Issues in Green Criminology

Piers Beirne, Nigel South, Piers Beirne, Nigel South

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843922209
• eBook ISBN: 9781134017508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Issues in Green Criminology: confronting harms against environments, humanity and other animals aims to provide, if not a manifesto, then at least a significant resource for thinking about green criminology, a rapidly developing field.

It offers a set of specially written introductions and a variety of current and new directions, wide-ranging in scope and international in terms of coverage and contributors. It provides focused discussions of current and cutting edge issues that will influence the emergence of a coherent perspective on green issues. The contributors are drawn from the leading thinkers in the field. The twelve chapters of the book explore the myriad ways in which governments, transnational corporations, military apparatuses and ordinary people going about their everyday lives routinely harm environments, other animals and humanity.

The book will be essential reading not only for students taking courses in colleges and universities but also for activists in the environmental and animal rights movements. Its concern is with an ever-expanding agenda ? the whys, the hows and the whens of the generation and control of the many aspects of harm to environments, ecological systems and all species of animals, including humans. These harms include, but are not limited to, exploitation, modes of discrimination and disempowerment, degradation, abuse, exclusion, pain, injury, loss and suffering. Straddling and intersecting these many forms of harm are key concepts for a green criminology such as gender inequalities, racism, dominionism and speciesism, classism, the north/south divide, the accountability of science, and the ethics of global capitalist expansion.

Green criminology has the potential to provide not only a different way of examining and making sense of various forms of crime and control responses (some well known, others less so) but can also make explicable much wider connections that are not generally well understood. As all societies face up to the need to confront harms against environments, other animals and humanity, criminology will have a major role to play. This book will be an essential part of this process.

Part I

Introduction to green
criminology

Chapter 1

Ecology, community and justice: the meaning of green

Ted Benton

The focus of this chapter is on the implications of the new green agenda for one concept in particular albeit a very broad one: that of social justice. Historically, of course, the idea of justice is a contested one, and this contest itself is one field of contemporary political dispute. Because my aim is a wide and programmatic one, I shall not engage in detailed analytical treatment of rival philosophical positions on justice. Instead I will draw upon and comment upon several views of justice, both as they have been articulated in political philosophy, and as they exist in ‘common sense’ political thought and institutional politics. One important ‘broad brush’ contrast I shall draw upon is that between formal theories of justice, generally derived from ‘first principles’ (often associated with liberalism, but sometimes yielding unmistakably socialist implications), and ‘communitarian’ views of justice which at least claim the status of articulations of the normative commitments of actual moral communities. The work of the American political theorist John Rawls (Rawls 1971) has been astonishingly influential in academic discussion of the concept of justice for more than three decades. So, where names are mentioned, Rawls will be the exemplar of formal theories of justice.

I will begin with four features of the social and political thought which have arisen in association with the green movement. For my purposes in this context, it makes sense to include the thinking of the animal rights and welfare movements as integral to the ‘green challenge’, though in other respects these movements are quite distinct from each other. I then go on to explore how each of these four features of green thought poses problems for ways of thinking about justice developed (largely) independently of and prior to the rise of contemporary green movements. The main drift of the argument in each case will be that green issues do pose deep and serious questions for established views of justice. However, it will also be noted that considerations of justice also pose a challenge to at least some versions of green social and political thought.

The green challenge

There are four aspects of the social thought associated with the green and animal liberation movements which are especially challenging to pre-existing conceptions of justice. These include both cognitive claims and innovative value-orientations. They are:

1 Natural limits. Humans are held to be dependent on ecological ‘life-support systems’ which impose outer limits on the scope and scale of human activity in relation to the rest of nature. This is often supplemented by a second claim: that extrapolation of current growth trends (in population and/or resource use, pollution, CO₂ emissions, etc.) into the future predicts exceeding natural limits, and consequent catastrophic collapse. The urgency of tackling these growth trends may override other deeply held moral or practical considerations.

