Much of this chapter is devoted to clarifying what it means for non-sentient entities, including plants, species, and ecosystems, as well as human groups, to suffer harm (as distinct from being wronged) and what it means for that harm to be intolerable. More of this chapter is taken up with plant life, species, and ecosystems than with human groups. But chapters 9 and 10 revisit at greater length issues of harm to human groups. Environmental atrocities are not represented in Part ii of this book, although torture of laboratory animals is considered in chapter 8. Yet, in responding to atrocities, it is important to avoid not only evils to other people but environmental atrocities as well. It is part of the agenda of this chapter to give sense to environmental atrocities as not entirely human-centered or even pain-­centered. Thinking about harm to human groups, insofar as they are not sentient entities, benefits from thinking about harm to non-sentient entities in the natural environment. And so, most of the focus in this chapter on harm to human groups is reserved to the penultimate section.

CONTEXTS AND PROBLEMATIC CASES

In The Atrocity Paradigm, I baldly asserted that evils are done to trees and ecosystems and then deferred indefinitely the task of explaining how or what that would mean.