Exploring Green Criminology

Toward a Green Criminological Revolution

Michael J. Lynch, Paul B. Stretesky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317137405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

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.

Chapter 1
Toward a Green Criminological Revolution

The earth is being destroyed as we watch, often as we do too little to stop the destruction. Today, for example, the Global Footprint Network estimates that it takes the earth one and one-half years to regenerate the resources that we have extracted from the earth in a year. This means that we are using the earth’s resources at a greater rate than is sustainable. Unfortunately unsustainable business practices have been occurring since the early 1980s and are accelerating at such a rapid rate that we will consume nearly three times what the earth can regenerate annually by the year 2050 (Global Footprint Network, 2013). To be sure, there are those who take note of these alarming trends and are doing something to work toward sustainability. But, the efforts of a few individuals when compared to the majority of the human race are too little to overcome the devastating and unsustainable forces humans unleash on the planet. Thus we hide our head in the sand. We hope that divine intervention¹ or the next generation can prevent the impending ecological calamity. However, there may not be too many more next generations and time is running out to take care of the problem.

It is not our intention to write about the general neglect of environmental problems within society at large. Rather, our topic is much more limited, and is in many ways simply a microcosm of these broader social tendencies to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear toward environmental problems. In the scheme of things, the small area we address in this work appears to have little relevance to the vast problems of ecological destruction that lay before us as humans. Yet, that is, perhaps, precisely the point. All these small situations and contexts sum together to create our unsustainable and devastating behavior that result in massive ecological destruction. Since many people believe that the big ecological problems of the world are too big to tackle, the alternative is to approach these problems at smaller levels of aggregation. The hope is that changing each small situation will lead to large-scale change. Whether or not that is true is hard to determine and it is entirely possible that small change is an inefficient and ineffective strategy to prevent large-scale global harm.

Despite these observations, we, as criminologists, are concerned with the general neglect of ecological issues in criminology. We are concerned with teaching people lessons about crime, law and justice within the context of our biosphere. Indeed, a small number of criminologists continually call attention to the fact that criminology neglects widespread and important forms of harm such as green or environmental crimes. And still other criminologists suggest that these green crimes present the most important challenge to criminology as a discipline. As criminologists, we are not simply concerned that our discipline continues to neglect green issues, we are disturbed by the fact that as a discipline, criminology is unable to perceive the wisdom of taking green harms more seriously, and the need to reorient itself in ways that make it part of the solution to the large global environmental problems we now face as the species that produces those problems.

We expect that most criminologists will reject the idea that they ought to be paying greater attention to the problems of green crimes and justice. After all, the history of criminology as a discipline is the history of an academic field devoted to the study of ordinary forms of street offending and efforts to control those offenses. In our view, these offenses and their consequences are quite small in comparison to the forms of environmental destruction taking place in the world around us. Yes, people are hurt by crime—but those are small hurts when one considers them in comparison to the end of humanity.

As criminologists we are dissatisfied to be part of a discipline that has become rather meaningless within the context of the modern world. The meaninglessness of criminology in that context will not change overnight, and this book may have little impact on that situation. Yet, at the same time, we feel that it is our obligation to propose that this situation needs to change, and to outline the ways in which criminologists can actively engage in research of importance in the contemporary world. While the research of criminologists is unlikely to change the world, any small step forward that addresses green crime and justice is a step in the right direction, and contributes to changing the social attitudes and practices needed to help reform the behaviors that have produced the ecologically damaging situation in which we now find ourselves. While our book is no solution to the ecological problems of our times, it exposes a way of thinking that pushes the discipline of criminology closer to being relevant in the modern context of ecological destruction.

To take this step forward, this book explores the parameters of green criminology, its theory and practice, and why environmental issues ought to become more central to the study of crime, law, and justice, or, more specifically, an integral part of criminological research and the criminological imagination. We argue that if harm is the primary concern addressed by criminology—that is, if criminology exists as a science designed to understand, address, reduce, or eliminate crime in the hope of reducing or eliminating harms and to promote justice for humans, nonhumans, and the environment—then criminologists need to recreate criminology, redesign its focus, open it to new understandings of harms and crimes, criminals, laws, corrective responses to crime and harms, victims, and justice. But how do we redesign criminology to consider environmental harm as an important area of study in an era when the destruction of the earth and the world’s ecosystem is the predominant concern of our times? And, if we are correct in stating that this has yet to happen, we must ask why this has not been accomplished given that this situation has been known for quite some time.