2 Human/animal continuity. Since Darwin, this has been the ruling orthodoxy in the life-sciences. The claim is that our species evolved from some ape-like ancestor as a result of the operation of broadly similar mechanisms to those which gave rise to other species. It follows that other animal species are our more-or-less distant kin. This basic evolutionary claim can be complemented by subsequent ecological and ethological research to yield two further, but more scientifically contentious, general claims:

a that (many) other animal species have a range of capacities for social interaction, emotional expression, communication, and puzzle-solving, and are vulnerable to associated sources of suffering in ways which differ from but are comparable with those experienced by humans; and

b that the first claim under 1 above is but a special case of the ecological ‘embedding’ of all animal species.

3 Non-anthropocentric values. Greens proclaim an innovation in values which marks a qualitative break from all previous Western thought. This innovation is expressed through a variety of different polarities (ecologism/environmentalism; ecocentrism/technocentrism; deep/shallow; biocentrism/anthropocentrism and others), but the core claim is that the non-human world, or parts of it, have value in themselves, independently of their capacity to serve some human purpose. Green thinkers also sometimes claim that substantive normative principles can be derived from nature, or from ecological characterisations of it. A separate but related move is made by animal liberationists who use human/animal continuity to justify extending the scope of received anthropocentric moral theories (mainly rights theory and utilitarianism) beyond the boundaries of the human species.

4 Ecotopia. Distinctively green visions of the ‘good life’ are rarely spelled out in terms of detailed institutional forms, but from such speculations as exist, from attempts at actual communal living inspired by green ideas, and from the various ‘platforms’ and statements of principles issued by radical ecologists we can reconstruct a cluster of widely shared themes and preferences. The green society would be one in which:

a humans would live in ways which minimally disrupt the rest of nature;

b decision-making would be decentralised to small, self-sufficient and self-governing communities;

c self-government would take the form of active, or participatory democracy;

d either as a separate principle, or as a consequence of the above, these self-governing communities would be radically egalitarian, or ‘non-hierarchical’;

e the purposes of individual and collective life would give priority to aesthetic, spiritual and convivial sources of fulfilment, as against the ‘materialist’ pursuit of material acquisition and competitive advantage; and

f work to meet basic physical needs would be intrinsically fulfilling, and employ tools appropriate to small-scale egalitarian communities and to ecologically sustainable production and consumption.

Social justice and the green challenge

I now explore some of the implications of these features of green thinking for views of justice which have been for the most part developed independently of, and prior to, green thought in its present form.

Natural limits and social justice

Taken together, the claims that there are natural limits and that current growth trends are carrying us beyond them towards catastrophe can be used to justify ‘going beyond’ – or displacing – concern with social justice in two distinct ways. One argument is that urgent action to secure human (and natural) survival overrides other values. Implicit in this is a widely shared notion of a hierarchy of needs or values, in which survival is the first priority, followed by emotional security, and then ‘higher’ considerations of aesthetics and ‘self-actualisation’. On the ‘survivalist’ view, it may be necessary to assign authoritarian powers to governments to secure reductions in population growth, or restrict the ecologically significant uses of certain private as well as common property and open-access resources in order to protect the environment.

A powerful objection to this way of thinking is to ask why survival is accorded such a high priority. Clearly, there are widely praised and widely condemned acts of self-sacrifice in which war heroes or terrorists willingly die for values or purposes which they presumably set higher than their own survival. It may be retorted that such cases are in one way or another exceptional, and inappropriate to set standards for the rest of humanity, for whom survival is the overriding consideration. However, it still seems relevant to ask what, for the great majority of us not given to ultimate acts of supererogation, is the point of ‘bare’ survival? Survival, I submit, is of value to us solely in virtue of the purposes and experiences it makes possible. Mere survival under increasingly authoritarian rule, deprived of access to meaningful engagement with the rest of nature, let alone to basic material conditions of healthy life, presents a severe limit to those valued purposes and experiences. So, to override all other values in order to secure survival would be perverse. It would be to destroy, or severely limit, whatever made survival a valued aim in the first place.

