Victims of Environmental Crime and Green Criminology
Administrative Announcements and Evaluation Feedback
Evaluate Feedback Surveys:
The "Evaluate" system is currently open for the unit.
Students are encouraged to provide feedback via the provided QR code or through university communications.
The lecturer acknowledges that the volume of notifications (emails and texts) from the university might feel over the top, but stresses its importance.
Feedback serves two primary purposes: helping students progress through their degrees by improving future unit experiences and assisting the students following behind them in the curriculum.
Feedback is discussed at multiple levels of university administration, including the discipline, school, and faculty levels. These are considered vital metrics for crafting and developing units, rather than just flashy data points.
Final Weeks Structure:
Week 10: This is the final substantive week of new content, focusing on victims of environmental crime.
Week 11: Focused entirely on essay planning. The lecture will be a Q & A session for students to ask questions, engage in informal revision, and have consultations with the lecturer. Seminars for Week 11 follow the same structure.
Introduction to Environmental and Green Criminology
Broadening the Scope of Victimology:
The unit concludes by examining who or what can be considered a victim, extending beyond human individuals to include beings, places, and objects.
Key internal comparisons for students to consider include:
Victim Blaming and Idealization: Applying concepts of the "ideal victim" to the environment.
Restorative Justice: Exploring how restorative processes might apply to repairing the environment and redressing ecological harms.
Justice Needs: Considering if non-human animals have needs or experiences of victimization, even if they do not experience the justice system in the same way humans do.
Harm can be committed by various actors, including the state, corporations, and individuals.
Defining "Environment" (Student Intuitions):
Initial definitions provided by students highlight the complexity of the term:
The surrounding world and the life it produces (including non-living artifacts like rocks, valleys, rivers, and mountains).
Habitats where humans and animals live.
A place of interaction between living things (a relational approach).
A compilation of physical and non-physical surroundings (including metaphysical aspects like consciousness).
An ecological system governed by conditions, factors, and forces.
An ontological category (a way of being).
Definitional Uncertainty: Unlike interpersonal crime where the victim (a person) is usually intuitive, environmental victimization is less clear. It might involve an ecosystem, a habitat, or a series of relations. This uncertainty is central to the study of Green Criminology.
Distinguishing Between Environmental Crime and Harm
Rob White’s Definition ():
Environmental Crime: Illegal environmental harms. These are actions currently defined as unlawful and therefore punishable by state legislation.
Environmental Harm: Legal environmental harms. These are actions currently condoned as lawful but are nevertheless socially and ecologically harmful. These can have devastating consequences for biodiversity, habitats, and livelihoods.
Conceptual Tensions:
The distinction hinges on whether an act is ratified within legislation.
Some environmental crimes may not seem immediately "harmful" in an ecological sense (e.g., financial fraud related to environmental regulations), while many significant ecological damages are perfectly legal.
The lecturer questions why society accepts certain harms against animals or forests (e.g., factory farming, deforestation of the Amazon) that would be considered victimization if applied to humans.
Examples of Environmental Crimes and Harms
Examples of Environmental Crimes:
Oil Spills: Specifically those resulting from negligence or criminal activity (e.g., the Deepwater Horizon oil spill).
Illegal Dumping: Unregulated dumping of waste or oil.
Deforestation/Illegal Logging: One of the most lucrative and widespread environmental crimes globally.
Wildlife and Animal Trafficking: Exporting animals for medicinal purposes or the exotic pet market.
Overfishing: Exceeding regulated boundaries for economic greed.
Intentional Burning/Arson: Causing traumatic consequences for environments and human communities.
Illegal Mining and Fracking: Specifically when they breach existing regulations.
Examples of Environmental Harms (Often Legal):
Commercial Fishing: Depleting populations and destroying essential ecosystems for endangered species (e.g., issues in Tasmania).
Chemical Contamination: Seeping into groundwater (e.g., the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, often linked to local industrial practices or fracking).