The how question comprises a large section of this work, and is illustrated in various chapters that apply an environmental frame of reference that underlies a green approach to issues that can be addressed within criminology. Taking this environmental frame of reference as the starting point and applying it to criminological issues is the substance of green criminology. Such a perspective helps us to see criminology in a new way that is only apparent once this green-environmental frame of reference is adopted.

Toward a Green Criminology

In 1990, Lynch published the first work to suggest the need for a green criminology. It is now two decades later, and in the terms of generational language, an entirely new generation of criminologists has entered the world and has done little to transform the nature of criminology. To be sure, over the past generation, some advances have certainly been made in the area of green criminological research by a handful of pioneers in the field (Agnew, 2012; Beirne, 1999; Beirne and South, 2007; Benton, 2007; Bisschop, 2012; Croall, 2009; Eman, Meško and Fields, 2009; Gibbs et al., 2010; Groombridge, 1998; Hall, 2013; Hauck, 2008; Jarrell and Ozymy, 2012; Katz, 2010; Kramer and Michalowski, 2012; Lane, 1998; Lynch and Stretesky, 2003; Nurse, 2013; Ruggiero and South, 2010; Sollund, 2008; South and Brisman, 2013; Takemura, 2007; van Solinge 2010; Walters, 2006; White, 2008a; Wyatt, 2012).

Yet, despite these advances, one could hardly claim that green criminology has acquired a prominent place within criminology. Indeed, relative to many other varieties of criminology or criminological specialties, there is by comparison little in the way of green criminological research. That is, in reviewing the last generation of criminology, we can hardly say that the emergence of green criminology has had a dramatic impact on the field of criminology. As evidence of these claims, we observe that in the database Google Scholar the term “green criminology” makes up approximately 0.33 percent of the published material in the discipline of “criminology” between the years 1990 and 2013. This is equivalent to about three environmentally-related research publications for every 1,000 publications in the field. This low level of focus on environmental issues in criminology is hardly the type of attention that signals a shift in the discipline.

Why isn’t criminology greener? To be sure, over the past two decades a number of criminologists have initiated efforts to build a green criminology, and we will discuss some of these efforts in detail later in this work. For now, it is sufficient to note that despite efforts to create a green criminology, the majority of criminologists have ignored the messages being delivered by green criminology. Again, the question of why emerges. Perhaps green criminologists have been ineffective in communicating the importance of their work. That might be a relevant argument if green criminologists were the only ones suggesting that the world is faced with intense and widespread ecological problems that demand the attention of the peoples of the world, including academics. One can imagine that criminologists read the news and understand that their academic colleagues in other disciplines are taking green crimes and harms seriously—more seriously than criminologists.

In that context, we must return to the question: Why have criminologists ignored taking an environmental frame of reference, especially in an era when environmental problems and concerns are so widespread? There are several potentially relevant explanations.

First, because criminology, as traditionally defined, is about human harms that are defined in criminal law, all other forms of harm tend to be excluded from criminology unless unorthodox approaches such as those found within critical/radical criminology serve as the foundation for criminological analysis. Given its focus on the legal definition of crime, it matters little to criminology that most of the harms that occur in the world are not criminal harms or socially constructed as criminal harms; or that the most serious harms of our times are not defined under criminal law statutes but by related legal codes such as environmental laws, corporate crime regulations, or administrative codes of agencies that police corporate, white-collar, and environmental crime. By definition, criminology was born from a specific and limited set of questions—who is a criminal? How widespread is criminal behavior? What are the causes of crime? How can crime be controlled?—and supported by a series of related assumptions criminology generated about crime and criminals (Beirne, 1993). For the most part, those assumptions about law, crime, and criminals limit the study of crime to behaviors most likely to be exhibited by the powerless (Reiman, 2006). By continually repeating these assumptions about the nature of criminology and crime within the criminological literature and criminological curricula, a boundary has been established and maintained—a boundary that has often tended to exclude a diverse range of topics relevant to studying harms and their consequences that ought otherwise to fit within the discipline of criminology if criminology were not so narrowly conceived of in the first place.

