Green Criminology

<p>In recent years, a strand of criminology explicitly concerned with “green” or natural environmental issues has emerged, aiming to place a primary emphasis on the matter of harms and crimes affecting the environment and the planet, and addressing issues such as climate change; natural resource extraction and exploitation; pollution of air, land, and water; biodiversity loss; and wildlife trafficking. The case has been made for a “green perspective” within criminology—an approach that seeks neither to propose a definitive theory with respect to the causes of environmental crime or harm nor to offer a specific set of solutions, but more modestly sets forth an argument that criminology should be more sensitive to the extent and implications of these urgent and globally important matters. Arguably, this orientation for criminology reflects the times and in that sense there is a degree of inevitability about its arrival from the early 1990s onward. The development of a “green criminology” has led to an international community of common interest concerned with the biophysical and socioeconomic consequences of various sources of threat and damage to the environment. Major themes, topics, and problems that have been examined include pollution and its regulation; corporate criminality and its impact on the environment; health and safety in the workplace where breaches of regulations and law have environmentally damaging consequences; the involvement of organized crime and official corruption in the illegal disposal of toxic waste; the impact and legacy of law enforcement and military operations on air quality, landscapes, water supply, and living organisms inhabiting these areas; as well as forms of regulation, law enforcement, and prosecution relevant to such acts and omissions. Green criminological research, as it has developed, covers environmental damage and destruction (both as proscribed by law and defined as “crimes” and those harms that are not); environmental laws (i.e., administrative, criminal, and civil, applied via a governmental agency or the criminal justice system, and including enforcement measures and court proceedings, prosecution, and sentencing); and environmental regulation (e.g., systems and processes for purposes of protection and monitoring). As recognized in the natural sciences and most policy circles, the resources of the Earth are finite and this has implications that criminology is well-placed to examine in cases where problems such as abuse, conflict, corruption, exploitation, law-breaking, rule-avoidance, manslaughter, and murder can all be identified. In this article, we note (1) General Introductions and Overviews; (2) Early Contributions and Developments; (3) Conceptualizations and Alternative Formulations; (4) Topics of Study in Green Criminology; (5) Responses to Environmental Harm (2000–2005) and (2006–2011); and (6) Future Directions.</p>