Green Cultural Criminology

Constructions of Environmental Harm, Consumerism, and Resistance to Ecocide

Avi Brisman, Nigel South

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415630740
• eBook ISBN: 9781136228957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last two decades, "green criminology" has emerged as a unique area of study, bringing together criminologists and sociologists from a wide range of research backgrounds and varying theoretical orientations. It spans the micro to the macro—from individual-level environmental crimes and victimization to business/corporate violations and state transgressions. There have been few attempts, however, to explicitly or implicitly integrate cultural criminology into green criminology (or vice versa).

This book moves towards articulating a green cultural criminological perspective. Brisman and South examine existing overlapping research and offer a platform to support future excursions by green criminologists into cultural criminology's concern with media images and representations, consumerism and consumption, and resistance. At the same time, they offer an invitation to cultural criminologists to adopt a green view of the consumption landscape and the growth (and depictions) of environmental harms.

Green Cultural Criminology is aimed at students, academics, criminologists, and sociologists with an interest in green criminology and cultural criminology: two of the most exciting new areas in criminology today.

1

INTRODUCTION

Greening criminology and connecting to the cultural

In Monsters, Inc., the 2001 Pixar animation, monsters venture into children’s bedrooms to frighten them and collect their screams. Closet doors serve as portals from the children’s world to the monsters’ home universe. “The impetus to create fear comes out of self-interest,” Mitchell (2001) explains in his review. “[I]n Monstropolis, the freakazoid parallel dimension in which monsters live, children’s screams are used as a power source. But that power is drying up because kids don’t scare so easily anymore.”

A self-interested species whose power source is disappearing? This could easily be the plotline of a contemporary documentary.

At the end of Monsters, Inc., the monsters discover that laughter is ten times more powerful than screams, thereby ending Monstropolis’ energy crisis. If only there were an alternative-energy conclusion to this chapter of human history. Unfortunately, with our continued reliance on fossil fuels and our persistent unwillingness to mitigate global climate change, it appears that the future will be scary rather than something to laugh about.

“The last generation’s worst fears bec[o]me the next one’s B-grade entertainment,” writes Barbara Kingsolver in her recent novel about climate change, Flight Behavior (2012). She is slightly off the mark. Rather, our fears from the previous decade are ignored and we are presented with a G-rated prequel. In 2013’s Monsters University, the cast of Monsters, Inc. are students at Monsters University, learning to be the “scarers” they are in the 2001 film—“the heroic frighteners who, by traveling through literal doors into the human world, are able to terrify children, inspiring the kiddie screams that literally light up the monsters’ world” (Dargis 2013: C12). In the film, there is no indication of an impending energy crisis, no consideration of alternative energy sources. We are more than ten years removed from Monsters, Inc., and the message seems to be that if we reminisce about our years in university, an earlier Edenic existence, our present realities will disappear.

Dargis, in her review of Monsters University, laments that “the story remains disappointingly familiar … the usual child-developmental directive [] about … learning to work well with others” (2013:C12). Cinematically, her disappointment may be understandable. More disturbing, however, is the realization that the message—one that the two of us have taught and continue to teach to our children—still needs to be learned by participants at the yearly United Nations Climate Change Conferences held pursuant to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

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The brief discussion above represents an attempt to consider the meaning, significance, and representation (or non-representation, as with Monsters University) of media constructions and depictions of environmental threats and harms—a portion of the endeavor that we refer to as green cultural criminology. Before attempting to articulate our argument for a green cultural criminological perspective, a brief overview of the “greening” of criminology is in order.

Across the natural and social sciences, environmental sustainability is now recognized as a major issue for the survival of all species, including humanity. Within criminology, it is now also being recognized that concerns about environmental harms, crimes, and damage should be given a more prominent place in the field. The consequences of environmental pollution, for example, include the extinction of plants and animals, poor health outcomes for some population groups, damage to food chains, depletion of natural resources, exacerbation of climate change, natural disasters stimulated or worsened by human action, and so forth. Environmental harms have become a topic of public and political discussion and frequent media reporting, as well as the subject of international conferences and scientific symposia. For example, in her presidential speech to the American Society of Criminology in 1998, Zahn (1999:2) noted the far-reaching impacts of pollution and bio-diversity loss, and indicated that in the future, she expected to see more criminological focus on environmental crime; this in turn would bring “a new definition of victims to include species other than humans and a definition of offenders to include those who pollute for convenience … [and] for profit.” Importantly, Zahn observed that “[j]ust as Sutherland’s white-collar crime expanded our crime paradigm (1949), … environmental crime will change it in the future” (Zahn 1999:2). It is in this context that a branch of criminology addressing these issues has emerged and has been referred to as “green criminology.”

