Green Criminology and Environmental Crime: Criminology That Matters in the Age of Global Ecological Collapse
Abstract
An overview of green criminology (GC) is provided. That substantial literature is not easily summarized, and here, some core issues are reviewed: defining green crimes, the scope of GC, measuring green crimes, and empirical studies of green crimes. Special attention is paid to political economic approaches to GC, which was the foundation for GC. Connections are made to environmental sociology, theories of metabolic rift and unequal ecological exchange, and scientific evidence on planetary boundaries and ecological footprints. Examples of widespread human and nonhuman being green victimization are reviewed. In an era of anthropogenic-driven global ecological collapse, academic disciplines must pay increased attention to ecological disorganization, ecosystem destruction, and excessive production/consumption, which is the proper subject matter of GC.
As part of establishing the scope of this journal, the editors requested articles addressing the literature in particular areas of research relevant to the study of white-collar and corporate crime. My mission was to examine environmental or green criminology (hereafter, GC). That literature is now large and diverse and cannot be easily summarized in a brief review. To address that problem, and given my intellectual orientation, I limited the scope of this discussion (where necessary) to political economic GC (aka, PEG-C), which is the original approach employed to define the boundaries of GC (Lynch, 1990).1
Although three decades old, GC is marginalized within criminology, treated as if it were a curiosity rather than a field of research focusing on a tremendously important set of global concerns. For example, there is significant scientific research suggesting that Earth has entered an era of global ecosystem collapse (Sato & Lindenmayer, 2018) caused by adverse human activities (i.e., excessive ecological consumption, pollution; York, Rosa, & Dietz, 2003a). Given such assessments, green crimes—like corporate and state crimes—can be shown to produce more harm and victimization than street crime. This has been a significant issue in the GC literature and has led to broad definitions of green victims that include nonhumans and ecosystems (see below). Yet scientists don’t think about environmental issues in the same way as social scientists. Physical scientists document the harms caused to ecosystems. Particularly relevant to those discussions are examinations of empirical evidence related to climate change, planetary boundaries (PBs), ecological footprints (EFs), and anthropogenic species loss, described later in this article. While scientists describe those adverse ecological outcomes, or what social scientists refer to as dimensions of ecological disorganization, they don’t really examine why those harms occur, and physical scientists don’t take up explanations for those harms. The latter is the role social scientists play in the study of ecological harms.
Three decades after its introduction, the scope of GC is now broad. It is not simply about ecological harms (e.g., pollution) or explaining the origins of those harms. It now also draws attention to the construction, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws; to the problem of environmental justice; to the ways in which all living beings (humans, nonhuman, and the living Earth system; Gaia; Lovelock & Margulis, 1974) are victimized by ecological harms. And, like any other area of criminological research, GC must also address the definition of its main focus, green crimes, which is not a simple nor settled matter.
Again, it is beyond the scope of this article to fully review all of the areas of research described above. Rather, here, I examine only a handful of those concerns. To orient readers, I begin with a review of background issues. Next, I discuss the origins of GC and then move on to discuss some of the ways that green crimes have been defined. Next, I take up the measuring/counting of green crimes and green victimizations and then discuss some of the theoretical perspectives related to those observations. The Discussion/Conclusion section identifies some areas of future research.
Before beginning, I must admit that my approach lumps various green and conservation criminology views together and that these might be differentiated if this were a typological analysis. I avoid efforts to differentiate types of GC from one another, since doing so complicates matters and is not necessary for understanding GC more generally. As noted, my preference is for a PEG-C approach, which I have researched for the past three decades, and that view most certainly influences my review of GC.
Background
This section examines some major issues in GC and helps orient readers unfamiliar with GC. First, we must ask “What is a green crime?” Any area of research must have well-defined concepts, and as I illustrate later, this has not been a strong suit in GC, where there are many competing definitions.
Second, studying green crimes requires measuring them. Measuring green crimes is not just important but necessary. There is a large literature and numerous databases outside of criminology useful for measuring green crime. Counting those crimes is important for legitimizing the study of green crimes. Unfortunately, it is still necessary to legitimize the study of green crimes, given criminology’s obsession with street crimes. The need to legitimize the study of environmental harms is a unique criminological problem; one does not need to establish the legitimacy of studying environmental harms in most disciplines. Yet, with respect to legitimacy, it can be easily shown that there are more green crimes and victimization than street crimes and victimization (Lynch et al., 2017).
Third, studying green crimes requires addressing legal statutes and law enforcement mechanisms that define and control green crimes. Unlike street crime—but like corporate and white-collar crime—green crimes are defined in administrative, regulatory, and civil laws, as well as criminal laws, and at various levels of governance. Consequently, the traditional legal definition of crime as a violation of criminal law does not strictly apply to green crimes and reflects the debate concerning white-collar crime between Sutherland (1945) and Tappan (1947). Complicating this research, rules that officially identify green crimes are often in massive, complex documents. Addressing this issue also requires examining the social construction of green crimes. As a social construction, environmental laws and regulations involve conflicts about representing scientific knowledge, corporate interests, and victims’ interests (i.e., any living being’s interests) in those rules. The outcome often represents the interests of powerful groups and the structural economic organization of society rather than scientific knowledge.
