Green Criminology
The Environment Crime
Building on political economic theories, we can say the following. First, green crimes, harms, and injustice—which are sometimes referred to more broadly using the term ecological disorganization (Lynch et al. 2013)—are to be understood in relation to the organizational content of the economic system that generates them.
In other words, a given economic organization not only contains structural elements that create certain kinds of harmful outcomes, it also tends to overlook harms against ecosystems, for example, when those harms facilitate economic expansion and the interests of the owning class.
Second, we can also say that the nature and content of environmental law and enforcement of those laws are produced as a result of the inherent organizational characteristics or contradictions of capitalism (Foster 1992, 2000, 2002; O’Connor 1988, 1991).
Taken together, these two observations mean that the structure of capitalism must be considered an essential component of the explanation of green crime and injustice, as it also affects the ways that environmental laws are constructed and enforced (Lynch et al. 2020c).
Moreover, because capitalism is global and constitutes the primary form of organization that affects how nations interact with one another over the past four hundred years, this view also applies across nations to a variety of green crimes, harms, and injustices (hereafter, we refer to green crimes to mean green crimes, harms, and injustices).
This view of capitalism as a political economic organization helps explain why green crimes are global and assists us in understanding the forms in which green crimes emerge within nations in different ways.
Although the world is structured by global capitalism, global capitalism’s effects are not monolithic because of the unequal structure and nature of capitalism as it is organized at the global level. In the international economy, nations are organized into a hierarchy of relationships that define global capitalism.
In that global hierarchy, nations occupy different roles and class positions. For instance, some nations are developed and control economic relationships between nations, whereas others are less developed and lack control and are more likely to supply labor and resources and have their labor forces and natural resources exploited. Thus, the location of a nation in the global hierarchy of capitalism affects the kinds of green crimes and forms of green injustices it experiences.
This can affect the distribution of green crime, including the opportunities and motivations for green crimes, the forms of laws created and applied, and the structure of mechanisms of enforcement within any given country in the global capitalism world order.
One goal of introducing green criminology into the criminological literature was to turn criminological attention to the wide array of environmental crimes that had, for the most part, been overlooked within the traditional criminology literature and escaped the explanation of traditional theories of crime or were excluded from the purview of criminological theories and philosophies of the law and justice. Before the introduction of green criminology, criminologists hardly paid attention to environmental crimes (Goyes & South 2017, Lynch 2020).
Some argued that the neglect of green crimes could be linked to the reluctance of criminologists to more fully explore the extent and diverse array of corporate crimes that occur in society (Lynch 2020), and, in that sense, one could say that the development of a literature on corporate crime was a necessary precursor to the emergence of green criminology.
Many areas of research could be identified as precursors to green criminology. These research areas began to point to the harms that green criminologists also study today. For example, before there was green criminology, there were scholars writing about ecological destruction in several different disciplines, including toxicology, epidemiology, sociology, political science, and ecology, among others.
There were philosophical writings on the rights of nature and animals and on forms of natural justice. In that sense, one can argue that the ideas in green criminology involve an application of existing theory and research from other disciplines in a criminological context and that the existence of green criminology owes an intellectual debt to these disciplines that, sometimes, has gone unacknowledged (Lynch 2020).
From a political economic view of green crime and harm, the majority of environmental harms that occur in the world result from corporate behaviors.
The massive quantities of pollution and environmental destruction that are generated, for example, through forms of mountaintop mining, deep pit mining, strip mining, and manufacturing are not just responses to increased demands for goods from the general public or simply to the growth of the global population of humans.
Moreover, when taking up the study of ecological harms, we must be sensitive to the observation that adverse ecological outcomes that involve widespread ecological destruction are not simply the result of the behavior of individuals. Rather, these deleterious ecological consequences are organized outcomes that result from the ways corporations engage in a capitalist economy, design products, carry out production, and promote consumptive behaviors—especially in ways that encourage maximum profit making.
To be sure, it could be argued that all economies destroy ecosystems to some degree, but we must recognize that capitalism does so as part of its inherent organizational structure, i.e., as part of the constant, inherent drive for expansion of production to increase profit
In that system, and due to the unequal ways in which wealth is distributed and used, we must also come to grips with the fact that the wealthy have a much larger ecological impact than other social classes. The green criminological focus on the crimes of corporations and the excessive behavior of the wealthy is considered nontraditional in a discipline that has long focused its attention on explaining the crimes of the poor and powerless while neglecting the crimes of the wealthy and powerful.
Although green criminology was introduced in 1990, it was not until the late 1990s that it became noticed in any significant way. In 1998, green criminology became more firmly established following publication of a special issue on green criminology edited by Nigel South and Piers Beirne in the journal Theoretical Criminology (Volume 2, Issue 2).
Around the same time, green criminological research also began to draw attention to the study of environmental (in)justice (EJ) (Stretesky & Lynch 1998, 1999).