When Lynch (1990) first introduced the term “green criminology” to criminological discussions, he made it clear that, as a new sub-field, green criminology should empirically and theoretically reflect existing traditions while fostering emergent directions. Indeed, Lynch (1990:3) acknowledged that a green criminology did not represent “an entirely new perspective or orientation within criminology” for “a number of criminologists [had already] examined various environmental hazards and crimes,” and previous studies of white-collar and corporate crime had made significant contributions in this regard (see also South and Beirne 2006). Nonetheless, the power and utility of a green umbrella or perspective (South 1998; Brisman and South 2013c) then, as now, lies in loosely covering or unifying the study of environmentally related harms and crimes.¹ As examples of what might be studied, Lynch (1990:4) suggested a non-exhaustive list as follows:

(1) the study of crimes committed against humanity through environmental destruction; (2) the study of laws, treaties and movements designed to promote sound environmental practices that protect against the destruction of human, plant and animal life; (3) examinations of the successes and failures of governments and corporations to protect humans and animals from environmental hazards; (4) the study of specific governmental and corporate practices and social trends that destroy the environment and thereby threaten the survival of humans, animals and plants; (5) the study of reckless, negligent or wilful destruction of humans and animals through misuse of the environment or environmental predation; (6) examinations of the testing of chemical compounds, drugs, etc., on animal and human subjects and the production of commodities and chemicals that have negative effects on all forms of living organisms; and (7) the study of hunger and homelessness as the product of corporatism, individualism, greed, corruption, poor planning, overuse/poor use of land, excessive pesticide use, etc.

Since then, those working specifically and explicitly in the sub-field of green criminology, as well as those conducting research across disciplines, have written on:

• animal rights and animal abuse (e.g., Agnew 1998; Beirne 1997, 1999, 2007, 2009; Benton 1998; Cazaux 2007; Gaarder 2011, 2013; Nurse 2013; Pellow 2013; Regan 2007; Sollund 2008, 2011; Yates 2007; Yates, et al. 2001);

• food crimes (e.g., Croall 2007, 2013; Walters 2004, 2006, 2011);

• harm caused by global warming and climate change (e.g., Agnew 2012a, 2012b; Brisman 2012; Farrall et al. 2012; Franz 2012; Fussey and South 2012; Hall and Farrall 2013; Halsey 2013; Pink and Lehane 2012; Heckenberg and Johnston 2012; Lynch and Stretesky 2010, 2013; Kramer and Michalowski 2012; Mares 2010; Nobo and Pfeffer 2012; Sollund 2012; Takemura 2012; Wachholz 2007; White 2012);

• illegal deforestation (e.g., Boekhout van Solinge 2010a, 2010b; Boekhout van Solinge and Kuijpers 2013);

• pollution crimes (e.g., Greife and Stretesky 2013; Kane 2013; Shuqin 2010; Situ and Emmons 2000, Walters 2010, 2013);

• violations of the Endangered Species Act in the United States (e.g., Clifford and Edwards 1998) and the illegal trade in species threatened with extinction listed in the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) Appendix I (e.g., Herbig 2010; Lemieux and Clarke 2009; Sollund 2013a, 2013b; Wellsmith 2010; Wyatt 2011, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2013d); and

• waste and e-waste (e.g., Bisschopp 2012; Dorn et al. 2007; Gibbs et al. 2010b; Rothe 2010; Snider 2010; van Erp and Huisman 2010).

In addition, many have examined environmental crime and harm in general, as well as in the context ofthe examples bulleted above, through the (sometimes overlapping) lenses of organized crime (e.g., Block and Scarpitti 1985; Hayman and Brack 2002; Boekhout van Solinge 2008; Ruggiero 1996; Ruggiero and South 2010b; Salzano 1994; Szasz 1986; see also South 2010; Takemura 2010; Walters 2007b), corporate or white-collar crime (e.g., Gibbs et al. 2010b; Girard et al. 2010; Kagan et al. 2003; Pearce and Tombs 1996, 1998; Rothe 2010; Simon 2000; Snider 2010; van Erp and Huisman 2010), state-level crime (e.g., Green et al. 2007; Green and Ward 2004; Kauzlarich and Kramer 1998; Zilinskas 1995), crimes of the corporate-state (Katz 2010), state-corporate crime (Aulette and Micha-lowski 1993; Barrett 2013; Kauzlarich and Kramer 1993; Kramer 2013; Kramer and Michalowski 2012; Kramer et al. 2002), state-corporate environmental crime (Smandych and Kueneman 2010), and transnational crime (e.g., Michalowski and Bitten 2004).

