Once upon a time, humans did not have to contend with violence beyond the hearth and their face-to-face community.

Certainly, humans have had a long history and prehistory of ignoring the long-term impacts of their own practices, in society and on the landscape. When those systems did not kick back within a single generation, it was easier to ignore surpluses of population, depletions of resources, and the atrocities of impersonal violence through torture and devastation. These chapters consider the recent past and ponder bleak futures—so bleak that even tentative interventions might be better than none.