EJ research examines the unequal exposure of populations to environmental toxins and the unequal protection of populations and communities from the harms posed by exposure to environmental toxins (for a recent review of EJ literature, see Banzhaf et al. 2019)
. This focus on EJ has largely entailed examining how poor and Black American communities are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards, a process that establishes detrimental life course and health conditions and forms of racial injustice in Black as well as low-income communities.
In this initial 1990s phase, green criminologists also began to explore the boundaries of green criminology as well as the subject matter that was to be a part of it. Lane (1998), for example, introduced the need to explore the connection between green issues, feminism, and women’s victimization.
Unfortunately, this line of inquiry has not become a major focus in green criminological research, and recent work suggests that the arguments laid out by Lane have not been taken up to any significant extent within green criminology and therefore deserve additional attention (Lynch 2018).
Around the same time, an equally important development in the history of green criminology occurred when Beirne (1999) introduced the study of harms against nonhuman animals into the criminological literature. The issue of harms against nonhuman animals has attracted significant attention within green criminology over the past two decades.
A persistent theme in that area of research included the examination of the rights of nonhuman species to be protected from harm (Benton 1998). Connected to research on nonhuman animals, green criminology also began to explore the causes of crimes against nonhuman animals, with some studies pointing toward the role traditional theories of crime causation might play in that process (Agnew 1998).
The study of crimes against nonhuman animals and questions related to the philosophy of animal treatment and animal rights now make up one of the main areas of research within green criminology (e.g.,
Flynn & Hall 2017; Goyes & Sollund 2016, 2018; McFann & Pires 2020; Nurse 2016; Sollund 2017).
POLLUTION AS A CAUSE OF CRIME
It should be evident that green criminology addresses a wide variety of environmental harms, how those harms are created, and the effects of those harms on humans, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems. One of the issues green criminology has raised, but was then addressed more completely within traditional criminology, involves the effect of exposure to environmental toxins on criminal behavior.
This research has tended to focus on the impact of one well-known toxin, lead (Pb), which can affect human behavior through the stimulation of aggression and its impact on learning and IQ.
The study of the relationship between lead and crime has a relatively long history (Needleman et al. 1990).
Early studies were performed at the individual level and showed that controlling for other covariates of delinquency, children with elevated lead levels (measured in blood, bone, and teeth) were statistically more likely to be engaged in delinquency (Needleman et al. 1996). Nevin (2000) examined whether the relationship between lead pollution and crime existed over time in the United States, examining two indicators of lead exposure and various measures of crime, with some of those tests spanning a one-hundred-year time period.
His research showed an association between lagged trends in gasoline production and violent crime rates. Stretesky & Lynch (2001) proposed that the lead–crime relationship previously observed at the individual level and over time ought to be visible at the spatial level as well. They examined the relationship between lead pollution and homicide across all counties in the contiguous 48 US states.
Controlling for fifteen other explanations for crime, they found a statistically significant relationship between lead pollution and homicide across counties (see also Stretesky & Lynch 2004).
These results have also been discovered at lower levels of aggregation in the cities of Chicago (Barrett 2017, Sampson & Winter 2018, Winter & Sampson 2017) and St. Louis (Boutwell et al. 2016).
Much research remains to be performed on the effect of pollution on behavior. For instance, there are a wide variety of other pollutants, including heavy metals, endocrine disruptors, and pesticides, that may affect behavior.
These are issues that green criminology should address as part of its examination of how pollutants are generated and distributed by capitalist systems of production (Stretesky 2003).
INEFFECTIVE JUSTICE PROCESSES
Traditional criminological research devotes significant attention to empirical studies of ineffective and unequal justice processes. Those studies, for instance, examine whether a given policy reduces crime or whether sentencing outcomes are equivalent across groups with different racial, class, or gender characteristics.
The literature examining these issues within green criminology is quite small. Two broad types of empirical studies have been conducted: those addressing environmental injustice and those related to deterring environmental offenders.
In the broader sociological and epidemiological literatures, EJ studies examine whether groups are unequally exposed to environmental hazards based upon the racial, class, and ethnic composition of an area. For example, a study could examine the proximity of hazardous waste sites to neighborhoods with different demographic characteristics or air pollution concentration differences across those neighborhoods (e.g., Banzhaf et al. 2019).
Early green criminological studies examined the spatial relationship between accidental chemical releases and neighborhood racial and ethnic composition (Derezinski et al. 2003; Stretesky & Lynch 1998, 1999); the relationship between census track race and ethnicity and proximity to Superfund sites, which are the most extreme hazardous waste sites in the United States (Stretesky & Hogan 1998); and the relationship between school racial and ethnic composition and proximity to hazardous waste sites (Stretesky & Lynch 2002). Lynch & Stretesky (2013) examined whether access to US Environmental Protection Agency informal water monitoring improvement programs contained evidence of race and class bias. They found evidence of both effects, with access to these programs being significantly higher for white and upper-income neighborhoods.