Most “green criminologists” would probably agree that it is now quite clear what kind of subject matter is relevant, but it is questionable whether it would be possible (or even desirable) to attempt to impose or agree upon a single theoretical position or framework. There are various positions within the literature, making this field both “basic and exceedingly complex,” as it “necessitates understanding and interpreting the structure of a globalising world; the direction(s) in which this world is heading; and how diverse groups’ experiences are shaped by wider social, political and economic processes” (White, 2003:484).

Green criminology reflects a critical stance on the need to defend the environment and to uphold the rights and safety of both humans and non-human species. At present, it seems that late-modern societies remain set on a path of continuing behavior seriously detrimental to the environment (Brisman and South 2013a) and, according to some commentators, worthy of description as “ecocide” and requiring legally recognized instruments of protection and response (Higgins, Short, and South 2013; South 2010; see also Larsen 2012). Social and economic conflicts arising from resource scarcity or exploitation, as well as climate change phenomena, present major challenges for human rights, civil society, and species preservation in many parts of the world (Brisman and South 2013d; South and Brisman 2013). The global flow of people and goods is intimately bound up with impacts upon the environment and there is scope for protest, both peaceful and violent, about, for example, unnecessary transport, production of waste, and inequalities in access to food.

Here and elsewhere (e.g., Brisman and South 2013b), we argue that green criminology must attend to: the mediated and political dynamics surrounding the presentation ofvarious environmental phenomena (especially news about environmental crimes, harms, and disasters); the commodification and marketing of nature and the construction of the insatiable consumption that underpins this; and examples of resistance to environmental harm and demand for changes in the way that “business as usual” and “ordinary acts of everyday life” (Agnew 2013) are destroying the environment. All of this connects theoretically and empirically with some related concerns in the area of cultural criminology, and we outline these connections in the next two chapters.² We begin with Chapter 2, “Overview of cultural criminology,” where we note the emergence of cultural criminology and identify five main “motifs” (Hayward and Young 2004:263) of the cultural criminological enterprise. Then, in Chapter 3, “A green field for cultural criminology,” we draw attention to cultural criminology’s analysis of urban space—something that is well within the province of green criminology—in order to demonstrate that cultural criminology is, at some levels, already doing green criminology.

From here, in Chapter 4, “Constructions of environmental harm,” we put forth the argument for greater attention on the part of green criminologists to the mediated representation and/or construction of “environment,” “environmental crime,” and “environmental harm,” and identify two areas of possible exploration: (1) news about real environmental crimes, harms, and disaster; and (2) fictional/science-fictional depictions of human— nature/human—environment relationships and environmental disaster narratives—categories, as we will describe below, that are becoming increasingly more difficult to distinguish. Next, in Chapter 5, “Consumption, environment, health and happiness,” we seek to draw green and cultural criminologies together in considering: (1) how markets turn the mundane and readily available into desirable and expensive commodities; (2) how consumers help to create conditions that lead to environmental harm yet can feel that they are green and ethical consumers; and (3) how commodification of nature is related to variants of white-collar and corporate crime. We further flesh out the ideas of Chapter 5 in Chapter 6, “Marketing and consuming nature and the natural: water, quarantine, and infantilization,” which describes the transformation of water as a public good to a private good and/through the myth-selling of bottled water. Chapter 7, “Resistance to environmental harm,” describes how green criminology might adopt cultural criminology’s concern with the contestation of space, transgression, and resistance, to analyze the ways in which environmental harms are opposed in/on the streets and in day-to-day living, and offers four examples of such types of playful, pleasurable, and celebratory activism, protest, and resistance: Reclaim the Streets; Critical Mass; Reverend Billy; and guerrilla gardening. We conclude, in Chapter 8, with further suggestions for green criminology—cultural criminology cross-fertilization.

One final word is in order before undertaking our attempt to integrate cultural criminology and green criminology into a “green cultural criminology.” Our goal in this book is not to identify weaknesses in previous approaches or to promote a particular solution to an environmental problem or set of environmental problems,³ but to examine existing overlapping research and to stimulate further investigation. We are also mindful of Michalowski’s (2012:42) concern that “institutional mandates within the contemporary Academy” have placed pressure on scholars “to identify and colonize new academic niches”—the implication being that people who really have a lot in common and share common interests end up instead establishing their own discrete “camps” and/or fighting about relatively small differences (see also DeKeseredy 2012 (citing Doyle and Moore 2011)). Rather than creating a wedge, our hope is that this book will serve as a springboard for future attem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Excerpts
• Half Title
• New Directions in Critical Criminology
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: greening criminology and connecting to the cultural
• 2 Overview of cultural criminology
• 3 A green field for cultural criminology
• 4 Constructions of environmental harm
• 5 Consumption, environment, health, and happiness
• 6 Marketing and consuming nature and the natural: water, quarantine, and infantilization
• 7 Resistance to environmental harm
• 8 Conclusion and future directions
• References
• Index