Criminology and the Anthropocene

Cameron Holley, Clifford Shearing, Cameron Holley, Clifford Shearing

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781134889235
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Anthropocene signals a new age in Earth's history, a human age, where we are revealed as a powerful force shaping planetary systems. What might criminology be in the Anthropocene? What does the Anthropocene suggest for future theory and practice of criminology? This book seeks to contribute to this research agenda by examining, contrasting and interrogating different vantage points, aspects and thinking within criminology.

Bringing together a range of multidisciplinary chapters at the cutting edge of thinking and environmental rethinking in criminology, this book explores a mix of key intractable problems of the Anthropocene, including climate change and overexploitation of natural resources that cause environmental insecurities; crime and corruption; related human insecurity and fortressed spaces; and the rise of new risks and social harms.

Of interest to scholars in the fields of criminology, sociology and environmental studies, this book provides readers with a basis for analysing the challenges of, and possible approaches to, the Anthropocene at all levels (local, national, regional and international) and discusses the future(s) of criminology for improving social policies and practices.

Chapter 1

Thriving on a pale blue dot

Criminology and the Anthropocene

Cameron Holley and Clifford Shearing^*

Introduction

We, Homo sapiens, have had a varied history during our brief time on this planet of ours. So many of the things we have done, and continue to do, to each other and to other fellow earthlings, have been unspeakably horrible as well as heartrendingly caring – we have been a Janus-faced lot (Harari, 2014). Through all of this we have not only survived but have thrived on ‘our’ tiny ‘pale blue dot’ – the term that was used to describe the iconic image captured by the spacecraft Voyager 1 as it turned its cameras, at astronomer Carl Sagan’s request, one last time to Earth as it moved beyond our solar system, appropriately, on Valentine’s Day 1990.

We have done well in creating well-being for ourselves as earthlings.

Our thriving has been particularly evident during a temperate climatic period on the planet that geologists have dubbed the ‘Holocene’ – meaning, ‘wholly new’. This short period of some 12,000 years since the last Ice Age has seen us reach into every corner of our planet as we created safe spaces for ourselves in which to live, work and play. Enabling this accomplishment has been a planetary infrastructure of ‘ecological services’ (Costanza et al., 1997) that have sustained us as biophysical beings. Rockström (2009) has conceived these services as constituting a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ that has been made possible by a set of ‘planetary boundaries’ (Steffen et al., 2015) that defined the environments of the Holocene.

For us humans, these planetary boundaries have been the foundation of our biophysical survival as a species, along with many other species. Many of us have conceived of these boundaries as ‘Nature’, a realm that we took advantage of, and took for granted. A world that we thought of as a warehouse of unlimited resources available for our use (Verbeek, 2005) and that we thought we did not, and indeed could not, influence. Nature was the work of Gaia and Gods, not our work. Certainly, many indigenous peoples had conceptions and rules that recognised our interconnectedness with the natural world (Adamson and Davis, 2017; Williams, 2013: 261), but what many in the Global North barely glimpsed, and did not fully understand or acknowledge, was that Nature constituted our biophysical security. Without Nature there would be no ‘us’.

While we lived in and took advantage of Nature, our realm of accomplishment was ‘the social’ (Rose, 1996). This was a domain of existence that Durkheim (1950) conceived as an independent realm, that we constituted, that was entirely apart from biophysical Nature – two sui generis realities. While we humans constituted ‘the social’, we had little, if any, influence over Nature – or so we thought. It was within this ‘way of seeing’ (Smith, 1987) that the ‘social sciences’, including criminology, emerged. The natural sciences studied Nature, while we social scientists studied the results of the human work that constituted the social worlds within which we had our being as ‘social animals’. Within this conception humans, as earthlings, had been influential in shaping the social world, but with respect to the world of Nature we have been, in Harari’s (2014) words, decidedly ‘insignificant animals’.

This framing has quite suddenly been overturned via, what Pat O’Malley (this volume) has termed, a ‘collapse of nature into society’ – a collapse that was admittedly a long time in coming. The Greek tragedy author Sophocles long ago reflected how ‘man’ easily ‘wearies even the noblest of gods, the Earth’ (quoted in Heidegger, 1999: 146–147). And as others have documented more fully (Williams, 2013; White, Rudy and Gareau, 2016), the history of the social has repeatedly been nudged by questions of animal equality (Bentham, 1907), restrained economic growth (Mill, 1909) and our humbling existence as but one part of an evolving planet (Darwin, 1859). These ideas were reinforced by the rise of twentieth-century environmental perspectives advanced by scientists and social scientists (e.g., Leopold, 1949; Carson, 1962; Lovelock and Epton, 1975; Singer, 1975; Merchant, 1980). These many modern environmental thinkers increasingly positioned Nature as relevant to society, as well as questioned the Cartesian dualism between them (see Lidskog and Waterton’s [2016] discussion of environmental sociology; see Williams’s [2013] discussion of wild law). Leopold (1949: 205) nicely illustrates this in his arguments for a new ‘land ethic’ noting: ‘man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic team.’