For green criminologists, important EJ questions overlap with issues of regulatory effectiveness, producing two additional types of studies: those assessing whether punishments deter corporate offenders, and those that explore whether the punishment of corporations is affected by the people/neighborhoods they pollute. Green criminological research contains several studies indicating that punishments do not deter corporate polluters (Lynch et al. 2016) and hence fail to slow the ecologically destructive tendencies of the ToP, leading to continued and expanding ecological disorganization (Barrett et al. 2018; Long et al. 2012; Stretesky et al. 2013a, 2017).
CLIMATE CHANGE, CRIME, AND JUSTICE
Although the potential association between temperature and crime has a long history within criminology (Lynch et al. 2020b), specific attempts to study the relationship between climate change and crime emerged much more recently (Rotton & Cohn 2003).
The discussion of climate change within green criminology has been somewhat controversial. One of the first extensive green criminological discussions of climate change (Lynch & Stretesky 2010) laid out the argument that climate change ought to be viewed as a global crime committed against the ecosystem and suggested the need to address adverse outcomes associated with climate change as forms of ecological injustice.
his style of argument has been taken up by other green criminologists who have explored the responsibility of corporations for climate change, climate change as a state–corporate crime (Kramer 2013, 2020), the role climate change plays in producing ecocide, and how social action can be employed to mitigate climate change–related ecocide and its effects (White & Kramer 2015).
An article by Agnew (2012) changed this social justice/harm/climate change dialog and drew attention to the possibility that climate change, by raising temperatures, might cause an increase in crime. Evidence for this possibility was implied through the study of individual responses to temperature changes and studies of crime, temperature, and seasonality (for discussion, see Lynch et al. 2020b). Green criminologists, however, made little effort to empirically test the assertion that temperature changes generated by climate change lead to crime. Moreover, at the same time that criminologists were contemplating the idea that climate change might increase crime through an increased temperature effect, they failed to consider the contradicting crime trend: globally, mean temperatures were rising, but crime was declining across nations. Responding to other research suggesting a climate change/temperature/crime association, Lynch et al. (2020b) questioned the methodological structures of studies that supported the proposition that climate change caused an increase in crime. They noted that prior studies tended to either study seasonality effects, thus leaving out an assessment of the long-term effect of climate change on crime, or focus on levels of analysis (e.g., the mean US crime and temperature change) inappropriate to the task of assessing the effect of climate change as a process on crime. To address these limitations, they examined two 120-year time series for temperature and homicide (New York City and London). They found no association between temperature and homicide controlling for the effects of gross domestic product on homicide. To be sure, the results from one study should not be generalized, and additional empirical research is needed to help understand the potential relationship between climate change and crime (for discussion, see White 2018).
GREEN CRIMINOLOGY?
The above discussion provides an overview of research undertaken within green criminology. As noted, the green criminological literature has expanded greatly, and no single review article can examine each of its components because of the number of subareas within green criminology and the volume of extant literature that now exists. That said, there are some areas that green criminology has not adequately explored and that require further research attention.
As noted, some green criminologists posited the criticism that early green criminological arguments were anthropocentric, generating literature focused on harms against humans while neglecting the victimization of nonhuman beings. That criticism has led to extensive growth in studies addressing the ways in which nonhuman animals are victimized. At the same time, that criticism has unintentionally led to the neglect of studies focused on the green victimization of humans. For example, despite limited, early interest in ecofeminism theory (Lane 1998), it was only recently that green criminologists proposed the need for the expanded study of the green victimization of women (Lynch 2018). One can imagine numerous studies that green criminologists could undertake to address the environmental victimization of women. These studies could draw on the public health or occupational health and safety literatures. One might also expect these studies to explore gender differences in green victimization, an area of research that has been entirely overlooked within green criminology. Also welcomed would be studies related to racial, ethnic, and class differences in green victimization for women as well as issues of equal protection and EJ related to gender and race/class/ethnicity, e.g., the green victimization of migrant female workers and migrant workers more generally.
Another area of research that has been overlooked within green criminology is the green victimization of children (Barrett et al. 2016). Prior studies have examined the green victimization of children in schools as an example of forms of school violence criminologists have overlooked (Barrett et al. 2016). Other studies have examined the green victimization of children in limited ways, e.g., by exploring exposure to toxic chemicals among members of the US public (Lynch & Song 2019). Similar to the discussion above on the green victimization of women, green criminologists have not addressed EJ issues for children or variations in victimization by gender, race, ethnicity, social class, or country of residence. One overlooked issue that one would expect to see addressed in this literature is the victimization of children in developing nations from exposure to e-waste (Heacock et al. 2016).
Green criminology—and traditional criminology even more so—has also neglected the green victimization of native/indigenous peoples. This issue was first addressed by Lynch & Streesky (2012), who examined green victimization and EJ concerns for Native Americans (for a historical perspective, see Moloney & Chambliss 2014). More recently, green criminologists have addressed the killing of indigenous environmental activists, which has become a global problem as corporations continue to invade native people’s land in search of raw materials for production (Lynch et al. 2018b). Recent research has also drawn on Marxist ecological theory to examine the ways in which capitalism generates ecocides that contribute to genocides (Crook et al. 2018, Lynch et al. 2020a). This research integrates theory from various perspectives to examine how the structural organization of capitalism cofacilitates the intersection of ecocide with genocide and illustrates how ecological destruction contributes to genocide.
