Green Criminology

Piers Beirne, Nigel South

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351564960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In little more than a decade, Green Criminology has become an established new perspective in the field. It embraces an exciting and wide range of topics, from controversies about genetic modification through corporate offending against the environment and human communities, to animal abuse. Green Criminology provides a focal point for longstanding and new areas of research as well as making important interdisciplinary connections.

Part I Animal Abuse and Green Criminology

[1]

Rights and justice on a shared planet: More rights or new relations?

TED BENTON
University of Essex, UK

Abstract

It is now widely recognized that members of other animal species and the rest of non-human nature urgently need to be protected from destructive human activities. This article evaluates the case for extending the moral and legal scope of rights as a strategy for achieving these aims. It suggests that we require a more pluralistic approach to the moral standing of non-human beings—i.e. one which does not depend entirely on the discourse of rights and its cognates—and that moral argument and legal reform need to be pursued in the context of a wider movement for far-reaching structural changes in social and economic life.

animal rights environment human rights liberalism social reform

Outrage against ‘modern’, ‘industrial’ destruction of nature is not new (see, for example, Gould, 1988; Pepper, 1996). The romantic movement of the 19th century expressed a predominantly aesthetic revulsion against the reductionism of modern science’s representation of the natural order, and against its destructive consequences (see Soper, 1995). The 19th century also saw the beginnings of legislative reform aimed at the improvement of environmental conditions in the urban industrial centres. In part this was motivated by middle-class fears of both contageous disease and social unrest. In his classic work on The Condition of the Working Class in England ([1845] 1969), Engels wrote:

I have already referred to the unusual activity which the sanitary police manifested during the cholera visitation. When the epidemic was approaching, a universal terror seized the bourgeoisie of the city. People remembered the unwholesome dwellings of the poor, and trembled before the certainty that each of these slums would become a centre for the plague, whence it would spread desolation in all directions through the houses of the propertied class.

(p. 97)

Among 19th-century commentators Engels was quite typical in seeing direct connections between questions of environmental degradation, on the one hand, and poverty, class power and social order, on the other. One of my themes in what follows is that much of our contemporary environmental concern has become too detached from central questions about the nature of our society and its continuing injustices.

In our own century, the period since the early 1960s has been marked by an unprecedented explosion in both popular and official concern about our increasingly destructive relation to the non-human world. In the US, writers such as Rachel Carson (1962), Barry Commoner (1972) and Murray Bookchin (1991) were prominent among those who successfully roused public anxiety about the threat posed to both wildlife and human health by chemical poisoning of the environment. But the changes to which these writers drew attention were international in scope. The shift to intensive agriculture, and the associated concentrations of industrial capital in pesticides, fertilizers, agricultural machinery, food processing and distribution was, likewise, an international process. It brought with it profound scenic, ecological and socio-economic transformations of the countryside, as well as changes in dietary habits and divisions of labour in the home (see, for example, Shiva, 1989; Conway and Pretty, 1991; Goodman and Redclift, 1991). These changes in the countryside coincided with the growth of ‘commuter villages’, and also an increase in leisure uses of the countryside on the part of urban dwellers. However, urban expectations of the ‘rural idyll’ were soon dashed as they encountered the reality of an industrialized agriculture promoting landscape homogeneity, crop monocultures and a poisoned, inhospitable countryside. These direct experiences of environmental degradation fuelled an unprecedented expansion of locally based social movement organizations, some focussing exclusively on rural issues, or seeking greater protection for wildlife and their habitats, others concerned with issues of public access.

Meanwhile, seemingly authoritative ‘elite’ groupings such as the Club of Rome put alarm about human impacts on finite planetary ‘life-support systems’ onto an emergent global political agenda (Meadows and Meadows, 1974). From the early 1970s there was a growing consensus among the world’s scientific and political leaderships that prospects for world ‘development’, and even human survival itself were deeply threatened by prevailing patterns of resource use, population growth and pollution. However, there was no consensus at all about the kinds of change demanded by this recognition. Questions of power, wealth and poverty again became inextricably linked with the environmental agenda, but now posed at a global level. While national government representatives struggled to protect their particular interests within internationally negotiated regimes for environmental regulation, grass-roots social movement organizations extended their vision to include the global character of the environmental threat posed not just by changes in agriculture and food production, but by other industrial sectors—energy, transport, weapons production, waste disposal and so on. These new organizations themselves played a crucial part in capturing the attention of the media and thereby the wider public. People were made aware of the ecological disasters flowing from the wreckage of oil tankers, the chemical explosion at Bhopal, the desertification of parts of Africa, the destruction of the tropical moist forests, the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and the ecological dimension of modern warfare, most especially during the Gulf war.

Significantly, media images of these disasters included both the human death and suffering they entailed, together with poignant coverage of the ‘innocent’ non-human victims—the oiled sea birds, the myriad living denizens of the rain forests, the fish deaths resulting from chemical spillages and so on. In this way, growing public awareness of environmental problems became intertwined with a growing sensibility to the suffering of non-human beings. From the high-profile campaigns against whaling, seal culling, and the fur trade, through to the rise of anti-vivisection and animal welfare activity, awareness has been growing of the moral issue of human relations with non-human species. The quite striking intensity of the emotional tone of some of this social movement activity may be linked to a growing, and quite central cultural contradiction in our civilization. On the one hand, we understand more vividly than ever before the complexity of the social and mental lives of other animal species, our evolutionary kinship with them and our economic, spiritual and ecological interdependence with them—many of us have direct experience of this through the practice of pet keeping, and all of us through powerful and sophisticated media coverage. On the other hand, intensive agriculture and associated animal ‘husbandry’ regimes increasingly reduce living animals to the status of engineered factors of production, whilst the use of animals in scientific research and product testing similarly underlines their status as mere instruments of human purposes. Only a pervasive practice of concealment and cultural schizophrenia keeps at bay the explosive implications of this contradiction (Thomas, 1983).

