Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology

Nigel South, Avi Brisman, Nigel South, Avi Brisman, Avi Brisman, Nigel South

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000753523
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Droit
• Categoría: Droit de l'environnement

The Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology was the first comprehensive and international anthology dedicated to green criminology. It presented green criminology to an international audience, described the state of the field, offered a description of a range of environmental issues of regional and global importance, and argued for continued criminological attention to environmental crimes and harms, setting an agenda for further study.

In the six years since its publication, the field has continued to grow and thrive. This revised and expanded second edition of the Handbook reflects new methodological orientations, new locations of study such as Asia, Canada and South America, and new responses to environmental harms. While a number of the original chapters have been revised, the second edition offers a range of fresh chapters covering new and emerging areas of study, such as:

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• conservation criminology,

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• eco-feminism,

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• environmental victimology,

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• fracking,

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• migration and eco-rights, and

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• e-waste.

This handbook continues to define and capture the field of green criminology and is essential reading for students and researchers engaged in green crime and environmental harm.

Part I

History, theory and methods

1

The growth of a field

A short history of a ‘green’ criminology

Avi Brisman and Nigel South

Our planet and its ecosystems face threats of increasing scale and complexity, mostly resulting from human activity. Yet, a stubborn commitment to ‘business as usual’ and growth economics—combined with either denial of anthropogenic emissions and pollutants, faith in Gaia’s cornucopia, or an uncritical belief in our ability to save ourselves from the consequences of our actions—suggest that any responses may be a case of ‘too little, too late’. As Pretty (2011: 50) submits, even when we do ‘acknowledge … that it is indeed humans who have caused climate change, biodiversity extinction, pollution and cultural loss’, we also maintain that ‘we can invent ourselves out of any problem’.

It is now clear that criminology has much to contribute to debates about these threats and harms. As green criminology has developed, it has addressed epistemological, methodological, political and theoretical questions, and established a strong base and growing body of work. Among the challenges along the way has been the difficulty of moving beyond traditional criminological conceptions and definitions of ‘crime’. This has been a vital step (although not one confined to green criminology) because definitions of ‘crime’ and ‘offending’ are often created or shaped by the powerful members of socio-economic elites, whose organisations and systems of production and reproduction initiate many, if not most, environmental harms. It is also they, like other powerful offenders, who will seek to reject definitions of ‘crime’ and ‘offending’ that might be applied to them and who will pass on the costs of avoiding environmental regulations, including safety standards for products and workers, to others who must bear the consequences. To that end, such firms and organisations invest enormous resources in efforts to persuade politicians and courts that the imposition of legislation and regulation clearly marking limits to environmental harm would be damaging to their profitable economic development, and therefore detrimental to the economic situation and stability of all (Ruggiero and South 2010: 246). All the while, multinational corporations and other corporate-state entities work to construct and reconstruct the public and social meaning of ‘green’ (see, e.g., Beder 1997; Benton 2007; Brisman 2009; Lynch and Stretesky 2003).

To review, beginning in the 1960s, some work in criminology and in sociological studies of deviance and power began to make significant contributions to critical thinking about environmental harm (Goyes and South 2017; and see various papers reprinted in South and Beirne 2006; White 2009). Only since the 1990s, however, has that momentum and wider interest gathered behind the efforts of criminologists to examine regulation, public policy and the diminution of legal protections, as well as issues of social responsibility and citizen empowerment regarding the preservation of the environment (Beirne et al. 2018; Beirne and South 2007; Lynch 1990; South and Beirne 1998). This work has developed into a new, identifiable green field within criminology that has promised—and continues to offer—enormous scope and potential. For example, South (1998: 226) has argued that

[g]reen issues open up a wide range of possibilities for interdisciplinary work, both within the social sciences and with disciplines in the natural sciences, offering the potential for collaboration between criminologists and economists, geographers, biologists, health specialists, philosophers, human rights workers, lawyers and others.