Notwithstanding this long and formidable body of thought, humans quickly became rapacious consumers of ‘ancient stored sunlight’ (Hartmann, 2013) as a source of energy to enhance our well-being. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution an acceleration commenced, driven by a contingent coupling of a fossil fuel (initially coal), the steam engine and manufacturing of goods through machines (Marks, 2006). What we did not realise initially, but now know, is that through our harnessing of fossil fuels, and the release of carbon into the atmosphere that this involved, we humans became, virtually overnight, very significant animals indeed. So significant that we have become influential ‘geological actors’ (Chakrabarty, 2009) who are, not only part of Nature, but have fundamentally shaped planetary systems. This is exemplified by anthropogenic climate change and a veritable array of declining indicators of biodiversity and ecosystem health (UNEP, 2012; Clark, 2014). The ‘unintended consequence’ (Merton, 1936) of our actions has been to fundamentally undermine ‘planetary boundaries’, the ‘safe planetary space’ and the ‘ecological services’ upon which our well-being had depended in huge and consequential ways – as our changing climate now makes clear.

In doing so, we have placed our survival, and that of other earthlings, in jeopardy (Lovelock, 2006; 2015). This, in Klein’s (2014) telling words, ‘changes everything’. For criminology, and security studies more generally, this means that we now need to rethink our most foundational assumptions – our Durkheimian heritage. We can no longer treat our ‘safe planetary space’ as independent of us. We can no longer treat the harms that we have previously attributed to Nature – ‘natural’ disasters – as natural. These harms, and the planetary boundaries that we have relied upon for our safety, must now be ‘problematised’ (Foucault, 1980) in radically new ways. What earth scientists have recognised (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000; Crutzen, 2002), and what social science must now recognise, is that Nature is in large part a human ‘accomplishment’ (Garfinkel, 1967). This recognition has given rise to the claim that the Earth has now entered a new geological age, a human age, the ‘Anthropocene’ (Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill, 2007).

The Anthropocene signifies a new role for humankind: from a species that had to adapt to changes in its natural environment, to one that has become a driving force in the planetary system (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000; Steffen et al., 2011; Biermann, 2014: 57). Although it is far from a settled concept (Ruddiman, Crucifix and Oldfield, 2011; Hamilton, Bonneuil and Gemenne, 2015; Lidskog and Waterton, 2016), the naming of the Anthropocene increasingly serves to indicate a recontextualisation of human history as ‘a mere moment in Earth’s deep time’, while insisting that we acknowledge the profound consequences of the scale and speed of the global change that human actions have wrought (Beck, 2014: 404–405).

Responses to the proclamation of this new human age have varied significantly (see Dalby, 2016; Corlett, 2015: 38). Some view the Anthropocene and its consequences in a ‘negative’ light (Hamilton, 2015), others see ‘bright spots’ (Ellis, 2011; Bennett et al., 2016), while still others have come to focus their attention on a new awareness, succinctly captured by Steffen et al. (2011: 756) who state: ‘ “business-as-usual” cannot continue.’ It is this latter view that provides the girders for this book, and it suggest that our collective approach to criminology research and practice must change (Corlett, 2015: 38).

An increasing body of work has come to examine, explore and critique the concepts, consequences and solutions within the Anthropocene. However, according to Lövbrand et al. (2015: 212) much of this work has been underpinned by ‘marginal and instrumental roles granted to the social sciences and humanities … producing a post-political Anthropocene narrative dominated by the natural sciences and focused on environmental rather than social change’ (see also Lidskog and Waterton, 2016). This has led to increasing assertions like those made by Viñuales (2016: 5) that the Anthropocene ‘calls upon all disciplines, the entire body of human knowledge about the world, to analyse what is happening and how to face it’. This is a call that some in the social sciences are beginning to answer (Lövbrand et al., 2015: 212; Lidskog and Waterton, 2016). Scholars have focused on institutional responses (Biermann, 2014; Dryzek, 2015), legal questions (Biber, 2016; Galaz, 2014; Kotze, 2016; Vidas et al., 2015), concepts of agency (Latour, 2014), critiques of the human-centred Anthropos (Grear, 2015) and the entangled relations between natural and social worlds (Lövbrand et al., 2015: 21; Harrington and Shearing, 2017; Lidskog and Waterton, 2016).

