Green Criminology and Green Crime

Last Updated on August 10, 2024 by Karl Thompson

This post explains in simple terms what green crime and green criminology are, before looking at sociological perspectives on green crime and some different types of green crime in more depth.

Green Crime and Green Criminology Summary Notes

Green Crime – A simple definition of Green Crime is ‘crimes committed against the environment’.

Types of Green Crime

Nigel South (2008) classifies green crimes into two distinct types, primary and secondary.

Primary green crimes

Primary green crimes are those crimes which constitute harm inflicted on the environment (and, by extension, those that inflict harm on people because of damage to the environment – our classic ‘environmental victims’ who suffer health or other problems when the land, water or air they interact with is polluted, damaged or destroyed).

There are four main categories of primary green crimes – Crimes of air pollution, Crimes of deforestation, Crimes of species decline and animal rights, Crimes of water pollution.

Secondary green crimes

Secondary, or “symbiotic green crime is crime that grows out of the flouting of rules that seek to regulate environmental disasters” (Carrabine et al. 2004: 318). South provides two examples of secondary crime: State violence against oppositional groups’, ‘hazardous waste and organised crime’

Criminology – Disagreements over the concept of Green Crime

Criminologists disagree over the appropriate subject matter of ‘green criminology’.

Traditional criminology argues that ‘green crime’ should be defined in a narrow sense – thus ‘green crime’ is defined as any activity which breaches a law which protects the environment.

Green criminology, on the other hand, argues that criminologists should study environmental harms whether or not there is legislation in place and whether or not criminal or other laws are actually broken. Green Criminology takes an ecocentric (environment centred) approach to crime, and criticises traditional criminology for being too anthropocentric (human- centred).

White’s (2008) argued there were three important principles of green criminology –

• It isbased on environmental rights and environmental justice;
• it’s ecocentric – rather than based on human domination over nature;
• It should include Animal rights and species justice.

Green Criminology is thus a type of ‘transgressive criminology’ – it breaks the boundaries of traditional criminology and focuses on the concept of ‘harm’ rather than the concept of ‘crime’.

Advantages of a green criminological perspective –

Green Criminology thus follows in the footsteps of radical or critical criminology – Marxism and Interactionism. It is more interested in the question of why some harmful acts (pollution) are not labelled as criminal, while other less- harmful acts are.

Problems with Green Criminology

is that its subject matter is not clearly defined – where do we draw the line about what constitutes harming the environment? Where does it all end, and who decides?

Key Term – ‘Zemiology’ – the study of social harms. Green Criminology is Zemiological.

The Late Modern Perspective on Green Crime – Ulrich Beck (1992) – The Risk Society

Beck explains green crime/environmental damage as part ‘the risk society’, whereby modern industrial societies create many new risks – largely manufactured through modern technologies – that were unknown in earlier days.

New technologies are generating risks that are of a quite different order from those found throughout earlier human history.

The most obvious type of ‘new risky technology’ is that of nuclear power, which generates small, but hugely toxic (radioactive) forms of waste which stay radioactive for thousands of years.

Ulrich Beck’s (1986) argument is that environmental problems are truly global – he argues that ‘Smog is democratic’, which suggests that traditional social divisions — class, ethnicity and gender — may be relatively unimportant when considering the impact of many environmental problems.

The future demands innovative political responses to the new environmental challenges we face. Beck doesn’t offer any solutions to how we might tackle green crime, he just points out that the emergence of the problem is new, and that it’s going to be difficult to tackle it in an uncertain, postmodern age.

A Marxist Perspective on Green Crime

According to Marxists, the single biggest cause of Environmental Crimes according to Marxists (and most of the Green Movement) is Industrial Capitalism.

Given that the primary aim of most governments is achieving economic growth, and the means whereby we achieve this is through producing and consuming stuff, Marxists would not expect any significant global agreement safeguarding the environment until Capitalism is either eradicated or severely controlled. As it stands, companies are all too often given the green light by governments to extract and pollute.

Marxists offer an alternative analysis of the consequences of Green Crime to that of Ulrich Beck. Marxists argue that current social divisions are actually reinforced in the face of environmental harms, with poor people bearing the brunt of harms.

An important part of a Marxist analysis of green crime is to explore who the victims of green crime are, and the victims of pollution tend to be the poorest in society.

Sources

I used two text books to put the first half of this together – Chapman and Webb, the last two points I mainly made up myself!

Green Criminology: More In Depth Notes

The remainder of this post is a summary of the chapter on Green Criminology in the 2023 Oxford Handbook of Criminology

What is Green Criminology?

Green Criminology is an umbrella term or perspective used to describe the study of ecological, environmental or green crime or harm, related to matters of speciesism and environmental injustice. 

Green criminology is a form of ‘transgressive’ criminology, like Marxism, because it focuses on harms rather than just crimes. 

Laws protecting our shared environment are not necessarily that well developed. This means it is often technically legal for an individual or company to harm the environment, but such acts are still of interest to green criminologists. 

Green criminology asks how we can capture the significance of actions which cause harm and yet are not criminal. This is an important endeavour today. Lynch et al (2013) have noted that green harms and crime are more widespread and do more harms than street crime. 