Despite green criminology’s interest in behaviors that harm wildlife, green criminologists have paid much less attention to nonhuman animals harmed in other circumstances. In the green criminological literature, little mention has been made, for example, of the practice of vivisection, which includes live animal surgical experimentation, dissection, and examination, the laboratory animal breeding industry and treatment of laboratory animals, the testing of drugs and cosmetics on animals (Frank & Lynch 1992), the exploitation of animal labor (Stretesky et al. 2013b), or animal harms in the fishing industry. These areas remain ripe for green criminological research and for development of a political economic interpretation of the production of these harms.
There are many other understudied areas awaiting additional attention from green criminologists. These areas include the use of, and the polluting industries and harms associated with, pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers; unsafe working conditions caused by exposure to workplace pollution and toxins; green crimes in working-class communities; expansion of recent SGC research to include a link to and a perspective inclusive of African nations; an expansion of empirical studies in each of the areas reviewed in different portions of this manuscript; and greater attention to the study of hunting and fishing crimes and industrial fishing harms and crimes.
Green criminology has grown significantly over the past several years and is a large, vibrant area of research undertaken by researchers in numerous nations around the globe. One could argue that given the focus of green criminology, it could not have developed within criminology without the external influence of research in other disciplines. Green criminology has brought attention to harms/crimes and injustice in new ways and allowed criminologists to address contemporary issues of extraordinary importance in an age of global ecological collapse (Lynch 2020). Until the creation and expansion of green criminology, these forms of ecological harm were excluded from the criminological literature. As green criminology has demonstrated, many of the behaviors it studies are not only harmful but involve violations of the law—and not just the criminal laws that have become the sole focus of traditional criminology. Moreover, topical areas addressed within green criminology also include subject matter such as the construction, application, and operation of law and social control mechanisms and the definition of crime and its explanation, i.e., subject matter that is also common in traditional criminology. In that sense, we can say that green criminology and traditional criminology are procedurally similar; where they differ is with respect to the kinds of harms and victims and the forms of law and social control that are examined.
Given the scope of issues green criminology now addresses, this review has not been able to explore nor even mention all the subareas to which green criminology has been applied. To address those areas, future reviews should examine conservation criminology, green theories of justice, and crimes against nonhuman animals, all of which contain sufficient literature for review
The Future
Green criminologists have employed explanations drawing on the above arguments, applying them theoretically (Lynch et al. 2017a, 2019, 2020c) and empirically. ToP theory has been primarily applied by Paul Stretesky, Michael Long, and Michael J. Lynch to explain green crime and its variations across time and place/nations (see also Lynch et al. 2013, 2017b; Stretesky et al. 2013b). Over time, as the ToP expands, evidence of increased ecological disorganization can be seen and is promoted by the process of metabolic rift. Furthermore, over time and space, metabolic rift and EUE processes also accelerate evidence of ecological disorganization across places.
The combination of these various political economic approaches (ToP, EUE, metabolic rift, etc.) forms the basis for PEG-C. The extant empirical literature in PEG-C has applied ToP theory and analysis to investigate crime in the coal industry (Long et al. 2012); assess whether financial penalties slow the ToP and reduce pollution (Stretesky et al. 2013a, 2017); model species trade and biodiversity loss (Stretesky et al. 2018); and examine the distribution of pollution across time and states in the United States (Long et al. 2018).
In brief, PEG-C argues that the capitalist ToP drives motivations and opportunities for green crime (Lynch et al. 2017b). Moreover, the ToP produces a legal structure that restricts the definition of green crimes and creates the regulatory and enforcement mechanisms that promote underenforcement of environmental regulations (Lynch et al. 2020c). In part, reflecting the structural requirements of the ToP, the legal apparatus operates to protect the ToP from over-regulation and as a result is generally ineffective in its efforts to reduce environmental crime by corporations (Barrett et al. 2018, Long et al. 2012, Lynch et al. 2016, Stretesky et al. 2017). These assumptions have been assessed quantitatively primarily within the United States by green criminologists. However, environmental sociologists have widely assessed ToP, EUE, and related arguments across numerous countries (e.g., Besek & McGee 2014; Clausen & Clark 2005; Clausen & York 2008; Givens et al. 2019; Jorgenson 2006, 2016b; McKinney et al. 2010; for a green criminological example, see Stretesky et al. 2018)
INTEREST IN GREEN CRIMINOLOGY AND ITS BROADER SCOPE
This section examines the second phase in the development of green criminology, which emerged in the early 2000s. During this phase, researchers expanded the scope of topics to which green criminology could be applied and started to demarcate and name different areas of research within green criminology.
Other perspectives related to green criminology, which included varieties of conservation criminology, also emerged. In our view, it is important to consider the emergence of conservation criminology as part of the development of green criminology, especially as these two areas of research have overlapped more and more over time (Lynch & Pires 2019).