The second line of argument derives from the ‘catastrophist’ prediction. This is the ‘delayed gratification’ argument. It relies on the same hierarchy of values and needs as does the first survivalist argument, but the urgency of the ecological crisis is held to be such that if we fail to address it now, we will lose the opportunity to realise other values. This was the core of Rudolph Bahro’s early (1982) call for socialists to give priority to the ecological question: there could be no prospect for socialism unless urgent action were taken to secure survival! Although, in Bahro’s case, there was a convenient complementary argument to the effect that the objectives of the greens could only be met by the overthrow of capitalism (which Bahro at that time took to be equivalent to a transition to socialism), there remained a certain echo of earlier postponements until ‘after the revolution’.

Another example is that of the influential environmentalist James Lovelock (2006) who has argued strongly for a turn to nuclear energy in response to the urgency of the prospect of catastrophic climate change. His argument is no simple ‘survivalist’ one: indeed, he denounces ‘ecofascism’ and warns that we ‘may be unable to prevent a global decline into a chaotic world ruled by brutal warlords on a devastated earth’ (2006: 154). His alternative is to retreat into a defensive strategy based on the nation state, and aimed at the preservation of ‘civilisation’:

In several ways we are at war with Gaia, and to survive with our civilization intact we urgently need to make a just peace with Gaia … Can the present-day democracies, with their noisy media and special interest lobbies, act fast enough for an effective defence against Gaia? We may need restrictions, rationing and the call to service that were familiar in wartime and in addition suffer for a while loss of freedom. We will need a small permanent group of strategists who, as in wartime, will try to out-think our Earthly enemy and be ready for the surprises bound to come. (ibid: 153)

There is no direct answer to the question whether our ‘present-day democracies’ will be able to act fast enough, but what follows strongly suggests not: restrictions, loss of freedom, and a ‘permanent’ group of strategists. The authoritarian drift is evident elsewhere, as in this comment on fellow environmentalists:

My feelings about modern environmentalism are more parallel with those that might pass through the mind of the head-mistress of an inner-city school or the colonel of a newly formed regiment of licentious and naturally disobedient young men: how the hell can these unruly charges be disciplined and made effective? (ibid: 140)

Lovelock’s concept of ‘Gaia’ refers to the immensely complex web of physical, chemical and biological interactions that sustains life on planet earth. Though the idea has scientific pretensions, Lovelock concedes that the concept works as metaphor. In his more freely metaphorical uses of the term, it represents the planetary system as a nurturing mother, upon whom we are all wholly dependent, but also as a fragile and vulnerable friend whom we are at risk of destroying, and, yet again, as a sternly disciplining father, who becomes a deadly enemy when abused. It is the last of these that is foremost in the quotation above.

Lovelock’s argument poses a serious challenge: if the threat posed by escalating demands on the natural world is as dire as current evidence suggests, are there not strong grounds for abandoning, at least temporarily, cherished social and political values in the effort to offset impending catastrophe? The parallels between this style of argument and current arguments for restriction of civil liberties in the face of a new kind of terrorist threat are noteworthy. One key reason for resisting them is that the forms of power relation which are tolerated to address what is seen as an emergency have a habit of persisting as a long-term obstacle to the realisation of the promised values. This is commonly acknowledged as an objection to ‘vanguardist’ strategies on the left, but it applies equally well to a certain style of ecological alarmist politics, which is prepared to countenance extensions of state power without serious consideration of the consequences for other social and political values.

A second reason for, at least, healthy scepticism about such arguments is that they are very convenient for already powerful institutions that seek to enhance their power and limit the capacity of popular movements to mount effective resistance. It is arguable that Western rulers have ‘talked up’ the threat of global terrorism both in a bid to secure public legitimacy for aggressive foreign policies, and to justify erosion of democratic and civil liberties. Could the same be said of current alarmism in official circles about the ecological threat – most notably global climate change? It seems to me that here the analogy breaks down. The growing international scientific consensus about the link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change is in many respects a deeply uncomfortable one for Western governments and economic élites. The restraints on environmentally significant production and consumption that would be called for in any serious attempt to deal with the issue would not only be deeply unpopular with electorates, but would also cut against the interests of key business sectors with powerful political lobbies.