Second, because of the biases contained within criminal law, criminology focuses on the behaviors that others—lawmakers in particular—select as harms (White, 2008a). This focus on criminal law definitions of crime has meant that criminologists have failed to create an objective definition of harm that is independent of the social construction of crime in the criminal law, and instead have substituted the legal definition of crime for a scientific definition of crime as if the legal definition of crime were based upon objective criteria. That is, criminal harms are defined by law, and law is created by lawmakers, and lawmakers may not, and usually do not rely on objective criteria to make the distinction between say, criminal, regulatory, or administrative law, or even between behaviors that are defined as crimes and those that are not. Because there is no objective definition of crime, criminologists cannot objectively differentiate the legal forms of law—that is, criminal, regulatory, administrative, and so on—from one another nor the crimes those legal forms identify on the basis of the harmful outcomes produced by violating those laws. In criminology, a crime is a crime because criminal law defines it as a crime. That clearly tautological identification of crime has no objective, independent point of reference or definition of the type found in other disciplines identified as sciences. Physicists, for example, do not say gravity is gravity because of the law of gravity. Rather, the law of gravity is derived from the explanation of gravity to explain how gravity behaves.

To illustrate this point, consider the following. When an environmental crime results in a death, the vagaries of law allow this behavior to be treated as a regulatory violation even though there may be intent and knowledge that such an outcome is likely and, that as a result, the same behavior could be classified as violation of criminal law. Criminologists, however, have tended not to address this issue in any direct way, and instead tend to accept these legal definitions and their outcomes and distinction as if they are neutral, objective definitions of harms, and base the proper study of criminology on only the forms of harm pertinent to the definition of crime in the criminal law (Reiman, 2006). This tendency to privilege the criminal law as the starting point for analysis has directed the criminological gaze to very specific forms of behavior and to studying the kinds of system responses—criminal justice system responses—that are designed to control offenses and offenders who violate criminal law. This produces a very narrow range of issues that are, in turn, defined as legitimate criminological subject matter (see also Hillyard and Tombs, 2007).

Third, criminal law, by its design and in its applications—as a real process undertaken by police and courts—draws attention to those who are less economically advantaged, including those who are poor, uneducated, marginalized from the work force, or who comprise the blue-collar classes. These are the offenders to whom criminal law objects, not those who own and operate powerful corporations which are “regulated” through an entirely different set of legal mechanisms that exist outside of criminal law proper. As a result, corporate and environmental offenders are not typically treated as engaging in the same kinds of behaviors as street offenders, nor are they viewed as being equally liable or reprehensible for their crimes as street offenders. They are excluded by criminology as if these behaviors are irrelevant; as if these offenders produce no harms; as if these behaviors have little relevance to studying and understanding crime.

And fourth, because criminologists base their work in a frame of reference that reflects all of these assumptions about criminal law and criminal behavior, and because this frame of reference more generally includes assumptions common to all social sciences—that the starting point for all manner of social science is the human perspective—victimization of nonhumans is not considered important. In other words, social sciences, because they are socially centered on human societies, are human centered, and only perceive harms when humans are the victims. This frame of reference excludes other views of harm—any nonhuman entity or victim harmed by a legal violation, whether criminal, regulatory, administrative, or civil. And, in the event that the social science frame of reference acknowledges alternative views of victimization, it often treats those views as peripheral since they are outside the human frame of reference already narrowly defined by social sciences. This, perhaps more than the other issues raised here, orients criminology toward considering a limited range of harms. In that view, crimes are harms caused by humans primarily against humans that are defined in law as criminal harms.

In contrast to this human centered view, green criminology begins by imposing an alternative frame of reference, one based in nature, the environment, or natural ecology. We will discuss this frame of reference and the problems associated with human-centered frames of reference in more detail in a later chapter. For now, it is important to note that by selecting a natural ecology frame of reference, green criminology is a revolution in the making; a revolution that seeks to displace humans and human issues as the sole objects of study. In doing so, green criminology supplants the traditional criminological interest in personal crimes that, in comparison to environmental harms, are rather minor in their overall impact measured in terms of the scope and amount of harm caused. By moving away from this human-centered approach, green criminology points out that there are an extraordinarily wide range of environmentally-related harms that exist in the world, especially compared to the criminal harms to which criminology has been limited. This broader set of crimes that becomes the focus of green criminology is not the set of crimes committed by the poor that attracts so much criminological attention. In drawing attention away from these ordinary, powerless criminal offenses and offenders it is not only possible to view the crimes of the powerful as the most serious offenses that occur in society and as having the broadest scope of effect on human and nonhuman victims, it is also possible to understand the biased view that a criminology anchored to criminal law produces. In short, when criminology excludes an environmental frame of reference, it hides from our vision the vast array of harms perpetuated against and through the victimization of the environment. In the green view, the environmental frame of reference dominates, and the criminological frame of reference becomes secondary and subsumed within the broader environmental frame of reference. We explore this idea more fully later in this work.