To explore this second phase in the history of green criminology, we begin with a brief examination of the development of conservation criminology, which, as noted, overlaps with but can also be explored independently of green criminology.
The following is not a thorough review of conservation criminology, which requires its own independent review to explore in greater detail (e.g., Gore 2017, Kurland et al. 2017).
In our view, three forms of conservation criminology that emerged over time are important to note. The first was offered by Herbig & Joubert (2006, p. 88) who conceptualized conservation criminology as addressing crimes related to natural resource conservation, which they defined as the “illegal manipulation and exploitation of natural resources.” This approach to ecological crime is primarily concerned with conservation crimes occurring in African nations.
The next form of conservation criminology to emerge was what we call the Michigan State model of conservation criminology, which is a multidisciplinary attempt to understand environmental crimes that affect the natural environment and humans.
This approach favors the integration of risk assessment science with criminological literature and theory to understand environmental harms and ways to constrain those harms (Gibbs et al. 2010).
The third variety of conservation criminology can be referred to as the Rutgers Model. It is an extension of Ronald V. Clarke’s (1980) development of situational crime prevention criminology, which was first applied to an environmental issue by Lemieux & Clarke (2009) in their study of elephant poaching.
Although recent work has promoted cross-fertilization between green and conservation criminology (Lynch & Pires 2019), the situational crime prevention models employed within conservation criminology are not theoretically consistent with PEG-C (Lynch et al. 2018a).
It should also be noted that of the three conservation approaches, the literature in the Rutgers conservation approach is predominately empirical. This is related to the origins of that model in situational crime prevention theory and the tradition of testing that theory.
With respect to its empirical orientation, Rutgers-related studies have explored how situational factors contribute to various forms of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing (Petrossian 2015, Petrossian & Clarke 2014,
Petrossian et al. 2015), and the poaching of various species such as parrots (Pires & Clarke 2012), redwood burl (Kurland et al. 2018), and corals (Petrossian et al. 2020).
One of the weaknesses of the situational crime/Rutgers conservation model is that this approach addresses situational contexts, which often vary from location to location, making it difficult to generalize findings across different contexts (for discussion, see Lynch et al. 2018a).
As noted above, green criminology has explored crimes against nonhuman animals in various ways, largely engaging in philosophical arguments about the nature and definition of those harms, the rights of nonhuman animals, and the responsibilities of humans to protect nonhuman animals from harm.
These studies have included discussions of harms against nonhuman animal companions (Sollund 2011), examinations of human–nonhuman animal and human–predator animal conflicts (Lynch 2019, Sollund 2015), and development of the concept of the murder of nonhuman animals (Beirne 2014, 2018), an act called theriocide.
Beirne’s argument on the origins of theriocide details the numerous ways in which humans kill animals and the methods through which those killings occur.
For example, Beirne notes that “the variety of ways that we kill animals seems without limit. Animals can be 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.
However, operating in tandem with the strategic invisibility of animals in slaughterhouses is the increasing elusiveness of their deaths in various discourses of lethality” (Beirne 2014, p. 53). Many of these killings are legal and can occur when hunters obtain licenses to kill animals, even when the animal is an endangered species (Sollund 2015), or in the production of foods.
Legal killings of animals also occur as the result of actions by state agencies that theoretically ought to protect animals from harm (Lynch 2019). Thus, the harms that affect nonhuman animals examined by green criminologists do not necessarily involve behaviors that are defined as crime by laws or regulations but can include deviance-based definitional arguments about those harms that seek to sensitize readers and researchers to the possibility of reconceptualizing the definition of nonhuman animal–related crimes committed by humans.
Although extensive efforts have been made to study the definition of and philosophical objections to harming animals, green criminologists have directed less attention to the empirical study of the social control of crimes against nonhuman animals.
Green criminologists have examined the administration of animal laws (Nurse 2015), including the role of nongovernmental agencies in these activities (Nurse 2013). Those examinations, however, have largely been theoretical and descriptive.
Missing from this literature are the kinds of empirical examinations that focus attention on the effects of punishments on human behaviors that harm animals or how different sentencing options constrain behaviors that harm animals. In other words, one area that has been neglected in studies of nonhuman animal crimes involves research similar to the kinds of policy and efficacy studies found in mainstream criminological and criminal justice literature that ask about whether the law works to control crime and why it works or fails to work as planned.
One of the main areas of research that has emerged within green criminology during the second phase of its development focuses on wildlife crimes, such as the illegal trade in wildlife and animal poaching.
This is a broad literature that explores not only theoretical explanations for these illegal behaviors but also philosophical arguments about the need to protect wildlife from harm (Sollund 2019). This literature also includes empirical studies of wildlife trading and/or poaching (Goyes & Sollund 2016, Stassen & Ceccato 2020, Weekers et al. 2019) and the efficacy of intervention strategies designed to control the illegal wildlife trade.