Industrial Pollution: Routine emissions from cars or factories that contribute to climate change.
Consumerism/Fast Fashion: Significant but often legal environmental impact.
AI Water Usage: The high water consumption required by data centers, becoming a critical issue in the context of climate instability.
Noise and Light Pollution: Substantial impacts on wildlife behavior.
Large-scale Chemical Disasters: Historical examples include Bhopal, India (thousands of deaths due to chemical contamination).
Insights from Professor Reese Walters on Green Criminology
Defining Green Criminology:
A branch of criminology emerged in focusing on both legal and illegal actions harming the environment.
It critiques state-sanctioned behaviors (trade-related activities) that damage the environment, arguing that many currently legal acts should be regulated and criminalized due to the nature of their harm.
The Doomsday Clock:
Proposed in by atomic scientists from the Manhattan Project.
It is a symbolic representation of the likelihood of humanity annihilating itself, where midnight represents extinction.
Current Setting: As of January , the clock was set at seconds to midnight, the most alarming position in its history.
Scientists warn that human society could face chaos as soon as .
The Sixth Mass Extinction:
Current extinction events involve the eradication of unprecedented amounts of flora and fauna over the past four decades.
Unlike past extinctions caused by asteroids or volcanoes, the current crisis is almost entirely human-caused (Centre of Biological Diversity).
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes global warming as a "weapon of mass destruction."
The Threat of "Zombie Pathogens":
Melting sea ice in Antarctica and the Arctic is releasing bacteria and viruses frozen for thousands of years.
Permafrost thaw may expose humans and non-human species to pathogens for which there is no known response.
International Policy and the Legal Definition of Environment
The Challenge of Definition:
There is no commonly agreed-upon legal definition of "environment" in international law.
World Commission on Development and the Environment (): Defined it simply as "where we all live."
Rio Declaration/Earth Summit (): Concluded that environment is a term "everyone understands and no one is able to define."
International Court of Justice (ICJ): Described it as the "living space, the quality of life, and the very health of human beings, including generations unborn."
UN Environment Programme (UNEP): Defines it as the "totality of all the external conditions affecting the life, development and survival of an organism." While broader, it is still criticized for being humans-centric and potentially overlooking non-living components like rocks that support life.
Challenges in Criminalizing and Policing Environmental Harm
Transnational Nature of Crimes:
Environmental crimes often involve multinational corporations and cross international borders.
Jurisdictional Problems: Different legal systems have different ideas of criminality, penalties, and different languages. Lack of extradition treaties between nations complicates justice.
Factors Preventing Criminalization:
Economic Prioritization: Legal systems often protect corporate interests and economic activity over ecological safety.
Technical Difficulty: Policing requires specialized scientific equipment and expertise (e.g., measuring precise CO2 emissions from a smokestack).
Distributed Agency: It is difficult to identify a specific individual to prosecute within a massive corporate hierarchy.
Social Trade-offs: Some harms are seen as essential for humanity (e.g., meat production for food, though it produces methane that damages the ozone layer).
Lack of an "Ideal Victim": It is harder to generate public or legal sympathy for a "creek" or a "population of birds" compared to a human victim.
Questions & Discussion
Indigenous Victimization:
A student raised the issue of indigenous peoples and how they are affected by environmental crime.
The lecturer confirmed that indigenous peoples are "over-represented" as victims of environmental harms, meaning they are disproportionately impacted by the destruction of natural habitats and ecosystems.
Refining Hope and External References:
The lecturer mentions the recent birthday of David Attenborough, celebrated as an ardent defender of the environment.
Students are encouraged to watch the full lecture by Professor Walters on the unit site, particularly if it relates to their third assessment (AT3).
Numerical Context: The war in Israel/Palestine (mentioned as the war in Iran/regional context) resulted in tonnes of CO2 in its first week, roughly equivalent to of Australia’s annual carbon emissions.