The term Green Criminology was first used by Lynch (1990) in an essay: ‘The Greening of Criminology’ which argued that we should be committed to a creating a more humanistic society based on environmentalism and a radical Marxist framework. 

The discipline has retained a radical outlook as today it is concerned with Green Crimes committed by States and Corporations as well as organised criminal networks. It is also interested in how Capitalism tends to make victims out of poor people and poor nations. While the rich benefit from industrialisation and consumption, it is often the poor that suffer the pollution and toxic waste that goes along with industrial processes. 

(Although it must also be noted that not all people interested in and working on green criminological issues are radical marxists, the discipline is broader than this today!)

The questions Green Criminologists ask include:

• How do we identify who or what generates environmental harm? 
• Why does this crime occur: 
• What is the depth and extent of this harm? 
• How do we respond to this harm?

Terminology and typologies of Green Crime 

‘Primary’ green crimes or harms result directly from the destruction and degradation of the earth’s resources.

Four possible types of primary green crime are:

• crimes/ harms of air and space
• crimes/ harms of the land (deforestation/ land-theft)
• crimes/ harms against nonhuman species
• crimes/ harms of water. 

‘Secondary’ (or symbiotic) green harms and crimes can arise from the exploitation of conditions that follow environmental damage or crisis. (for example illegal markets for food, medicine, water) and/ or from the violation of the rules that attempt to regulate environmental harms. 

Potter (2014) has taken this scheme of categorisation to identify what he calls tertiary green crimes defined as those ‘committed by environmental victims or as a result of environmental victimisation committed as a deliberate or direct response to environmental harm or exacerbated by the experience of environmental victimisation.’

These might include crimes committed by those forced to migrate in response to environmental harm and changing environments impact on social or economic conditions that related to crime, and crimes relating to exposure to environmental pollutants. 

Types of Environmental Crime and Harm….

Some of the more common crimes green criminology have focused on include:

• Climate change.
• Economy, consumption and waste (there are four types: State-corporate crime. organised crime, food crimes. E-waste).
• Nonhuman animal abuse.
• Poaching, trafficking and trading. 

Climate Change 

The major issue with climate change are the international and domestic inequalities that surround it. Wealthy consumer societies and wealthy individuals contribute disproportionately to climate change which imposes a higher social and economic burden on poorer nations and individuals. 

Global data clearly show that richer countries have higher CO2 emissions per capita than poorer countries. 

Climate change could also stimulate more crime. For example it could create new reasons for committing crime or exacerbate old ones. As global warming results in more environmental destruction, people on marginal land (which is more prone to flooding for example) will feel worse off than previously.We can apply Strain Theory here to theorise how this might result in more crime. 

Data from the Migration Data Portal shows that climate change migrants are far more likely  to come from Sub-Saharan Africa compared to other regions. 

Kramer (2020) argues that climate change dental and regulatory failure constitute state corporate crime. By denying the processes are happening, they are failing to protect victims of climate change.  

Economy, consumption and waste

Current economic systems and processes facilitate or otherwise contribute to environmental harm. Here, it is useful to subdivide green criminological research into four categories:

State-Corporate Crime 

States and Corporations have been particularly blameworthy and green criminologists have illuminated a range of their acts and omissions that have resulted in ecological degradation and environmental harm and disaster. 

Lynch and colleagues (2002) have explored how some of the most toxic forms of pollution are the result of very large scale corporate industrial processes. 

White (2002) It could also be the case that Nation States deliberately under-regulate environmental pollution because this is what the capitalist political economy needs. There are several  ways of doing this. 

• Firstly, don’t pass laws which prevent pollution and protect the environment in the first place
• Make the penalties for environmental harms low – allow Corporations to pay fines rather than the executives going to jail, for example.
• Underfund state agencies responsible for regulating the environment. 

Organised crime 

Organised crime reaches into many aspects of public service, from waste disposal to building construction, often resulting in corruption and pollution (Sergi and South 2016). Ruggiero and South (2010) have described such illegal services as dirty collar crime. These kinds of services flourish because of lax implementation and enforcement of rules and laws. 

Where there is a legal market there is often an illegal one. Various commentators have explored the role of organised crime in waste disposal. Corporate actors benefit from organised crime groups illegally disposing of toxic waste. 

A classic example of this is the Naples garbage crisis of 2008. But many national and local governments have unwittingly signed deals with organised crime groups who get rid of waste for cheap. 

Food crimes 

The ways in which food is grown, manufactured, processed and produced, as well as marketed and sold, attract different types of crime and harmful activity, such as food fraud, food poisoning, violations of food labelling laws, illegal trade and pricing practices, food labour exploitation and financial crimes. 

Walters (2004, 2006) employs case-study approaches, examining the social, economic, and ecological risks of genetically modified foods and considering issues of potential exploitation of the developing world relating to genetic modification, as well as monopolies within the biotechnology industries, state-corporate collusion in food market control schemes and the potential harms stemming from the corporate control of food. 