The latter type of studies, however, forms a much smaller portion of this literature than one might expect, especially within an empirically oriented discipline such as criminology. As part of these assessments, green criminologists have studied wildlife trade routes in China (Wong 2019) and employed the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) data to examine the utility of CITES as a policy (Goyes & Sollund 2016) and test structural theories predicting the distribution of wildlife trafficking (e.g., Stretesky et al. 2018). Structural models of wildlife trade and biodiversity loss are sometimes considered in this literature but are more commonly found in the environmental sociological literature (e.g., Clausen & Clark 2005; McKinney et al. 2009, 2010; Shandra et al. 2009, 2010).
The above studies are important because they identify how characteristics of the global economy and world order impact species trade and the loss of species across nations. In addition, studies focusing on biodiversity loss are also important because they demonstrate that for many species, the most significant impacts on biodiversity loss do not occur through illegal wildlife trafficking/trade/hunting (except, perhaps, for certain exceptional and visible species such as tigers, rhinoceros, and elephants) but rather occur through normalized and legalized trade as well as through extensive economic development, land-use changes, pollution, and habitat fragmentation (Gren et al. 2016, Tilman et al. 2017)
—or, one could say, outcomes that result from the routine growth and expansion of global capitalism and the forms of ecological destruction and disorganization capitalism fosters.
In contrast to studies on biodiversity concerns and loss in the sociological literature, the green criminological literature pays greater attention to detailing and explaining the illegal segment of those trades. For instance, conservation criminology research has focused attention on compliance with trade regulations (e.g., Harris et al. 2019) and how corruption can contribute to the illegal trade in wildlife (van Uhm & Moreto 2018). In contrast, sociological research on biodiversity loss examines how the organization of the capitalist treadmill of production (ToP) and global capitalism as measured by dimensions of international trade relationships among nations, income inequality, gross domestic product, and world-systems position variables affect biodiversity loss. Although it is consistent within criminology more generally to focus on illegal behaviors, green criminological research should also draw attention to how the trade in wildlife contributes to ecological destruction and disorganization, because this is a central concern in that literature outside of criminology.
It should be noted that conservation criminologists have also posed discussions of the ways in which this area of research can be expanded (McFann & Pires 2020).
Green criminologists have also taken up research examining food-related harms as green crimes (Gray & Hinch 2019). This includes research examining the ecological harms associated with genetically modified food (Walters 2004), which can not only harm those consuming those products (via genetic alteration hazards, toxicity, and allergic reactions)
(Zhang et al. 2016) but can also have adverse ecosystem impacts by altering the genetic stock of naturally occurring plant or animal species. Related research examines the issues of biopiracy and bioprospecting (South 2007). Biopiracy research draws attention to corporate exploitation of nature and efforts to commodify nature for use in commercial products, including medicines
Developing nations and indigenous peoples and their knowledge bases are more likely to be victims of bioprospecting and biopiracy. There are several international laws that address biopiracy and bioprospecting, including the US Marine Mammal Protection Act, the US Endangered Species Act, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the Nagoya Protocol
CRITISISM AND REDIRECTIONS
To some extent—one might even say to a large extent—green criminology has developed in isolation from mainstream criminology, which creates a vacuum that has protected it from external criticism. One can certainly argue that there have been limited responses to and recognition of green criminology in the traditional criminological literature. The reverse is true as well—green criminology has not been amenable to incorporating the theories and methods of analysis commonly employed in traditional criminological analysis (conservation criminology is an exception in this regard; for alternative arguments, see Lynch et al. 2017b). This is an interesting state of affairs for two reasons. First, globally, green criminology has attracted significant attention, and the literature associated with green criminology has expanded manifold over the years. Yet, at the same time, the audience for that literature has been truncated by the nature of green criminological theory and research, which has been slow to penetrate the criminological mainstream and, consequently, has done little to change the overall nature of the discipline of criminology (Lynch et al. 2017a). Second, because of this lack of interaction, there has been a deficient external critique of green criminological literature forwarded by traditional criminologists. This means that existing criticisms of green criminology have been generated by green criminologists themselves (Lynch et al. 2017b). Given that green criminology is much different than traditional criminology, the kinds of criticisms of green criminology one finds in the green criminological literature are quite different than those that might be posed by traditional criminologists (e.g., concerning the definition of green crimes and harms).
This is not to say that green criminology is entirely absent of all critiques. In an effort to criticize a perceived limitation in PEG-C approaches, for instance, White (2009) argued in favor of a position he calls ecoglobal criminology. Purportedly, ecoglobal criminology addresses the transnational nature of environmental crime. We agree with the position on the need to address transnational green crime taken up in ecoglobal criminology and suggest that White is indeed correct in positing that “the systemic causal chains that underpin much environmental harm are located at the level of the global political economy within which the transnational corporation stands as the central social force” (White 2009, p. 230). Nothing in the above statement, however—especially because it places emphasis on the global political economy—substantively differentiates ecoglobal criminology from the original political economic approach employed as the basis for green criminology (Lynch 1990, Lynch et al. 2017b).