By moving beyond the law, GC recognizes and gives a voice to a host of victims (human, nonhuman, and ecosystem/ecological) that traditional criminology willingly ignores and abandons, making green victimization a fourth area of concern. Green victims come in many forms. They may be victims of pollutants deemed legally safe (Wargo, 1998); or contested illness struggles between community victims, scientists, state agents, and industrial actors (Brown, Morello-Frosch, & Zavestoski, 2011); or victims of the unequal distributions of pollution (Bullard, 2008) or unequal enforcement of environmental law (Spina, 2015) across race, ethnic, and class groups. These victims include nonhuman beings, ecosystems, children, and women (Flynn & Hall, 2017; Hall, 2014; Jarrell & Ozymy, 2012; Lynch, 2018a; White, 2018). Some of these victims have no voice (e.g., a tree, a child) and, to be protected, require representation by researchers, governments, and the law.
A fifth concern is quantitative studies. GC has long been largely descriptive, theoretical, philosophical, and qualitative. It has been argued that legitimizing GC requires more extensive quantitative research (Lynch et al., 2017).
GC is a unique area of research and now constitutes an entirely distinct field of research within and outside of criminology. GC moves beyond orthodox criminology and the narrow intellectual orbit it has inscribed on criminologists, with its focus on street crime. GC—like its “cousins” that examine white-collar, corporate, and state crimes—has expanded the boundaries of criminology. Doing so requires drawing on research and theory from disciplines outside of criminology. One could argue that GC is so dependent on noncriminological research and data that perhaps it is not really criminology after all. One could argue, perhaps, that there should be no such thing as GC, if by “green criminology” one means a subdiscipline anchored only to criminology. Instead, it could be argued that we should instead be describing the fields of “green deviance,” “green social control studies,” “green law,” and so on. But, at the same time, dividing GC into too many areas may be counterproductive (see below).
GC Before and Without Criminology
Should GC be anchored to criminology? Long before GC, similar issues were examined in public health, toxicology, and sociology. The first laws addressing environmental harms emerged from public health research that predated GC by centuries. The same is true for laws addressing harms against wildlife, historically created to protect wildlife as the property of large landowners (Eliason, 2012). It was outside of GC that animal victims and animal rights were first entertained (Youatt, 1839). The primary empirical data and theoretical approaches employed to examine these issues also predate GC.
Some argue it makes little sense to discuss GC as if it was a criminological matter alone (Goyes & South, 2017). I agree and cannot disentangle my interest in GC from “outside” influences.2 GC owes debts to many important figures, from those widely known (e.g., Carson, 1962) to the lesser known, such as Truhaut, who founded ecotoxicology (1960s). Truhaut (1977) suggested the 19th-century chemical industry “brought with it immense economic and social benefits” but also “risks” from “exposure to…an ever increasing number of chemical products in modern life.…” (p. 1). Similar observations stretch back nearly 2,000 years to the first toxicological studies by Dioscorides (ca. 50 AD). Others, too numerous to name, include Alice Hamilton, the early 20th century pioneer of industrial toxicology and occupational health/epidemiological studies. And, one cannot forget the scientists, ecologists, and philosophers who studied and preserved ecosystems.3
GC reflects intellectual traditions from numerous disciplines and would be impossible without Marxist analysis, scientific risk assessment, environmental sociology, animal rights studies, environmental justice research, ecophilosophy, and so on. That rich, broad, interdisciplinary intellectual background cannot be adequately reviewed here. Importantly, in the context of this journal’s first issue, we must also acknowledge GC would be impossible without sociologists/criminologists who expanded the concept of crime and brought corporate/white-collar/state crime into criminology in meaningful ways. But, here, we must move on to other relevant issues examined by GC.
What Is Green Crime?
Definitions, a Conceptual Approach
To study something, one must first define the main concepts; perhaps (in metaphysics), the inherent nature or “being” of the thing under examination. This is done to share information and assumptions, which may be accepted or rejected. As well-known philosopher of science, Hempel (1965) argued, lacking basic, agreed-upon definitions, researchers are unable to effectively establish a field’s boundaries, logically extrapolate its theories, assumptions and relevant hypothesis, or engage in the intellectual work of discovery. In other words, conceptual definitions matter.
GC was first proposed in 1990 (Lynch, 1990). Thirty years later, there is still no agreement concerning the definition of the term “green crime.” That term can vary significantly across green scholars. Indeed, these definitions are so numerous and wide-ranging, they cannot be adequately reviewed here.
The coexistence of numerous definitions of green crime may mean any of the following: (1) green crimes are complex and require different terms to distinguish them from one another; (2) it is theoretically useful to have these diverse definitions; and/or (3) diverse definition reflect green criminologists efforts to name its concepts, define GC’s boundaries, and deal with the philosophy of semantics, metaphysics, and epistemological concerns (Kripke, 1972). In another view, one could argue that this plurality of definitions constitutes conceptual ambiguity and that GC moves in opposition to Kant’s arguments in Critique of Pure Reason, which preferences simplicity and eloquence over endless complexity and conceptual competition. These issues cannot be settled here (though my personal preference leans toward eloquence and simplicity).