We put the question of the implications for criminology of the Anthropocene to leading thinkers within criminology. This edited volume presents their answers. In this chapter, we aim to outline some of the fundamental questions posed by the Anthropocene for criminology, and briefly summarise how these issues were tackled by our authors. This discussion provides a framework for our subsequent examination and reflection on the book’s chapters and what they suggest are the core implications for criminology of the Anthropocene.

The challenge of the Anthropocene

Our starting point for this book was that the Anthropocene may require a fundamental rethinking of safety and security. Indeed, the safety and security that Earth systems have provided can no longer simply be regarded as the work of Nature, and as something that we humans must simply live with. We are now revealed as a geological force that has shaped and continues to shape these systems. And this, to return to Klein, changes everything. And it most certainly may change, and has already begun to change, criminology, an area of enquiry whose fundamental topic has been safety and security (Shearing, 2015).

The appreciation that we humans are influential biophysical agents invites us, as criminologists, to ask what criminology could be, and should be, in the Anthropocene. As we develop new criminological imaginations (White, 2003), we have no choice but to start from where we are now, and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps (Shearing, 2015: 258). As we do this pulling, we need, as Larner (2011: 320) has noted, to be wary of ‘totalizing and epochal thinking’ and to seek instead ‘nuanced’ and diverse responses that acknowledge the complexity, dynamism and uncertainties inherent in the Anthropocene (Shearing, 2015: 258). And as we do so, we will no doubt recognise continuities, as well as disruptions, before we will be able to innovate in ways that will carry us beyond our present (Shearing, 2015: 258).

To push the limits of existing criminological knowledge this book asks:

• What has already been achieved in criminology and what remains unanswered for confronting the key intractable problems of the Anthropocene?
• What might criminology be in the Anthropocene?
• What does the Anthropocene suggest for future theory and practice of criminology more generally?

The chapters in this book seek to contribute to this research agenda by examining, contrasting and interrogating different vantage points, aspects and thinking within criminology.

In Chapter 2, Brisman and South set the scene for exploring criminology’s contribution to the analysis and debate that flows from the Anthropocene. Acknowledging that criminology has only very recently begun to consider these matters in any substantial way, their contribution to this debate begins with an overview of some of the issues raised by the idea of the ‘Anthropocene’, before considering dominant conceptualisations of the environment as ‘resource’ and ‘private property’. Underscoring the anthropocentric acceleration of the theft of lands and oceans, their chapter turns to a discussion of how resource scarcity and climate change will continue to be criminogenic, what this means for the idea of ‘environmental security’ and the risk that the Anthropocene will accentuate, rather than do away with, the human–nature dualism.

Following Brisman and South’s chapter, the issue of a criminogenic Anthropocene and criminology’s response to it is taken up by two chapters which centre around notions of criminal responsibility for ecocide. In Chapter 3, White raises and discusses the international crime of ‘ecocide’ to target contributors to climate change. Critiquing capitalism’s response to global warming, White contends that current political and social measures are not adequately addressing climate change. Finding that both nation-states and corporations must be held responsible for global warming, he argues that contemporary policies and practices can be considered criminal, and its perpetrators therefore as ‘carbon criminals’.

Chapter 4 continues the interrogation of criminal responsibility, with Haines and Parker analysing attempts to criminalise environmental damage, specifically in the context of climate change. Drawing on a unique combination of green criminology, regulatory studies and a case study analysis, they examine the normative and legal project of criminalisation of business conduct that breaches ecological limits (‘ecocide’). They conclude that, whilst there is considerable benefit in both normative and legal attempts to criminalise, it is also necessary to understand the complexity and fundamental economic logic of current regulatory regimes.

O’Malley, in Chapter 5, offers something of a rejoinder to the preceding calls for more, and more informed, regulatory and criminal responsibilities in the Anthropocene. Centred around Bentham’s rejection of traditional criminal sanctions of imprisonment, O’Malley explores innovative approaches to environmental crime in the Anthropocene. Raising the question of what regime of sanctions should be embraced in this age characterised by chronic issues of natural resource depletion, he concludes that financial sanctions (thr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Series foreword
• 1 Thriving on a pale blue dot: Criminology and the Anthropocene
• 2 Autosarcophagy in the Anthropocene and the obscenity of an epoch
• 3 Carbon criminals, ecocide and climate justice
• 4 Moving towards ecological regulation: The role of criminalisation
• 5 Bentham in the Anthropocene: Imagining a sustainable criminal justice
• 6 Cities, walls and the Anthropocene: When consciousness and purpose fail to coincide
• 7 Temporalities in security: Long-term sustainability, the everyday and the emergent in the Anthropocene
• 8 Politics of the Anthropocene: Lessons for criminology
• Index