Violence comes in many forms, including road traffic and industrial accidents, gender-based sexual abuse, sexual harassment against women, self-inflicted suicides, and violence due to organized crime. Like infectious diseases, many of these harmful behaviors are āsocially contagiousā ā transmitted through imitative behavior, promoted by the mass media, and perpetrated by transnational criminal networks.Gahr Store et al., 2003: 71
Combining financial and economic values, illegal logging, fishing, and wildlife trade has an estimated full global economic value of about $1 trillion to $2 trillion per year. More than 90 percent comes from the estimated value of ecosystem, regulating and cultural services that are not priced by the market. It is double or more the global risks of counterfeiting and piracy, which are estimated at $509 billion, or 3.3 percent of world trade in 2016.World Bank Group, 2019: 18
Introduction
If there is a common theme across dimensions of social thought today, it is that great change is upon us; that the environment, which sustains us and grants us the ability to even think of enjoyable, wonderful futures, is in a form of peril that could only be eclipsed (perhaps) by the advent of full-scale thermo-nuclear war or a calamitous meteor impact. To be clear, itās not Earth itself that is at stake here. Itās the thin layer of life we call the biosphere and, more particularly, the species homo sapiens which, for better or worse, inhabits it. Climate change (and the heated political discourse on doing something about it) is the most visible manifestation of a broader crisis in the human-environment relationship, but biodiversity loss, massive natural resource consumption, the interlinked oceans crises, toxic pollution, ozone layer depletion, and many other concerns are all related, global in scope, local in destruction, and caused in some manner by human conduct (see Stoett 2019). The rapid spread of the zoonotic novel coronavirus COVID-19 in 2020 may have been linked to live wildlife markets in China that have been linked to the illegal wildlife trade (Yu 2020; Vidal 2020), and itās widely accepted that habitat destruction and climate change will induce more newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases in the future (see Morens and Fauci 2013; Daszak et al. 2001; and various IPCC reports).
People have done this. No one hurls the lightning bolts that start forest fires, but we certainly helped dry out the forest surface so that it burns so quickly and bright. No one decides how often and when endangered species will mate and propagate, but we have certainly made their survival in the wild increasingly difficult, if not impossible. Human agency is at the causal heart of our ecological footprint and any attendant angst over our continued collective survival is well-deserved. Meanwhile, we continue to exploit not just the natural environment, but each other. One can plausibly argue that great advances in human dignity, freedom, and equality have been made since the days of feudalism and slave economies, but it is impossible to deny the continuation of a global political economy based on mass exploitation. We are in the midst of a massive act of violence against nature, and attendant crimes against humanity: the socio-legal structures that facilitate this bear scrutiny and must be reformed if we are to get off this path.
This book is focused primarily on one particular aspect of this contextual challenge: the rise and expansion and fight against both formal (legislated) and informal (uncodified directly, but equally harmful) transnational environmental crime, which we broadly label transnational ecoviolence, and the human suffering that accompanies it. Typically, āecoviolenceā has referred to violence that results from conflicts over natural resources and/or resource scarcity (or abundance) amid growing population pressure, a theme explored by Thomas Homer-Dixon and others (Homer-Dixon and Blitt 1998; de Soysa 2002; Gleditsch and Urdal 2002); but we use the term to connote agential and structural violence, as discussed later in this chapter, which coterminously affects both nature and people, and which may or may not take place during conflict. Our use of the term is thus closer to Laura Westraās employment of it in her often overlooked 2004 book Ecoviolence and the Law: Supranormative Foundations of Ecocrime (Westra 2004). We are emphatic about the linkage between environmental justice and human security: there are few forms of environmental crime that do not involve human suffering, exploitation, fraud, or some other wrong against individuals or communities. Treating ecoviolence otherwiseāremoving the element of human paināis an empirical and, one can plausibly argue, strategic error. The reverse is often the case, as well: many crimes against humanity, and cases of severe economic exploitation including that of children, are accompanied by cumulative environmental harm, much as warfare is not only bad for the people it kills and maims, but it also destroys the trees, rivers, and wildlife that sustain them. Many forms of transnational ecoviolence are also linked historically to the imperialist projects that have themselves perpetrated extreme exploitation (also known as super-exploitation in some Marxist circles) in the periphery of the global economy (Smith 2016).
This volume is rooted firmly in the premise that we must look at environmental harms as clusters of ecological, social, and economic damage; ecoviolence (whether it crosses borders in its transmission or not) is a threat to both environmental justice and human security. And it can also be seen as a violation of the inherent rights of nature (see Humphreys 2016; Maloney and Burdon 2014), if that conceptual lens is adapted. If nature has rights, and we openly think it should, then violations of those rights are a form of violence, just as violations of human rights are usually regarded as violent acts as well. When ecoviolence breaks laws and involves actors in more than one country, this is labeled formal transnational environmental crime; when it does not break any formal law but violates what we could consider to be the inherent rights of nature and the human rights to environmental justice and human security, this is labeled informal transnational environmental crime. In order to include both these variants, and to pay homage to the progressive development of an Earth Jurisprudence that assigns inherent rights to nature, we prefer to use the term transnational ecoviolence.
This book is thus inspired by previous efforts in political science, human geography, international law, environmental science, criminology, and other disciplines; it is an inherently interdisciplinary exercise. We are not claiming novelty here, but are seeking to convey a new way of looking at things. Much of what has come to be known as āgreen criminologyā is not altogether a new academic enterprise, though it continues to be treated as novel in some circles. An edited book published in 2007 integrated previously published work on the general theme (Beirne and South 2007). However it is mainly concerned with wedding āthe movements in green environmentalism and in animal rightsā (xiii). Boyd and Menzies edited a text on ātoxic criminologyā in 2002; Del Frate and Norberry edited one on environmental crime in 1993; Williams published an article on āan environmental victimologyā in 1996. The term āgreening of criminologyā was used in a textbook published in 2004 (Carrabine et al. 2004), which generated some debate (see Halsey 2004); Robert White has been presenting a framework for studying green criminology in various guises since 2010, including an āeco-global criminologyā (White 2011). As thematic subjects, environmental crime and green criminology are in themselves worthy pursuits, but their own interdisciplinary nature means that scholars from a vast array of other fields, including history, anthropology, sociology, political science, chemistry, geography, legal studies, biology, journalism, and many others, must contribute to their evolution (see Elliott and Schaedla 2016). Weāve tried to integrate various disciplines in the discussions and analyses that follow, and to supersede our own disciplinary callings in the process.
At the same time, given the extent of the disasters unfolding before our eyes and the preponderance of failure in efforts to mitigate it, a critical perspective is highly warranted here. We live in an age characterized by the public anxieties discussed above, but the specific anxieties of wealth (or, more directly, the frets and concerns, both understandable and exaggerated, of the wealthy) continue to plague both established and emerging public discourses over security. Indeed, the privatization of security provision, and the adaptation to environmental change afforded only by wealth, are two of the key themes of this century (both of them began much earlier, of course). Everything from prison systems to neighborhood watches to pandemic responses have been privatized and militarized and made profitable in many parts of the world. Conservation, meanwhile, is increasingly subject to securitization as a response within the neoliberal framework that accepts and indeed promotes privatized and militarized protection as a market commodity. One of the bigger debates raging within the conservationist community is whether a heavily weaponized approach to āsavingā nature is warranted under a consequentialist ethics given the extremity of the biodiversity crisis. We will return to ...