Methodologically and theoretically, as White (1998: 214) suggests, the ‘investigation of environmental harm requires analysis which is wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary, and which is sensitive to the inter-connectedness of social and ecological phenomena’. Essentially, if criminology is a ‘rendezvous discipline’ (Hayward and Young 2007) or ‘rendezvous subject’ (Downes 1988; see also Garland and Sparks 2000: 193, 202; South 2007: 231, 2010: 228), then this characterisation has become particularly appropriate as a description of criminology’s engagement with environmental issues.

Introducing green criminology: terms and typologies

As alluded to above, green criminology has emerged as a fertile area of study bringing together a wide range of research interests and theoretical orientations (see, e.g., Beirne and South 2007; Brisman 2014b; Sollund 2008; South 2014; White 2010a). It has not been and is not intended to be a unitary enterprise. Diversity is one of its great strengths and it is most helpfully seen as a capacious and evolving perspective (see, e.g., South 1998: 212–213; see also White 2008: 14)—a loose framework or set of intellectual, empirical and political orientations toward problems (crimes, harms and offences related to the environment, different species and the planet). Importantly, it is also an ‘open’ perspective and framework, arising from within the tradition(s) of critical criminology; at the same time, it actively seeks inter- and multi-disciplinary engagement. It is both a network of interested individuals and a forum for sharing and debating ideas. Green criminology is thus invitational, to borrow from cultural criminology’s self-description (Ferrell, Hayward and Young 2008).

Green criminology remains fluid and full of potential to link with other (both established and growing) areas within criminology (e.g., Agnew 2012; this volume, Chapter 2; Altopiedi 2019; Brisman 2014b, 2017a, 2018; Ferrell, this volume, Chapter 37). It also seeks to forge connections across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences (e.g., Brisman 2011; Lynch and Stretesky 2011, 2014: 29–49). The ‘naming’ of the field has occasionally attracted debate and alternatives include ‘environmental criminology’, which White (2008) has argued could be reclaimed from what is more properly considered ‘place-based criminology’, to cover the study of environmental harms and threats, environmental legislation and related research activity. This usage is an obvious reflection of the way that the word ‘environment’ is frequently employed in everyday discussion and contemporary media but suffers the drawback of being too easily confused with its longer established usage in criminology to describe relationships between the incidence of crime and the spatial features of the built and urban environment.¹ Without expressly abandoning this endeavour, White (2010b: 6) has also offered the term ‘eco-global criminology’ to

refer to a criminological approach that is informed by ecological considerations and by a critical analysis that is worldwide in its scale and perspective … one that expresses a concern that there be an inclusive definition of harm, and … a multidisciplinary approach … to the study of environmental harm.

In a related vein, Walters (2010a: 180) has suggested that the term ‘eco-crime’ is helpful and capable of ‘encapsulat[ing] existing legal definitions of environmental crime, as well as sociological analyses of those environmental harms not necessarily specified by law’. Other formulations include ‘conservation criminology’ (Gibbs et al. 2010; Herbig and Joubert 2006). It seems, however, that criminologists most frequently employ the term ‘green criminology’ to describe the study of ecological, environmental or green crime or harm, and related matters of speciesism and of environmental (in)justice. Even so, as Goyes and South (2017: 178) argue, while the term and concept are very useful, their true value lies in drawing attention to concerns about the health and future of our environments and planet.²

Putting aside various names and nuances, all these terms represent similar frameworks and share a common interest in the bio-physical and socio-economic consequences of different sources of threat and damage to the environment, whether biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution or resource degradation. Whatever the descriptor—and ignoring questions of aetiology and different levels of individual, micro and macro analysis (which we touch on later in this chapter)—there is agreement on the need for research and debate on matters such as: pollution and its causes, consequences and control; corporate criminality and its impact on the environment; health and safety in the workplace where breaches have environmentally damaging consequences; involvement of organised crime and official corruption in the illegal disposal of toxic waste; the impact and legacy of law enforcement and military operations on landscapes, water supply, air quality and living organisms populating these areas—human, animal and plant; and the potential and scope of criminal law to prevent environmental despoliation and punish perpetrators of harm.