Green Versus Traditional Criminology

Having laid out the purpose in this book in a rather small space, most criminologists may find themselves disagreeing with our basic premise that environmental harms matter more than criminal harms; that green harms are more widespread than criminal harms; that criminology maintains a bias against examining green harms because of criminology’s basic assumptions about the criminal offender and the nature of crime. Thus, what we propose is a revolution in the way criminologists think about harm and crime. To be sure, most criminologists would not be in favor of such a green criminological revolution. They might argue that criminology is, after all, concerned with crime, especially crimes between people, the criminal law, and responses to those defined as offenders by criminal law. They are right that criminology has been practiced in that way. What we are objecting to is this practice and the consequences of the way in which criminology has been applied. Traditional criminology has been growing more irrelevant in a world that is increasingly being destroyed by green crimes.

In response to the traditional criminological position, we reply that the identification of a harm as criminal or otherwise in the traditional criminological approach involves a process of accepting the social construction of crime as an act identified as a crime because it is included within the criminal law. Again, as noted, that method of identifying crime and the scope of criminology is not objective because it fails to address the nature of acts that ought to be treated criminally because of their characteristics. The legal process of socially constructing crime contains subjective dimensions which criminologists, if they adhere to the principles of scientific investigation, ought to reject. Those subjective dimensions are reinforced by criminology when it employs the same subjective standards that lawmakers employ when they identify harm as criminal, administrative, regulatory, or civil. There is, in short, no criminological definition of harm that is independent of law or rulemaking that is employed by criminologists, and this very fact threatens the validity and objectivity of the criminological enterprise—of the entire disciplinary practice of criminology (Hall, 2011). Law is not an objective science, and as a result, neither can criminology be objective if it simply accepts legal definitions of crime as the origins of its research (Hillyard and Tombs, 2007).

In responding to the majority of criminologists, we should also point out that green criminology is based on a premise, justified by scientific studies in a wide variety of disciplines, that green harms are the most important concerns in modern society because they cause the most harm, violence, damage, and loss. Consider a brief example that illustrates this point. Under law, corporations can legally emit certain types and volumes of pollution. The fact that this behavior is defined as legal—that it is not a violation of law—does not mean that there are not harmful consequences associated with this kind of behavior. For instance, dumping pollution into a local waterway, even though allowed under law, may cause extensive environmental damage. Those pollutants may damage the local water supply and expose thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions across the landscape of a nation to toxins that affect their health. It should also be noted that the same detrimental consequences befall other, nonhuman species as well. Moreover, the pollution may impede the natural ability of the waterway to function, making nature a direct victim of the harm caused by pollution. This reinforces our point: just because a behavior isn’t defined as criminal behavior doesn’t mean there is no harm, that the harm is minor, or that the harm is adequately defined in law. And, it’s the harmful outcome, not the behavior as defined by the rule of law that should be examined and should become the subject matter of criminology.

Further, as a response, we would point to the fact that the form of criminal justice criminologists ordinarily examine to discuss the control of crime is a rather narrow form of justice. There are other ways of conceiving justice that provide legitimate alternative frames of reference for thinking about crime and justice. Criminologists accept the criminological frame of reference as valid, and most work within that frame of reference. Consequently, it is difficult for them to perceive of an alternative to the traditions forged within criminology, to acknowledge that an alternative view of justice could, in fact, be useful or appropriate. For example, there is a significant literature on harm written from the perspective of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• About the Authors
• 1 Toward a Green Criminological Revolution
• 2 Defining the Parameters of the Problem
• 3 Science and a Green Frame of Reference
• 4 Toward a Typology of Green Criminology
• 5 Green Victimology
• 6 Green Behaviorism: The Effects of Environmental Toxins on Criminal Behavior
• 7 The Life Course Trajectories of Chemical Pollutants
• 8 Green Criminology and the Treadmill of Production: A Political Economy of Environmental Harm
• 9 A Green Criminological Approach to Social Disorganization
• 10 The End of Crime, or the End of Old-fashioned Criminology?
• Appendix: A Manifesto for Green Criminology
• Bibliography
• Index