A General Definition
Some green crime definitions are created using typological approaches. For example, defining types of green crimes by referring to other colors of crime, White (2008) proposed dividing environmental crimes into (1) brown crimes or environmental harms in urban landscapes; (2) white crimes related to new technologies; and (3) green crimes, which he restricts to environmental harms that relate to wildlife conservation and wildlife harm. This definition does not, however, necessarily correspond with other definitions. When new definitions are proposed, the justification must be explored, and old and new definitions compared. Originally, green crime was defined as (1) harms caused to living beings through the creation of environmental hazards; (2) existing at the local and global levels; (3) outcomes tied to corporate and state crimes; and (4) as the subject matter of radical criminology and political economic theory/analysis, and its concern with class analysis (Lynch, 1990, p. 11). That is a broad definition, and newer definitions ought, therefore, to explain how they augment/improve that view. One could object to Lynch’s definition by arguing that it needs to be stripped of its political economic underpinnings for some specific set of reasons. The main point would be to explain why other definitions are needed.
The Problem of Too Many Definitions
Drawing on the philosophy of science, one could argue that too many conceptual definitions, and dividing up concepts endlessly into smaller pieces, actually impairs rather than enhances developing a deeper understanding of a subject. The endless division of knowledge is akin, I would argue, to the endless efforts to divide the division of labor. Overlooking commonalities across behaviors/outcomes assumed to be unique by definition inhibits developing appropriate etiological explanations of those outcomes. In taking this view, I am siding with the arguments for explanatory parsimony (Beck, 1943) and Albert Einstein, who, in a 1950 Life Magazine interview, noted:
Achieving this end requires avoiding unnecessary multiplication of concepts and definitional reification. Slobodkin (2001) has discussed definitional reification in ecological studies. For Slobodkin, reification occurs when a concept/idea is accepted at face value, while its empirical validity/utility is ignored. As an analogy, Slobodkin used the example of angels as reifications. Certainly, there are paintings, poems, and biblical writings about and prayers to angels—that is, there is some kind of sense data related to angels. In this way, angels are socially constructed/reified, but the construct “angel” is “not a scientifically useful one” (Slobokin, 2001, p. 4). The point: care must be taken to ensure the utility of definitions, that they are not arbitrarily multiplied without purpose, that they do not inhibit understanding, and that their production does not become a substitute for the development of knowledge and understanding.The aim of science is, on the one hand, as complete a comprehension as possible of the connection between perceptible experiences in their totality, and, on the other hand, the achievement of this aim by employing a minimum of primary concepts and relations.
The definition of green crime: A starting point
One of the most theoretically thoughtful and interdisciplinary definitions of green crime comes from the works of Beirne (1995, 1997, 1999, 2007, 2009, 2014). In his widely acknowledged 1999 work, Beirne defined one kind of GC—nonspeciesist criminology—that would focus attention on animal abuse. Doing so requires defining animal abuse, which Beirne (1999) defined as
Here, as in many definitions of green crimes, there is no direct reference to whether the harm in question is a violation of law, and many definitions of green crimes draw on deviance/harm rather than legal definitions.any act that contributes to the pain, suffering, or death of an animal or that otherwise threatens its welfare. Animal abuse may be physical, psychological, or emotional; may involve active maltreatment or passive neglect or omission; and may be direct or indirect, intentional or unintentional. (p. 121)
Numerous human behaviors cause harms to (nonhuman) animals. Since animals experience pain and psychological distress, they can be understood as being the victims of green crimes produced by humans, even if we (as humans) do not known whether animals can conceptualized or define their experience as victimization. The victimization of animals is widespread and variable. Sometimes, it may be useful to identify the kinds of animals being harmed, since the kinds of animals, the kinds of harms, and the explanations of those harms may be linked. As Sollund (2011) argued, however, human–animal interactions are constructed around the needs and consumption preferences of humans. Taking that position further, Stretesky, Long, and Lynch (2013) argued that all crimes against animals can be explained by the political economic context of human societies, which would also explain why crimes against animals are, as Sollund suggested, consumption-related (see also Beirne, 1999, 2014). Despite that overarching causal link, defining individual green crimes against animals has some utility. For instance, Sollund (2013) identifies the need to examine green crimes against companion animals, which include an array of crimes such as the abuse/exploitation of companion animals in the home, in the breeding/commodity marketplace, and the “abduction” of wildlife for the companion animal market.
Wildlife crimes, including their causes, correlates, distribution, and control, have become significant GC issues (Goyes & Sollund, 2016), especially in conservation criminology, which often examines these crimes quantitatively (Petrossian, Rolf, & Clarke, 2018; Petrossian, Weis, & Pires, 2015; Pires & Clarke, 2012). In conservation criminology, wildlife crimes are more likely to be defined as violations of law and include empirical studies of poaching (Lemieux & Clarke, 2009; Pires & Clarke, 2012) and illegal fishing (Petrossian et al., 2018, 2015). Less attention has been paid to other harms against animals such as those on factory farms (Fiber-Ostrow & Lovell, 2016; Gray, 2016; Wrock, 2016) or the agricultural/industrial exploitation of animal labor (Stretesky, Long, & Lynch, 2013; Lynch & Genco, 2018.
