Violence is woven into the tapestry of human history. The ascent and collapse of societies is shaped by war and organized violence. As these dynamics transform, so do the consequences for the human and more-than-human world. Modern environmental degradation and inequality remain deeply entangled with warmaking and large-scale organized violence. The case of the United States demonstrates the complex and developing tension among warmaking, statemaking, and environmental degradation. The United States did not simply conquer and settle North America, it altered ecosystems and pursued a policy of ecological imperialism—from the Atlantic to the Pacific (Crosby, Ecological imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900; 1986; see also McNeill & Painter, The global environmental footprint of the U.S. military, 1789-2003. In: War and the environment: Military destruction in the modern age. pp. 10–31; 2009). The links between environmental degradation and warmaking would intensify as industrialization gained strength and as the United States became the world’s leading military power. The treadmill of destruction theory argues that environmental destruction can be generated by the inertial growth dynamics of national militaries and militarism (Clark et al., Int J Sociol 40(2):23–43, 2010; Hooks and Smith, Am Sociol Rev 69(4):558–575, 2004; Hooks and Smith, Org Environ 18:19–37, 2005), operating independently of, or synergistically with, economic growth dynamics. The political violence and callous cruelty that drives environmental inequality is an important and understudied subject for environmental sociologists. We argue that a productive path forward is to focus on ontological asymmetry (defined and discussed in the chapter) and the meso-scale of analysis. This approach provides a clearer picture of the multi-scalar processes, historical conditions, social context, and structural factors that drive environmental degradation.