There is also the crime of biopiracy discussed in a case study of using seeds in Colombia (Rodriguez Goyes 2020).

Corporations have attempted to patent some well known food items, such as Turmeric for example. 

Finally, fishing and harms to the marine environment have been categorised as blue criminology (Burger and Edmunds, 2020). 

E- waste 

The disposal of E-waste can generate serious environmental harms. 

Until fairly recently E-waste was largely taken from rich countries and dumped, often illegally, in poorer countries. 

More recently the value of materials in old E-products has been realised and they are more likely to be recycled in India and China. 

There are issues of exploitation here with recycling workers being paid very low wages. Recycling also often releases toxic chemicals. 

We also need to question the urgency with which new E-products are advertised and pushed on consumers. Do we really need new devices every couple of years?

And the extraction of natural resources that go into E products can also cause environmental harm. 

Beford et al (2002) argue that planned obsolescence and corporate obstruction of the right to repair and thus resume electronic goods are environmentally damaging and encourage extractivism. 

Nonhuman animal abuse  

Criminology tends to be anthropocentric in its approach and orientation and part of green criminology has been a call for greater awareness of the harm humans do to animals and ecosystems. 

Green Criminologists Beirne (2009) and Sollund (2020) have advanced the concept of ‘speciesism’ to describe human devaluation and prejudicial treatment of nonhuman species, as well as human perception of nonhuman animals as less worthy of compassion or justice. 

Wildlife offences are generally considered low priority when compared to other crimes, and this suggests criminal justice is anthropocentric. 

Wildlife offences include poaching, trafficking and trading in animals and plants. This may involve live animals or harvested parts of animals.  Wildlife offences can take place on land, but also at sea, for example fishing for rare species. Trade has become increasingly international in recent years and often involves organised crime. 

Legal exploitation can also occur with the corporate commercialisation of the products of nature. This is where genetic and other properties of plants and animals are patented without compensation to Indigenous peoples living on the lands of origin. This has been referred to as ‘biopiracy’ by critics (Rodriguez Goyes and South, 2019). 

Controlling Environmental Crime 

Traditional courts have tended to trivialise environmental crimes, and green criminologists have suggested we need specialist environmental courts. 

Green criminologists have proposed setting up an International Environmental Court or Environmental Security Council. They have also proposed a new body of law based on Earth jurisprudence. This would recognise legally enforceable rights for nature and other-than-human-beings. This could mean rights not only for animals but also trees and rivers.

An International Law of Ecocide..?

Arguments for an international law of ecocide have been gathering pace. The Stop Ecocide Foundation has drafted an International Law. 

Ecocide means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.

Compliance Versus Deterrence..?

There are two basic ways of controlling environmental crime: Compliance (carrot) and Deterrence (stick) models. 

Compliance seeks conformity with the law without need for policing and punishment. This mainly involves offering Incentives to companies and individuals to act more sustainably. 

Deterrence involves enforcing the law and penalising offenders. 

Restorative Justice lies in the middle of these. This has the potential to work: one can imagine bringing together polluters to hear how their pollution has affected communities that are the victims of it. 

There are very few studies of law enforcement agencies and actors preventing and prosecuting environmental crimes and harms. This is most probably due to problems of gaining access.

Power and Environmental Crime 

It is crucial to understand the role of power in how we respond to environmental crime and harm. 

Powerful offenders will seek to reject criminal definitions that might be applied to them. When they are found guilty of breaching environmental laws, they will often seek to pass on the costs of being found in breach of environmental regulations. 

An example of this could be Thame’s Water being fined more than £100 million in 2024 for pumping untreated sewage into UK rivers. The company will simply increase water bills to cover the cost of the fines. 

Corporate interests also seek to dilute environmental protection legislation and reconstruct the public’s meaning of what ‘green’ is. 

Political Economy and the Treadmill of Production 

Lynch and Stretesky (2014) argue that many environmental problems are due to the neoliberal treadmill of production. Intense consumerism results in the extraction of raw materials and this results in ecological disorganisation: capitalism is not consistent with maintaining a healthy environment. 

O-Brien (2011) notes that  the impoverishment of African and Asian populations are due to the over-exploitation of their natural resources which is down to consumerism. This leads to desertification, economic migration and conflict. 

Victimisation and Green Criminology

Class and Race inequalities have exacerbated the location of waste facility siting and pollution. The impact of green crimes is usually felt by the least powerful. 

Bullard (1990) shows how environmental discrimination is a fact of life for many Black communities in the United States and ‘continues to be rooted in white racism’ which has made it easier for black residential areas to become the dumping grounds for all types of toxic materials. 

Environmental harms are often greater in less developed countries. Indigenous peoples are often the victims and leading fight back and protections. There are several local resistance movements in the global south which aim to protect natural environments from harm, often by Western corporations who wish to extract resources for profit, which won’t benefit local peoples.  

Hundreds of indigenous people have lost their lives protecting natural environments in recent years.  Global Witness noted at least 177 lethal attacks against environmental defenders in 2022.

Signposting

This material is mainly relevant to the Crime and Deviance module, usually taught as part of the second year in A-level sociology.