Beirne (2014, 2018) also proposed the term theriocide to define human killings of animals. As Beirne notes, criminologists offer many definitions of homicide, but all share one feature—the killing of one human by another. That definition omits the killing of animals by humans. He notes, human kills animals in many ways. They are “boiled, cooked, crushed, electrocuted, ensnared, exterminated, harpooned, hooked, hunted, injected with chemicals, netted, poached, poisoned, run over, shot, slit, speared, strangled, stuck, suffocated, trapped and vivisected” (p. 53). Orthodox criminology defines none of these acts as similar to “homicide.” He suggests this is because animals are not “regarded as ‘beings’” that “can be murdered,” rather they are simply viewed “as mere appendages to humans…or as…property” because they are “things” and lack agency (p. 54).
For Beirne, the term theriocide is like the term homicide—they are both generic terms describing acts where humans kill, in one case humans, and in the other, animals. Like homicides, theriocides
This is an example of a definition with utility that—in addition to containing academic rigor in the explanation—provides a shorthand way to refer to human killings of animals.may be socially acceptable or unacceptable, legal or illegal…intentional or unintentional. It may involve active maltreatment or passive neglect. Theriocides may occur one-on-one, in small groups or in large-scale social institutions. The numerous sites of theriocide include intensive rearing regimes; hunting and fishing; trafficking; vivisection; militarism; pollution; and human-induced climate change. (p. 55)
Broadening the Definition of a Green Crime
Beirne and South (2007) provide a broader conceptualization of green crime. “At the most abstract level,” a green crime involves “the study of…harms against humanity,…the environment (including space) and…nonhuman animals committed by both…powerful institutions (e.g., governments, transnational corporations, military apparatuses) and…ordinary people.” This definition implies that one form of crime green criminologists ought to address involve power relationships, an approach consistent with Lynch’s (1990) earlier definition. They also point out that “ordinary people” can commit green crimes. Whether those latter crimes deserve significant attention can be debated, and I briefly address this issue from a PEG-C perspective.
The media often exposes us only to green crimes committed by “ordinary individuals” but not to those committed by the powerful. Barak (1988) long ago drew attention to the role the media plays in the social/ideological construction of crime. He also argued criminologists needed to oppose those media depictions and reveal how crime is produced by the political economic structure. In that view, it is important to draw attention to how power structures create/influence definitions of crime, how the organization of law and law enforcement focuses its power and attention on the individual and the powerless, and how those processes shaped criminology and its focus on powerless street offenders. For example, while individuals certainly engage in behaviors that pollute ecosystems, corporate pollution matters more; while individuals violate local pesticide ordinances, it is pesticide manufacturers, corporate farms, golf courses, and so on that should draw attention; though individuals can cut down trees, globally, the bigger problem is economically driven deforestation; while individuals may harm a companion or farm animal or member of a wildlife species, the bigger harms are caused by the animal treadmill of production, including the pet industry (breeders and wildlife “kidnappers”; Sollund, 2013), factory farming, the laboratory animal industry, the clothing industry, and so on (Lynch & Genco, 2018).
Here, consider a brief quantitative example. In the United States, about 2.6 million companion animals are euthanized annually, with individuals implicated as the offenders (i.e., giving up animals, failing to spay/neuter animals). That is no small number. News articles, television, print, and radio ads also draw attention to this concern. But relatively, the scope of companion animals euthanized pales in comparison to organized, political economic crimes against animals in the United States. Consider the following U.S. facts (annual figures): (1) 3.1 million mink pelts are harvested; (2) 920 million farm animals die due to abuse and neglect (Cassuto, 2012); (3) 2.5 million wildlife beings are killed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Animal Health and Plant Inspection Service (APHIS; Lynch, 2018b); (4) APHIS reports more than 820,000 animals other than mice, rats, birds, fish, and amphibians (which in 2016, included 71,188 nonhuman primates) killed in laboratories; (5) the number of mice/rats/fish/birds/amphibians killed in laboratories is difficult to count (they are excluded from required laboratory animal counts) but is estimated to exceed 100 million. These few examples underestimate the number of animals killed by the organized sector of the U.S. economy and exclude animals killed in (1) the pet breeding industry (e.g., dogs, cats, fish, birds); (2) the pet industry’s organized animal capture and trafficking; (3) wildlife killed through deforestation or pollution or urban development; (4) the offspring of laboratory animals born in operating laboratories that are killed (legally, they are not required to be counted); (5) the number of animals that die in zoos (including petting zoos), circuses, animal and amusement parks, horse and greyhound racing, and other animal show events; and so on. While the media calls attention to the 2.6 million companion animals killed annually, it shows little concern for the 99.5% of animals—more than 1 billion—killed by/in the political economic treadmill of animal crime (for space reasons, I must ignore animal harms in the food industry; for real-time estimates, see https://animalclock.org/)
Discussing green crime, Beirne and South (2007) also created a specific, though not exhaustive, list of behaviors that illustrates the numerous ways in which green crimes occur. At the political economic level, that list includes:
This broad definition should be appreciated for its scope as well as its attention to identifying specific behaviors that fit the green crime concept.abuse and exploitation of ecosystems, including animal life; corporate disregard for damage to land, air and water quality; profiteering from trades and practices that destroy lives and which leave a legacy of damage for subsequent generations; military actions in war that adversely impact the environment and animals; new challenges to international treaties and to the emerging field of bio-ethics, such as bio-piracy; illicit markets in nuclear materials; and legal monopolization of natural resources (e.g., privatization of water, patenting of natural products, etc.) leading to the division between the resources of the rich and the resource impoverished and the prospects of a new form of conflict, harm, injury and damage…the institutional, socially acceptable human domination of animals in agribusiness, in slaughterhouses, and abattoirs, in so-called scientific experimentation and, in less obviously direct ways, in sports, colleges and schools, zoos, aquaria, and circuses.
