogenic threats to macaque health. Most wounds and injuries were successfully treated, with healthy animals released back to their group. We suggest other sites with high levels of human–alloprimate interplays consider the Ubud Monkey Forest veterinary office as a model of care and potentially adopt their approaches.

Abstract Robbing and bartering is a habitual behavior among free-ranging long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) at a single site in Bali, Indonesia. The behavior consists of three main elements: (1) a macaque takes an item from a human; (2) the macaque maintains possession of the item; then (3) the macaque releases or hands off the item after accepting a food offer from a human. In this paper, we analyze data on individual variation in robbing and bartering among subadult males in relation to dominance rank. Using focal animal sampling we collected 197 observation hours of data on 13 subadult males from two groups (6 from Celagi; 7 from Riting) at the Uluwatu temple site from May 2017 to March 2018, recording 44 exchanges of items for food from 92 total robberies following 176 total attempts. We also measured dominance rank using interaction data from our focal animals. Dominance rank was strongly positively correlated with robbery efficiency in Riting, but not Celagi, meaning that more dominant Riting subadult males exhibited fewer overall robbery attempts per successful robbery. We suggest the observed variation in robbing and bartering practices indicates there are crucial, yet still unexplored, social factors at play for individual robbing and bartering decisions.

The social media milieu in which we are enmeshed has substantive impacts on our beliefs and perceptions. Recent work has established that this can play a role in influencing understanding of, and reactions to, public health information. Twitter, in particular, appears to play a substantive role in the public health information ecosystem. From July 25th, 2020 to November 15th, 2020, we collected weekly tweets related to COVID19 keywords and assessed their networks, patterns and properties. Our analyses revealed the dominance of a handful of individual accounts as central structuring agents in the networks of tens of thousands of tweets and retweets, and thus millions of views, related to specific COVID19 keywords. These few individual accounts and the content of their tweets, mentions, and retweets are substantially overrepresented in terms of public exposure to, and thus interaction with, critical elements of public health information in the pandemic. Here we report on one particularly striking aspect of our dataset: the prominent position of @realdonaldtrump in Twitter networks related to four key terms of the COVID19 pandemic in 2020.

Antecedentes: La agricultura y ganadería modifican la estructura y funcionamiento del bosque tropical seco. El impacto de estas actividades ha sido evaluado en regiones de Jalisco y Yucatán, en donde la agricultura de roza, tumba y quema, y la ganadería extensiva son los principales tipos de manejo. Sin embargo, existen otras regiones como Guerrero, en donde la agricultura es combinada con la ganadería. No obstante, su impacto sobre el bosque no ha sido evaluado hasta el momento. Pregunta: ¿Cuál es el impacto de la agricultura/ganadería y ganadería sobre el bosque tropical seco de Zirándaro, Guerrero? Sitio y años de estudio: El estudio fue realizado en Zirándaro, Guerrero, en diciembre de 2014 y junio de 2015. Métodos: Se seleccionaron 9 sitios con agricultura/ganadería, ganadería y bosque para muestrear su vegetación y suelo, y calcular 10 indicadores ecológicos. Además, se colectaron 9 muestras de suelo para evaluar sus propiedades físicas y químicas. Resultados: Los suelos de la agricultura/ganadería y ganadería tuvieron mayor densidad aparente, pero menor porosidad y materia orgánica que el suelo del bosque. La agricultura/ganadería y ganadería tuvieron baja riqueza específica y cobertura del dosel. La agricultura/ganadería tuvo menor obstrucción visual y mayor proporción de claros basales que la ganadería. Estas diferencias sugieren que la agricultura/ganadería tiene mayor impacto sobre el bosque que la ganadería. Sin embargo, no se encontraron diferencias significativas en la mayoría de los indicadores ecológicos. Conclusiones: La agricultura/ganadería y ganadería tienen un impacto ecológico relativamente similar sobre el bosque tropical seco de Zirándaro, Guerrero.

We are in the Anthropocene. For millennia, human actions have been shaping the world to the degree that they are inscribed in the geological and ecological record. Recently, this has been occurring with increasing speed and influence. This means we need to be asking integrative and effective questions about the world and how we relate to and in it. Human niche construction has broad and deep effects not just on landscapes and environments, but on the myriad of other beings sharing space with us. Humans are self-appointed ecosystem managers and lead actors in seeking sustainability for planetary and local ecosystems. In order to accomplish this, we need to better understand how anthromes are shaped, inhabited and altered. To this end, we present two differentexamplesofanthropogeniclandscapes;oneinEthiopiaandoneinBali,Indonesia. Theseare landscapesthatareco-constructedbymultiplespeciesthroughcomplexwebsofecologies,economies and histories and represent the way that humans are drawn into relationships with non-humans; relationships which in turn alter landscapes.