Much of the public concern which has been aroused in the last three decades or so has been directed towards the existing power structure. To some extent businesses have been targeted, either directly, or indirectly, by the mobilization of consumer pressure. However, most environmental campaigning has been aimed at governments and the mainstream political parties, in the hope of environmentally friendly legal reforms. By some measures this strategy has been very successful. In most countries of the economically ‘developed’ world there are high levels of environmental regulation. Most have environmental ministries, procedures for vetting and, if necessary, banning the use of toxic substances in industry, legal liability on the part of public and private bodies for environmental damage, various public health measures, including provisions for health and safety at work, planning law governing the siting of environmentally hazardous installations and provisions for ‘environmental impact assessments’ in the case of large-scale development proposals. So far as animal welfare is concerned the situation is much more uneven as between different legislatures, but many countries now require minimum standards of animal welfare in intensive regimes and in research labs, outlaw cruel treatment of captive animals and outlaw at least some cruel sports. The National Environmental Policy Act, 1970, in the US played an exemplary role in prompting legislation elsewhere, whilst among the European countries, a crucial role has been played by the European Union, which has seen environmental protection as an important resource to bolster its own legitimacy. European law on the environment has been very influential in forcing the pace of national legislation, both among those countries already within the Union, and also among aspirant members to the East.

However, the sheer quantity of environmental legislation may not be the best measure of the success of the environmental movement. Questions need to be asked about the content of the legislation—does it adequately address the causes of the abuses it is designed to control? Does it enable unambiguous assigning of legal responsibility? Are the penalties it imposes an adequate deterrent? Are there adequate systems of inspection, monitoring and detection? Is enforcement rigorous and uncompromising? Above all, is the legislation effective in protecting non-human nature to the extent and in those respects that public concern requires? As we shall see, there are strong reasons for being less confident about the answers to these questions than the advocates of ‘environmental reformism’ might wish.

Nevertheless, the extension of well-established legal principles and precedents to offer protection to non-human species as well as to aspects of the human environment has many attractions. This approach does not appear to require deep-level institutional or cultural change, and is continuous with relatively successful reform strategies carried through by oppressed or exploited human groups. The discourse of universal rights and justice found its substantive expression in the revolutionary constitutions of America and France in the 18th century, and has by now acquired near universal moral authority, notwithstanding some cultural relativist and communitarian philosophical scepticism. Since World War 2, movements for national liberation on the part of former European colonies, as well as the nationalist opposition to Soviet domination, asserted their claims in the form of moral rights—in these cases to national sovereignty and self- determination, The emancipatory struggle of black Americans began with efforts to exercise civil and personal rights formally already possessed in the American constitution, but soon became a struggle for new rights and recognitions—including rights to assert a distinctive cultural identity. The subsequent ‘second wave’ feminist movement likewise moved from demands for equal rights towards more self-assertive claims for the recognition of difference (see, for example, Gilligan, 1982).

Rights for nature

When Singer ([1975], 1990), one of the pioneers of the contemporary animal liberation movement, explicitly situated the claim for animal liberation as the logical next step beyond these other causes, he was able to draw upon the considerable store of ‘moral capital’ already accumulated by those movements:

I argue that there can be no reason—except the selfish desire to preserve the privileges of the exploiting group—for refusing to extend the basic principle of equality of consideration to members of other species. 1 ask you to recognise that your attitudes to members of other species are a form of prejudice no less objectionable than prejudice about a person’s race or sex.

(p.v)

As we shall see, the claim that animal liberation had a moral authority comparable with that assigned to the various human liberation movements turned out to be very contentious. But Singer’s utilitarian grounding for animal liberation also came in for criticism for failing to accord animals sufficient protection. For utilitarians, the moral character of an act (or moral rule) is determined exclusively by its consequences. So, while Singer succeeds in arguing for equal consideration of human and animal suffering and welfare in the calculation of the consequences of actions, it still remains possible that human benefits may outweigh harms to animals in any particular case. It might, for example, be possible to justify causing suffering to animals in medical experiments if it could be shown that the overall total suffering of both humans and animals would be thereby reduced.

The leading exponent of this line of criticism, and of the alternative rights view has been Tom Regan ([1984] 1988). In his ‘deontologica’ approach, the rightness or wrongness of acts is not simply a matter of their consequences. Some acts are inherently wrong, even if it can be shown that a balance of benefits might accrue from their being committed. Individual humans, for example, have inherent value, and are entitled to respectful treatment. Here, Regan draws implicitly on the near un...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Animal Abuse and Green Criminology
• Part II Crime and the Environment: Diversity and Directions in a Green Criminology
• Part III Rights, Victims and Regulation
• Part IV Greening Criminology
• Name Index