Using the PEG-C approach to GC, Stretesky et al. (2013, p. 2) defined green crime as “acts that cause or have the potential to cause significant harm to ecological systems for the purpose of increasing or supporting production.” This definition draws on political economic theory in environmental sociology and arguments concerning the ecologically destructive tendency of capitalism (Foster, 1992, 1997, 1999, 2000; Jorgenson, 2009, 2012; Schnaiberg, 1980). The PEG-C definition includes legal and extralegal environmental harms. In this view, behaviors beyond the law that count as green crimes are defined objectively by referring to scientific evidence related to the assessment of ecological destruction (e.g., PB harms; Rockstrom et al., 2009; see below).
In the treadmill approach, green crimes are identified by the fact that they cause “ecological disorganization” (Schnaiberg, 1980). This view requires examining ways that humans produce conditions that force ecosystem (or any of its parts) to deteriorate and decay. Related explanations and evidence come from environmental sociology, ecology and economics, and research on ecology and entropy (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971), emergy analysis (Odum, 1996), and various views on ecological economics (Daly, 1991; Long, Lynch, & Stretesky, 2018). Ecological disorganization occurs when pollution is added to ecosystem (called ecological additions) or when resources are withdrawn from nature for production (called ecological withdrawals). Globally, these complex green crimes are related to forms of ecological disorganization generated by metabolic rift (withdrawing, using, redistributing, and polluting with energy-related materials produced by the labor of Nature such as fertilizers and fossil fuels; Clark & Foster, 2009; Clark & York, 2005; Clausen & Clark, 2005; Foster & Burkett, 2008) and global ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) of resources and pollution (Jorgenson, 2009, 2012). Having described some of the ways in which green crimes are defined, it is also useful to briefly review the extent of green crimes in society.
Counting Green Crimes and Describing Their Extent
There are many ways to count green crimes at the local, national, and international levels. Those data sources are not addressed in the orthodox criminological literature, and some measures of green crime require accessing the scientific literature.
Measuring green crimes is not as simple as measuring street crimes—there is no single location where green crimes are aggregated, and these data must be collected from numerous sources across levels of analysis and locations. It is also necessary to define what is being counted and why. Sometimes, green crime counts can only be measured using conviction or penalty data, leaving open questions about the dark figure of green crime. Since green crimes are diverse, efforts to measure them adequately must also be diverse. That is a difficult challenge, and requires aggregating, for example: counts of air, water, and waste pollution violations; violations of very specific laws related to nuclear waste and radiation, fossil fuel well (fracking) contamination, or other hazardous waste counts (e.g., abandoned contaminated brownfields, or waste sites on remediation lists); various measures of animal harms, including those described earlier (e.g., companion animals, wildlife, trafficked animals, companion animal industry, illegal fishing); ecosystem crimes that involve deforestation or water extraction crimes, which also raise the question of how to “count” deforestation or water monopolization; number of people, animals, or ecosystems harmed; and so on. And, some green crimes cannot be counted and must be described qualitatively to make those harms apparent and meaningful.
At the broadest level, measuring green crimes’ scope includes evidence of outcomes such as climate change, anthropogenic species loss, damage to PBs, and the human EF. These scientific, quantitative and theoretical concepts have been minimally integrated into GC and are entirely absent from orthodox criminological literature. A brief discussion of these concepts follows and also illustrates how corporations and states contribute to these crimes.
Climate Change
Here, I avoid discussing the extensive evidence on climate change, which hardly needs description given extensive scientific consensus on this subject (Cook et al., 2016). Moreover, for those who reject that consensus, no amount of scientific evidence is sufficient or persuasive.
In GC, climate change has been addressed in various ways. The most important of these explores the social, environmental, and economic injustice outcomes for both human and nonhuman species (e.g., White, 2011; White and Kramer, 2015; Wonders & Danner, 2015) and climate change as a state–corporate crime operating within the political economy of capitalism (Kramer, 2013; Lynch, Burns, & Stretesky, 2010). Drawing largely on seasonality explanations of the temperature–crime relationship, some argue climate change may increase crime (Agnew, 2012), though empirical studies addressing that assertion require greater attention to measurements issues described in the climate change literature (e.g., Friedman, Hwang, Chiang, & Frierson, 2013; Jorgenson, 2012, 2014; Lynch, Long, Stretesky, & Barrett, 2019; Lynch, Stretesky, Long, & Barrett, 2019; Stretesky & Lynch, 2009; York et al., 2003a) before useful conclusions can be reached.