Another branch of green criminology is green-cultural criminology, which also provides material that could be considered a critique and redirection within green criminology. To begin, it should first be pointed out that in the mid-1990s, a form of criminology known as cultural criminology was offered, and this later became the basis for green-cultural criminology. Cultural criminology probes the meaning of crime, in and of itself, as an action or as a purposeful construction, and how those actions and constructions intersect with criminal justice processes. In 2013, Brisman & South (2013) proposed the development of a green-cultural criminology. One goal of the unification of these approaches, according to Brisman & South, was to better understand how environmental harms and crimes are socially constructed. The social construction of green crimes can occur through various processes such as law, the criminal justice system’s response to those crimes, media depictions of green crimes, and social movements that endeavor to expand the definition of green harms (e.g., through EJ movements). The issues here, which are largely theoretical and descriptive, revolve around definitional processes and how those definitional processes form and either support or undermine the emergence of responses to green crime in society more broadly.
A major concern raised in the early development of green criminology was a charge that green criminology had an anthropocentric or human-oriented bias (Halsey 2004). This criticism was connected to additional critiques of the use of other theoretical approaches within green criminology such as liberal environmentalism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. It is quite difficult to neatly and succinctly summarize these complex arguments and how they intersect with one another; for interested readers, we direct you to take up some of the original discussion of these concerns (for extended discussion, see Halsey 2004, 1997). One can also suggest that a critique of anthropocentric green criminology is contained within Beirne’s (1999) argument for a nonspeciesist criminology because it was sensitive to the abuse of nonhuman animals.
In brief, the anthropogenic critique is primarily focused on ensuring that green criminology does not revolve only around the study of harms and injustices that affect humans but also considers harms and injustices from other, nonanthropocentric theoretical and philosophical perspectives. In short, the goal here is to develop a position that acknowledges the ecological victimization of nonhuman species as well as the victimization of nature and ecosystems as living entities. These alternative views on victimization have been widely developed within green criminology.
The fact that early green criminological studies investigated green crimes that predominantly affected humans as a starting point does not mean that those early works specifically argued in favor of excluding crimes that affected nonhuman beings from the purview of green criminology. Rather, in the early green criminological literature, a starting point was needed, and human beings were selected as a simple starting point for introducing issues pertinent to green criminology. By doing so (i.e., using human victim examples) to argue for a position that would incorporate environmental harms into the criminological literature, early efforts to justify green criminology avoided the need to simultaneously argue for the recognition of nonhuman victims as well. Given that it tended to develop around human victimization, early examples of green criminology were interpreted by some as anthropocentric, despite evidence to the contrary that included discussion of crimes against nonhuman entities in the original formulations of green criminology (Frank & Lynch 1992, Lynch 1990).
It should be noted that criticisms of the anthropocentric orientation of early green criminology were also connected to criticism of the PEG-C approach more specifically (Halsey 2004). PEG-C criminology has expanded in numerous ways over time and has come to include a variety of harm and justice concerns related to nonhuman beings (Lynch et al. 2017b, 2019; Lynch & Stretesky 2014). Along similar lines—or as a critique of animal studies performed by green criminologists—one could also make the reverse argument that approaches within green criminology that address crimes against nonhuman entities alone have not been inclusive of a variety of victims and lack the ability to incorporate green crimes that harm humans and possibly even ecosystems. In our estimation, it seems perfectly reasonable for green criminologists to compartmentalize these kinds of victims/victimizations because different kinds of victims may be exposed to unique victimization processes and concerns. Thus, sometimes green criminological studies focus on human victims and other times on animal victims or ecosystem victims. To be sure, in a broader theoretical or conceptual way, it should be understood that all living entities are connected by the fact that they are the victims of the forms of ecological disorganization engendered by capitalism.
A recent critique suggests the need for a green criminology that addresses environmental concerns that are relevant to the Global South. Referring to the need for a southern green criminology (SGC), Goyes (2019, p. 121) writes, “Southern green criminology must seek to scientifically uncover the harmful practices that make the South victim to ecological discrimination.” According to Goyes, a key concern in SGC is considering how the North/South divide is “fundamental in the production of environmental harm” (Goyes 2019, p. 8) and that such an approach makes reference to “epistemologies of the South” (Goyes 2019, p. 11). Based on these premises, Goyes (2019, p. 11) defines SGC as “the science that is attentive to the dynamics and contexts of the Global South and grows out of the epistemological power of the marginalized, impoverished and repressed.” Although SGC raises important points, it appears that the definition of the concept of SGC is currently quite restricted. For example, at this point in time, SGC is defined in a way that only addresses environmental issues in South America and Australia, leaving out discussions of ecological harms relevant to, for instance, southern nations in Africa (for a friendly critique of the SCG approach, see Moosavi 2019). Additionally, the current construction of SGC overlooks an extensive literature on dependent development, which addressed the concerns of unequal development from a global and southern perspective that was developed in sociology beginning in the 1960s (e.g., Amin 1972; Bunker 1985; Frank 1966, 1967; Rodney 1972; Wolpe 1972). That literature is also important because it addresses elements of a key theoretical argument in green criminology related to the political economy of crime and justice, to which we now turn our attention.