It is important to recognise that the way we identify and organize clusters of issues and problems can influence research agendas, policy priorities and methodologies (White 2010c: 415; see also Heckenberg and White, this volume, Chapter 6), and some simple but useful typologies can assist us in thinking about how to present the research directions and challenges relevant to green criminology (Lynch et al. 2017: 8–12). One typology derives from a distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ green crimes (Carrabine et al. 2004) and has been developed further by Potter (2014). This is a straightforward but suggestive way of differentiating clusters of harms and crimes by classifying some as resulting directly from the destruction and degradation of the Earth’s resources, and others as those crimes or harms that are symbiotic with or dependent upon such destruction and efforts made to regulate or prevent it.

Purely as an illustrative exercise, we can identify four ‘primary’ green crimes in which the environment and species other than humans are damaged, degraded or harmed by human actions—all of which, to add a positive note, have become the subject of some national and international legislative efforts to protect and intervene in recent years:

1. Crimes of air pollution	2. Crimes of deforestation
3. Crimes against animals	4. Crimes of water pollution

‘Secondary’ or ‘symbiotic’ green harms and crimes can arise from the exploitation of conditions that follow environmental damage or crisis (e.g., illegal markets for food, medicine, water) and/or from the violation of rules that attempt to regulate environmental harm and to respond to disaster. These can include numerous major and minor practices whereby states violate their own regulations (either by commission or omission) and, in so doing, contribute to environmental harms. Potter (2014: 11) takes this approach to a ‘tertiary’ level to add discussion of ‘green crimes’ that may be defined as those ‘committed by environmental victims or as a result of environmental victimization … [e.g.] committed as a deliberate or direct response to environmental harm … [or] exacerbated by the experience of environmental victimisation’, which might include: (1) crimes committed by those forced to migrate in response to environmental harms (e.g., Brisman 2019; Brisman, South and Walters 2018, this volume, Chapter 10; Hall and Farrall 2013); (2) increasing crime rates as environmental harm and changing environments (including access to natural resources) impact social and economic conditions that relate to crime (e.g. Agnew 2012); and (3) crimes relating to exposure to environmental pollutants, such as lead or other heavy metals, which can have behavioural effects (e.g., aggression, learning difficulties) that some criminological theories posit as causes of crime (see, e.g., Lynch and Stretesky 2014: 103–21; Muller, Sampson and Winter 2018; Sampson and Winter 2018).³

A different threefold typology is offered by White (2008: 98–99) in which ‘brown’ issues are defined in terms of urban life and pollution—air pollution, disposal of toxic/hazardous waste, oil spills, pesticides, pollution of beaches and water catchments, stormwater pollution; ‘green’ issues refer to conservation matters and ‘wilderness’ areas (e.g., acid rain, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, invasive species introduced via human transport, logging practices, ozone depletion, toxic algae and water pollution); and ‘white’ issues include the impact of new technologies and various laboratory practices (e.g., animal testing and experimentation; cloning of human tissue; environmentally related communicable diseases; food irradiation; genetically modified organisms; in-vitro processes; and pathological indoor environments).

Rather than promote a particular categorisation or typology, we instead rehearse the substantive topics and themes addressed by the breadth of scholarship in green criminology, including harms to the environment, to humans and to animals. The following section considers theoretical developments and frameworks in green criminology. We end with some observations about future work.

Theoretical developments and frameworks of analysis

Conceivable theoretical positions concerned with environmental crimes and harms may draw upon existing traditions and developments within criminology, including feminism, Marxism and post-modernism, among many others (South 1998: 212). The idea of an approach unified simply as a ‘perspective’ affords flexibility. While as an entire discipline, academic criminology may be ‘fragmented’ (DeKeseredy 2010: 57), green crimino...

Índice

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface to the second edition of the Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: new horizons, ongoing and emerging issues and relationships in green criminology
• PART I: History, theory and methods
• PART II: International and transnational issues for a green criminology
• PART III: Region-specific problems: some case studies
• PART IV: Relationships in green criminology: environment and economy
• PART V: Relationships in green criminology: humans and non-human species
• PART VI: Relationships in green criminology: environment and culture
• Index