Exploring Green Criminology

Few criminologists have drawn attention to the fact that widespread and significant forms of harm such as green or environmental crimes are neglected by criminology. Others have suggested that green crimes present the most important challenge to criminology as a discipline. This book argues that criminology needs to take green harms more seriously and to be revolutionized so that it forms part of the solution to the large environmental problems currently faced across the world. It asks how criminology should be redesigned to consider green/environmental harm as a key area of study in an era where destruction of the earth and the world’s ecosystem is a major concern and examines why this has remained unaccomplished so far. The chapters in this book apply an environmental frame of reference underlying a green approach to issues which can be addressed from within criminology and which can encourage criminologists and environmentalists to respond and react differently to environmental crime.

This edited collection brings together internationally renowned scholars to explore green criminology through the interdisciplinary lenses of power, harm and justice. The chapters provide innovative case study analyses from around the world that seek to advance theoretical, policy and practice discourses about environmental harm.

In the past three decades, a stream of criminological inquiry has emerged which explores, measures, and theorizes crimes and harms to the environment at the micro-, mezzo-, and macro-levels. This “green criminology”, as it has come to be known, has widened the criminological gaze to consider crimes and harms committed against air, land (from forests to wetlands), nonhuman animals, and water in local, regional, national, and international areas or arenas. Accordingly, green criminology has endeavored to understand the causes and consequences of air and water pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change, corporate environmental crime (e.g., illegal waste disposal), food production and distribution, resource extraction and exploitation, and wildlife trade and trafficking, while also exploring potential responses to these issues. This book seeks to introduce the green criminological perspective to a broader social science audience. Recognizing that green criminology is not the first social science to explore the phenomena and harms at the intersections of humanity and ecology, this book offers an introduction to some of the unique insights developed over nearly 30 years of green criminological thought and scholarship to students, professors, researchers, and practitioners working in the fields of anthropology, economics, environmental humanities, environmental sociology, geography, history, and political ecology. This book contains contributions from researchers in green criminology from around the world, including early- and mid-career scholars, as well as more established voices in the field—all of whom are dedicated to exposing, understanding, and ultimately hoping to thwart further environmental degradation and despoliation.

This book brings the visual dimension of environmental crimes and harms into the field of green criminology. It shows how photographic images can provide a means for eliciting narratives from people who live in polluted areas – describing in detail and from their point of view what they know, think and feel about the reality in which they find themselves living. Natali makes the argument for developing a visual approach for green criminology, with a single case-study as its central focus, revealing the importance of using photo elicitation to appreciate and enhance the reflexive and active role of social actors in the symbolic and social construction of their environmental experiences. Examining the multiple interactions between the images and the words used to describe the socio-environmental worlds in which we live, this book is a call to open the eyes of green criminology to wider and richer explorations of environmental harms and crimes. An innovative and engaging study, this text will be of particular interest to scholars of environmental crime and cultural, green and visual criminologies.

This edited collection is grounded in a green criminological approach to understand whether the law, both in effect and implications, reflects, refracts, or sublimates the social, political and ecological conditions of our times. Since its initial proposal in the 1990s, green criminology has focused the criminological gaze on a wide array of harms and crimes affecting humans, animals other than humans, ecological systems, and the planet as a whole. As a continuously blossoming field of criminological inquiry, green criminology recognizes and examines behaviours that are both illegal and legal (yet detrimental), and in varying ways has made great efforts to provide insight into harms in a more fulsome manner. At the same time, there have been many significant legal instances, domestic, and international, including case law, legislation, regulation, treaties, agreements and executive directives which have troubled the law’s understanding of green harms, illegal and legal activity, pushing legal boundaries in the process. Recognizing that humanity and nature are inextricably integrated, Green Criminology and the Law reflects the range and depth of high-quality research and scholarship, combining contributions from established scholars willing to explore new topics and recent entrants who are breaking new scholarly ground.

This groundbreaking text provides students with an overview and assessment of green criminology as well as a call to action. Green Criminology draws attention to the ways in which the political-economic organization of capitalism causes ecological destruction and disorganization. Focusing on real-world issues of green crime and environmental justice, chapters examine ecological withdrawals, ecological additions, toxic towns, wildlife poaching and trafficking, environmental laws, and nongovernmental environmental organizations. The book also presents an unintimidating introduction to research from the physical sciences on issues such as climate change, pollution levels, and the ecological footprint of humans, providing a truly interdisciplinary foundation for green criminological analysis. To help students succeed in the course—and to encourage them to see themselves as future green criminology researchers—the end-of-chapter study guides include: • Questions and Activities for Students that review topics students should be able to conceptualize and address. • Lessons for Researchers that suggest additional areas of research in the study of green crime.

The application of criminological perspectives to discussion of the environment is a rapidly developing field at the cutting edge of criminology. This innovative but accessible introduction to the key debates in green criminology both familiarises newcomers to the field with the core theories and methodological precepts and challenges them to take a critical approach. In addition to analysing an extensive range of contemporary issues – environmental harm, food and water security, fracking, climate change and genetically modified crops – the text steps back to examine overarching themes, including the power relationships between states, corporations and the human and non-human components of our environment. In this way, Exploring Green Crime prepares readers to approach environmental criminology with a questioning and analytical mind-set. With useful end of chapter summaries, review questions and further reading, the text is ideal for students of criminology, criminal justice, law, sociology and environmental studies.

This critical and cutting edge introduction to the key debates in green criminology shows readers how to approach environmental harm with a questioning mindset and demonstrates the contribution of criminologists towards solving global environmental concerns in the 21st century.