In contrast to environmental sociologists, GC has overlooked employing Influence of Population, Affluence, and Technology (IPAT), a modification of IPAT model (ImPACT), and Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence and Technology (STIRPAT) models to examine human influences on ecosystems and the global environment (York et al., 2003a; York, Rosa, & Dietz, 2003b). These models address climate change and other aspects of the human EF (see below). STIRPAT models can assess political economic hypotheses associated with treadmill of production and metabolic rift approaches and generally reject conservative/mainstream ecological modernization and Environmental Kuznets Curve hypotheses (York et al., 2003a; in GC, see Barrett, Lynch, Long, & Stretesky, 2018; Long et al., 2018; Lynch, 2016a; Stretesky, Lynch, Long, & Barrett, 2017; Stretesky, McKie, Long, Lynch, & Barrett, 2018).
Briefly, STRIPAT models developed from the IPAT/“closing circle” debate concerning the core measures of human environmental impacts (Commoner, 1971; Ehrlich & Holdren, 1972). While IPAT models are efficient and mathematically parsimonious (York et al., 2003b), their disadvantage involves assumptions that prevent hypothesis testing, a problem remedied by the stochastic (random probability) STIRPAT approach (Dietz & Rosa, 1994).
STIRPAT models can have different theoretical anchors. In the political economic version, the historical growth of global capitalism expands production, pollution, and ecological resource withdrawals to promote corporate profit. Production/consumption acceleration was also driven by fossil fuel extraction/use. Given the unequal economic exchange relationships between nations in the World-System, the extraction and consumption footprints associated with production become unevenly distributed, contributing to different dimensions of metabolic rift such as externalizing the costs of consumption and extraction (i.e., North–South, developed–underdeveloped, urban–rural rifts). Continued growth of the global treadmill of production expands ecological degradation, producing an unsustainable ecological crisis.
York, Rosa, and Dietz (2003b) employed STIRPAT models to predict carbon dioxide outputs and energy footprints across nations (N = 146). The models predicted between 85–87% of the variation in CO2 and 91–93% of the variation in energy footprints. For GC, these outcomes direct attention to how consumption, extraction, capitalism, and ecological destruction intersect. Related arguments have been examined in GC, integrating environmental sociology, treadmill of production, and EUE theory (Long et al., 2018; Long, Stretesky, Lynch, & Fenwick, 2012; Lynch, Long, Barrett, & Stretesky, 2013; Lynch, Long, Stretesky, & Barrett, 2019; Stretesky & Lynch, 2009; Stretesky et al., 2018).
Planetary Boundaries (PBs)
Marx’s ecological position, which addresses the conjoined exploitation of human labor and Nature, connects metabolic rift, EUE, and treadmill of production arguments (Foster, Clark, & York, 2010; Jorgenson, 2009; Schnaiberg, 1980). Although these theories are not incorporated into scientific studies of ecological destruction (scientific theories do not specifically discuss the role capitalism plays but do mention the role of the industrial revolution, a key marker in the history of capitalism), they are reflected in scientific concepts such as the PBs.
There are nine PBs that measure the health of the global ecosystem (Rockstrom et al., 2009): freshwater use, phosphorous/nitrogen flow, ocean acidification, biodiversity integrity (genetic diversity), climate change/radiative forcing, stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, land-use change, and pollution. These measures allow some GC explanations to be examined empirically. For example, carbon dioxide, ocean acidification, and phosphorous/nitrogen indicators measure aspects of metabolic rift in environmental sociological studies (Clark & York, 2005; Clausen & Clark, 2005; Jorgenson, 2012, 2014) and are identified in GC as forms of ecological disorganization and as objective indicators of ecological disorganization and green crimes (Lynch et al., 2017; Lynch et al., 2013). Moreover, because PBs also include ecological rift and EUE indicators, they can be employed to discuss the connection between environmental injustice and green crime (Lynch et al., 2017) and the social control of green crimes. Since the objective dimensions of PB can be employed to examine and propose policy/legal limits that facilitate ecological damage management (e.g., regulations related to wildlife trading/trafficking, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, carbon emissions, phosphorous/nitrogen pollution/use/production), these can be analyzed using traditional criminological effectiveness/evaluation methods. Given the connection between capitalism, corporate expansion, and ecological destruction/disorganization, however, GC recognizes that laws and environmental policies can, at best, limit some, but cannot solve the ecological damage caused by overproduction, overconsumption, and economic growth associated with the inherent expansionary tendencies of capitalism (Lynch, Stretesky, & Long, 2018a). This conclusion is consistent with Foster’s (1992) description of the “absolute general law of environmental degradation under capitalism.”
Ecological Footprint (EFs)
Humans’ adverse impacts on local and global ecosystems are also measured using EFs (Rees, 1992). EFs measure whether human activities are environmentally sustainable by accounting for the relationship between human ecological withdrawals and environmental pollution as ecological costs on one hand and the quantity of available biocapacity on the other hand. EFs can be measured at different levels of aggregation.
When the EF is 1.0 or less, human activities are ecologically sustainable and replaceable by Nature’s reproductive labor. According to the Global Footprint Network, the current global EF is 1.75, meaning that each year, humans consume more biocapacity (1.75 Earths) than Nature can replace. Clearly, if humans run a long-term EF deficit, the global ecosystem (like a savings account in a bank) will collapse. In contrast, street crime is very unlikely to make the world collapse.