I have argued elsewhere (Benton 1989) that ecological limits are a function of the specific articulation of socio-economic forms with their ecological conditions and media. If this argument is right, we cannot establish ‘limits’ in abstraction from social relations and processes. It follows from this that the kinds of ‘physicalist’ modelling that have been the main basis for the ‘limits to growth’ argument are inappropriate. It is at least theoretically possible that new technologies and forms of social organisation, some of which may be in principle unpredictable, may enable continued growth in agricultural production, industrialisation, population and so on without global catastrophe. This sort of counter-argument to the strong ‘limits’ position is the basis for more moderate forms of environmentalism which go by such names as ‘sustainable development’ and ‘environmental modernisation’.

However, it does not follow that such positions are either coherent or practically feasible. The argument that ‘limits’ should be theorised in ways which take account of the relationship of social practices to their material conditions and consequences does not do away with the concept of ecological limits as such – it rather relativises them to specific socio-economic and technical relations and dynamics. Whether currently prevailing power relations and economic structures are capable of being reformed to render them ecologically ‘sustainable’, and what would be the consequences of such reforms for other values and purposes, remains very much open to question. A strong tradition of ecological Marxist and radical political economy maintains that capitalism has an intrinsic growth dynamic that renders it inherently unsustainable (for example, see O’Connor 1994). By contrast, ‘ecological contrarians’, ‘ecological modernisers’ and former radical greens hold that modern capitalism either has a long-term tendency to cleaner technology or can be rendered sustainable by appropriate political action (see Lomborg 2001; Mol and Sonnenfeld 2000; Porritt 2005).

Nevertheless, the notion of sustainable development, in almost all its versions, is sharply opposed to ‘survivalism’. Considerations of social justice, especially, are integral to virtually all influential definitions. There are two reasons for this. First, an empirical case can be made out that distributional inequalities are causally responsible for a great deal of environmental degradation. Reducing inequalities, especially by empowering women and reducing rural poverty in the ‘third world’ is often held to be a necessary means of achieving sustainability. Second, most advocates of sustainable development include socio-political objectives in their view of ‘development’ – it is held to mean more than mere continued or accelerated economic growth. So justice is a part of the content of ‘sustainable development’ as a social, economic and political strategy: both justice as between rich and poor in the present, and as between present and future generations.

However, giving weight to considerations of justice in the context of sustainability poses a significant challenge to established ways of thinking in several respects. The first is the practical challenge that the global context in which the concept of sustainable development has emerged is one in which the agencies charged with developing strategies for implementing it generally lack either the will or the power and resources to do so. The current dominance of neo-liberal ideology and its associated institutional framework f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: approaching green criminology
• Part I Introduction to green criminology
• Chapter 1 Ecology, community and justice: the meaning of green
• Chapter 2 Green criminology and the pursuit of social and ecological justice
• Chapter 3 Animal rights, animal abuse and green criminology
• Part II Animal rights and animal abuse
• Chapter 4 Labelling animals: non-speciesist criminology and techniques to identify other animals
• Chapter 5 Vivisection: the case for abolition
• Chapter 6 Debating ‘animal rights' online: the movement–countermovement dialectic revisited
• Part III Ecological systems and environmental harms
• Chapter 7 ‘At risk': climate change and its bearing on women's vulnerability to male violence
• Chapter 8 Crime, regulation and radioactive waste in the United Kingdom
• Chapter 9 Food crime
• Chapter 10 The ‘corporate colonisation of nature':1 Bio-prospecting, bio-piracy and the development of green criminology
• Chapter 11 Green criminology in the United States
• Webliography
• Index