ECONOMIC GREEN CRIMINOLOGY
The most well-developed theoretical perspective within green criminology draws on political economic theory. In doing so, this portion of the green criminological literature draws on theory and research in environmental sociology and ecological Marxism.
A central premise of PEG-C research draws on arguments from ecological Marxism. Ecological Marxism directs attention to the inevitability of ecological destruction caused by the normal operation of capitalism. Understanding why this occurs requires comprehending the essential nature of capitalism, which must consume nature and labor to produce commodities for consumption as part of the profit-making cycle. This cycle of capitalist production and consumption has been aided by the emergence of the ToP following World War II (WWII). The ToP perspective is an important dimension of PEG-C (Stretesky et al. 2013b). PEG-C also refers to other processes within ecological Marxism such as metabolic rift and ecologically unequal exchange (EUE). These are not theories traditional criminologists normally employ, yet they are central to understanding green crime, injustice, law, and social control. We now turn to an overview of this argument.
It is useful to begin a discussion of PEG-C with the observations of James O’Connor and John Bellamy Foster. O’Connor famously argued that capitalism has a second contradiction in addition to Marx’s original theorization of a contradiction between labor and capital (O’Connor 1988, 1991). The second contradiction is between capital and nature, i.e., capitalism needs nature’s resources to fuel production. However, this need to consume nature will eventually lead to the end of capitalism due to natural resource exhaustion. The process occurs at an increasing pace due to capitalism’s inherent need for economic growth (i.e., more production and profit).
In an important contribution to the literature on ecological Marxism, Foster (1992, pp. 78–79) put forth a position on the association between capitalism and ecological destruction that he defined as “a tendency toward the amassing of wealth at one pole, and the accumulation of conditions of resource depletion, pollution, species and habitat destruction, urban congestion, overpopulation and a deteriorating sociological life-environment (in short, degraded ‘conditions of production’) at the other.” In other words, capitalism and nature are in contradiction with one another. What that means is that the growth of capitalism necessarily occurs at the cost of ecological destruction. In short, to grow, capitalism must consume nature and, in the process, causes various kinds of ecological degradation that promote ecological decline and destruction (Foster 2000, Foster & Clark 2020, Foster et al. 2011). The degradation caused by capitalism occurs in various ways and may result from, e.g., toxic pollution (air, land, and water), resource extraction and production, excessive resource depletion, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, and overuse of pesticides and fertilizers. Foster (1992, p. 78) referred to this as “the absolute general law of environmental degradation under capitalism.”
The idea that capitalism must degrade the ecosystem comes, following Foster’s (2000) various arguments, not only from Marx’s theory of capitalism (see also Burkett 1999, Saito 2017) but also from the ToP perspective (Schnaiberg 1980; see also Gould et al. 2008). The ToP approach states that capitalism must destroy nature to expand. ToP theory, however, focuses particular attention on the forms of ecological destruction (also referred to as ecological disorganization) that occurred following WWII. After WWII, a new era of capitalist fossil fuel and chemical energy capitalism emerged, both of which were used to drive the expansion of capitalism as if it were on an endless treadmill. In the ToP approach, there are two primary forms of ecological disorganization: those associated with ecological withdrawals or resource extraction and those related to ecological additions or the pollution of ecosystems. In this view, as capitalism expands it uses increasing levels of fossil fuels and chemical energy to drive the ToP, leading to increasing levels of ecological disorganization associated with resource withdrawals and pollution over time.
Environmental sociologists have also described these adverse ecological outcomes using metabolic rift theory and EUE theory. Metabolic rift theory is another way of describing the inherent contradiction between capitalism and nature, which can also be employed to discuss other complex problems such as the relationships between capitalism’s conjoined exploitation of workers and nature (Foster 1999) and the alienation between the human species and nature (Foster 2000). The implications of the theory of metabolic rift are quite complex and beyond the scope of this review to detail in full (for criminological applications, see Lynch et al. 2019). In part, metabolic rift theory is useful for understanding outcomes such as the unequal exchange of metabolic environmental resources between developed and less developed nations in the capitalist world system in ways that disadvantage less developed nations and cause them to experience specific forms of ecological disorganization, including, for instance, extensive natural resource exploitation and unequal biodiversity decline (e.g., Clausen & Clark 2005, Clausen & York 2008).
EUE theory is an extension of the broader theory of unequal exchange (Bunker 1985, Hornborg 1998). Unequal exchange theory is used to describe the unequal economic trade associations between countries in the global capitalist world system that promote uneven and dependent economic development across nations (Amin 1976, Emmanuel 1972, Frank 1967). EUE theory states that these unequal exchanges also promote the production of unequal ecological harms across nations. As a result, developing nations experience increasing rates and specific kinds of ecological disorganization and destruction owing to their position in the capitalist hierarchy of nations. Numerous empirical tests provide support for this argument (e.g., Givens 2018; Jorgenson 2006, 2016a; Tester 2020).