Consumptive behaviors driving the global EF deficit are not evenly distributed across nations, with the excessive consumption behaviors of core/developed nations driving the footprint deficit. For example, in 2014, the United States had a biocapacity of 3.6 ha/person (global hectares [gha]), and a consumption footprint of 8.3 gha, generating a deficit of (−)4.7 gha. Other nations with significant EF deficits include Belgium (−6.0), the Netherlands (−5.2), Japan (−4.1), Switzerland (−3.5), UK (−3.5), Italy (−3.5), Germany (−3.3), and China (−2.7). Those consumption deficits are augmented by depletion/extraction/exportation of resources from less-developed nations with biocapacity surpluses as part of the global capitalist system of EUE (Jorgenson, 2009) and global metabolic rift (Clark & Foster, 2009). As the ecological surplus in less-developed nations is consumed, developed consumer nations in the capitalist World-System shift resource extraction to new locations (Jorgenson, 2016).
GC has used EFs to describe ecological disorganization as a measure of green crime (Lynch et al., 2013). It is less common to discuss inequities in ecological consumption and ecological exploitation as indicators of environmental injustice in environmental sociology (Givens, Huang, & Jorgenson, 2019; Gould, Pellow, & Schnaiberg, 2015) and GC, though there are some relevant GC studies of this issue (Stretesky & Lynch, 2009).
Anthropogenic Species Loss
Species decline is a widely recognized global concern examined empirically in environmental sociology (McKinney, Fulkerson, & Kick, 2009; McKinney, Kick, & Fulkerson, 2010; Shandra, Leckband, McKinney, & London, 2009). While GC has displayed interest in a variety of harms against animals, a significant portion of that literature examines crimes against wildlife, wildlife trafficking, and poaching (Sollund, 2019). One criticism of that literature is its insufficient attention to the broader anthropogenic drivers of species loss (Stretesky et al., 2018), including patterns in EFs, EUE, and metabolic rift and scientific evidence of other anthropogenic drivers of species loss: deforestation (Betts et al., 2017), mining and river damming (Hughes, 2017), urbanization (Sol, González-Lagos, Moreira, Maspons, & Lapiedra, 2014), treadmill of production effects (Stretesky et al., 2018), agriculture (Karp et al., 2012), and habitat fragmentation (Haddad et al., 2015). Studies also indicate that anthropogenic drivers produce negative biodiversity feedbacks that weaken biocapacity reproduction and reduce species abundance and richness (Duffy, Godwin, & Cardinale, 2017).
Few relevant empirical studies are found in the GC literature. Empirical studies by conservation criminologists primarily test situational crime prevention arguments (e.g., Petrossian et al., 2018, 2015; Pires & Clarke, 2012). Conservation criminology’s focus on wildlife crime prevention hypotheses are understandable to the extent that they are more interested in predicting illegal behaviors than species decline. These studies supply important information about the connection between anthropogenic species loss, law, and social control.
Observations and Conclusion
This brief discussion covered a lot of territory, and consequently, inadequately represents the full scope of GC. As noted, two factors limited this review. First, the scope of the GC literature. Now quite large, GC comes in different forms, and covers a broad array of topical areas, making a review difficult. Second, as noted, my own attachment to the political economic variety of GC was employed to filter the materials in this review.
Given the inclusion of this work in the Division’s new journal, it should be made clear that GC overlaps significantly with corporate and state crime research. Each involves examining the crimes of the powerful and also often involves definitions of crime that go beyond the criminal law and orthodox criminology’s concern with street crime. Like corporate/state crimes, green harms are significant, particularly, in terms of the volume of harm and financial costs produced. Green crimes include local and global problems (e.g., pollution, ecological destruction, poaching) and wide-ranging harms such as climate change and anthropogenic species loss. The various living victims of these diverse crimes include all species, not simply humans. Green crimes, unlike street crimes, threaten the very stability of the world in which we live.
As noted, GC draws on Marx’s analysis of the intersection of capitalism and Nature and involves understanding metabolic rift and the exploitation of Nature’s free labor. Understanding green crimes requires coming to grips with the observation that capitalism exploits Nature’s labor in the same ways that it exploits working class labor. As Foster and Clark (2018) noted, Marx stated that “All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil….” Such observations do not sit well with most criminologists, given the conservative bent of criminology and its banishment of class analysis (Lynch, 2015). But, such analysis is required to comprehend the problems presented by green crime in the era of global ecosystem collapse.
After 30 years, much GC research remains to be done. Although most green criminologists might not agree, there is an insufficient body of empirical GC research, and further empirical research is needed (Lynch et al., 2017). Most green criminologists avoid empirical research and most empirically related questions have gone unaddressed. This omission cannot be excused by claims related to data limitations. Certainly, if one reads the scientific, or the ecological, or the toxicological, or environmental sociology, and so on, literatures, one does not encounter the same absence of data and quantitative research. There is a warehouse of green crime data on the Internet waiting to be exhumed and assessed.
One can easily imagine a tremendous number of empirical GC studies and many that replicate traditional criminological research. These include evaluation studies of the effectiveness of environmental laws, policies, and environmental law enforcement—at any level of analysis (local, state, regional, national, global) —using traditional pre–post research methods criminologists often use. These studies can involve one-shot locations or multiple sites (e.g., did the environmental policies established in the Periyar National Park, India, which involved turning poachers into environmental guides, and local park residents into environmental social control agents, work? How does environmental regulation effect compliance with environmental laws among Indigenous peoples who primarily rely on the environment for their livelihood? How does environmental policy X in various countries affect pollution outcome Y?).
Conservation criminologists have illustrated the uses of many different kinds of environmental data and how they can be employed to test criminological arguments. But, there are few researchers engaged in that work, and there is a tremendous volume of research on those issues that can be undertaken. Most quantitative GC has been by American-based or trained criminologists. To be sure, the United States has some of the richest and oldest empirical environmental data, and consequently, the majority of empirical GC studies employ U.S. data. This has left data from many countries unexplored. Yet, empirical data can also be found in other nations, and green criminologists must learn to exploit those in order to promote GC and broaden GC’s audience. There are also relevant international databases housed by many agencies and organizations, including those houses by the United Nations, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or the hundreds of databases listed by the International Environmental Agreements Database Project.
There is an endless array of GC research to be performed. Green/conservation criminologists have hardly scratched the surface of databases on wildlife trade/trafficking, how those can be used to test various theories, and how those data connect to research in other disciplines. For example, most green/conservation wildlife studies examine mammal species, with several examining illegal fishing and the parrot trade. There is limited research on the illegal (and legal) trade in most other species. There is also a species-food market and an underground dark web market that have not been explored. Many GC studies review summary data, and there is a need for more in-depth studies if GC is to penetrate further into the very empirically oriented criminological literature, where about 90% of articles are defined as empirically oriented (see, Lynch et al., 2017).
There is a tremendous global mining economy that involves not only oil and gas, but in some places, water extraction. There are mineral and precious metal markets and rare earth markets. There is a metal manufacturing market that has shifted across the global as the nature of the global world capitalist system changes, which has been misunderstood, and generates extensive ecological damage (Lynch, 2016b). Little attention has been paid to the green victimization of native/Indigenous people (Lynch, Stretesky & Long, 2018b). All these crimes are the result of corporations seeking out their next opportunity for exploiting the ecosystem to generate profits. And in each case, there is an extensive volume of data that can be accessed to illustrate the nature of these crimes and the scope and nature of victimization that occurs.
Here, I cannot list all the possible studies that can be undertaken. I invite you to that future, one you can help design. More empirical studies are needed for GC to become meaningful and to have an impact within and beyond criminology. Empirical GC studies can help change the content and nature of criminology and provide evidence useful to policy makers that might help reduce the ecological stress humans create. A useful closing point is as follows: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx, the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach). And, the world cannot be changed in the absence of empirically based knowledge that can be provided to others as part of a convincing argument about harm and the need for change.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Michael J. Lynch https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4012-5871
Footnotes
1. For other views, see the special issue of Theoretical Criminology (Volume 22, 3), celebrating the 20th anniversary of green criminology (GC; see also Goyes, Mol, Brisman, & South, 2017) and related works on conservation criminology (Gibbs, Gore, McGarrell, & Rivers, 2009; Petrossian et al., 2018; Pires & Clarke, 2012).
2. Long before conceptualizing political economic GC, I was (unknowingly) socialized into a toxicological worldview, first, by my father (Vincent DePaul Lynch, PhD), who, among other accomplishments, cofounded the Society of Forensic Toxicology and established the first degree program in toxicology in the United States. Second by his brother, Elliot, the City of Niagara Falls, NY’s chief chemist, who helped reveal the toxic crimes at Love Canal. Third, by my cousin, Patricia F. Lynch, a chemist, who published several articles on improved scientific oil spill fingerprinting and tracing techniques (e.g., P. F. Lynch & Brown, 1973).
3. I grew up on Long Island (NY), which no one thinks of in an environmentally friendly manner. Yet, Long Island (LI) is home to numerous nature preservations: for example, Theodore Roosevelt’s home, Sagamore Hill; New York Planting Fields Arboretum; and, among others, the overlooked 11,000 acres of tidal marsh preserves in the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge and smaller parcels surrounding Kennedy Airport. I hiked, wadded, and froze in those acres for years with my longtime friend/future professor of biology, Thomas W. Simmons, who sometimes literally submerged me in nature!
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Prisons as Law-Violators and Sites of Environmental Injustice
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Between Ordinary Harm and Deviance: Evaluating the UK’s Regulatory Reg...
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Appropriating the Commons: Tea Estates and Conflict Over Water in Sout...
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Mass Extraction and Green Crime Victimization in Turkey
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A Typology of Heritage Crime Victims
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The Criminal Law Aspect of the Violation of Environmental Law in the c...
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Environment, Environmental Crimes, Environmental Forensic Medicine, En...
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Criminología verde, esfuerzo de aplicación de las regulaciones sobre v...
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Green Criminology: Capitalism, Green Crime and Justice, and Environmen...
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Standing Trial for Lily: How Open Rescue Activists Mobilize Their Crim...
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Criminal Liability of Legal Entities for Environmental Crimes: Problem...
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Using crime script analysis to elucidate the details of Amur tiger poa...
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Living at Extractive Sites: Invisible Harm and Green Victimization in ...
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Uncovering the nuances of criminal motivations and modus operandi in t...
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Documenting Harm to the Voiceless: Researching Animal Abuse
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Chair of the Board
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Regulatory Rollbacks in the Amazon Rainforest: A Nuanced Look into the...
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Norway Case: Environmental Crime
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