Environmental Crime in Transnational Context

Global Issues in Green Enforcement and Criminology

Toine Spapens, Rob White, Wim Huisman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138606562
• eBook ISBN: 9781317142263
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

Environmental crime is one of the most profitable and fastest growing areas of international criminal activity. The increasing cross-border scope of environmental crimes and harms is one of the reasons why governments and the enforcement community have trouble in finding the proper responses. Law enforcement cooperation between western industrialized states is often time consuming and problematic, and the problems increase exponentially when environmental criminals take advantage of situations where government and law enforcement are weak.

This book provides an overview of the developments and problems in the field of transnational environmental crimes and harms, addressing these issues from perspectives such as enforcement, deterrence, compliance and emission trading schemes. Divided into four parts, the authors consider global issues in green criminology, responses to transnational environmental crimes and harms, alternative methods to combat environmental crime, and specific types of crimes and criminological research.

Discussing these topics from the view of green criminology, sociology and governance, this book will be of great interest to all those concerned about the transnational dimensions of crime and the environment.

Part I
The Global Context of Environmental Crime and Green Criminology

1 The Contested Planet

Global Green Criminology and Environmental Crime in Transnational Context

Nigel South

Introduction

At the beginning of October 2013, a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) drew the world’s attention to the serious implications of our current lack of concern for the planet: ‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented … The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased’ (IPCC 2013). Although this reflects the majority view in world science, this analysis is nonetheless contested. So, coinciding with the IPCC report, a similarly substantial publication from the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) presented an alternative view. This concluded that: ‘the human effect [on the climate] is likely to be small relative to natural variability, and whatever small warming is likely to occur will produce benefits as well as costs’ (NIPCC 2013). The NIPCC is sponsored by the Heartland Institute which, as its website makes clear, pursues a mission to ‘discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems’¹ and is funded by tobacco companies, fossil fuel producers and foundations to the right of the political spectrum (Kolbert 2013).

Debate is, of course, to be valued but the matters in dispute in this case are particularly momentous. The social sciences can contribute to discussion about climate change, our use and misuse of the planet, and the challenges we face and possible responses. In this chapter I bring one perspective to bear on these issues – the idea of a global green criminology. This is introduced as a device or method for orienting criminology to the study of global harms and crimes with an environmental and ecological impact. The aim of the chapter is to illustrate the ways in which the planet itself, and claims made upon it and about it, are contested – the definition of which I take to be ‘the action or process of disputing or arguing’ and related to events ‘in which people compete for supremacy in activity’.² Four dimensions of such contestation are described, relating to consumption, laws, conflicts and knowledge. The chapter concludes with some observations on justice, rights and the prospects for a law of ecocide.

A Global Green Criminology

Bowling (2011, p. 365) has distinguished between criminological approaches of a transnational, international and global orientation but acknowledges that a truly ‘global criminology’ is ‘some way from being fully established’. However, a ‘green’ criminology already offers much to such a project, demonstrating how forms of local and international environmental victimization are connected; how wildlife, timber and waste are trafficked through transnational commodity chains; and how air and water pollution are circulated globally (Bisschop 2012; South and Brisman 2013; Wyatt 2013; Walters 2013; White 2011). This global or planetary orientation is fundamental to a green criminology and is explicit in White’s (2011) proposal for an eco-global criminology, and in any agenda for green criminology that is also concerned with crimes of war and violations of human rights (South 1998, p. 226).

The great global conundrum for the future is how to address energy and resource deficits and address the question of what we mean when we talk of ‘sustainability’. A related problem faces us as we become a ‘waste society’ – how to cope with the unwanted discards of consumer society and mounting waste? Advanced economies continue to consume at a ferocious rate, now rapidly followed by the growth of other major markets and sources of demand. The economic system is ever more interdependent, reproducing its methods and models of production and consumption around the world, generating both benefits and dis-benefits from the flow of trade and exchange in goods, people and ideas. Among the dis-benefits are numerous instances of environmental degradation, resulting from complex trade relationships and consumption trends. These relationships and trends are built upon the idea of ‘environment as property’, and as a ‘resource’, that is owned and exploited for the benefit of some but not for the benefit of all. The following sections provide examples.

Contest in the Legal Marketplace: Problems of Consumption and ‘Business as Usual’

World poverty and hunger are undeniable facts. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (2012), in 2010–11, nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world (one in eight) lived with chronic undernourishment, almost all doing so in developing nations. There is no doubt that some of those who share our planet do not ‘consume’ enough at the level of basic nutrition and satisfaction of fundamental needs for water, shelter, security and health, all basic human rights (Pretty 2013; UNEP 2011). One proposition for a sustainable rather than contested planet that follows from this, is that in order for those ‘without’ to be able to consume more, those with more than they need should consume less (Pretty 2013). But across developed economies, consumption and growth are internalized and internationalized obsessions (Coghlan 2009).

Growth depends on the treadmill of production and the cycle of consumption (Stretesky et al. 2013; Brisman and South 2014). Aside from the purchase of necessities, additional consumerism continues to turn the wheels because we are persuaded to ‘buy more’, to ‘buy new’ and to discard the old as soon as new models and fashions appear, while technical built-in obsolescence means electronic goods have a rapid turnover in both domestic and work situations (Ferrell 2013). Consumers in advanced, wealthy economies are links in a ‘long global chain’ (Polgreen 2008, p. 1), in which ‘the richest countries … often treat the poorest less as partners in progress than as cheap targets for resource extraction’ (Owen 2012, p. 74), a relationship in which we are also contributors to environmental degradation and human rights abuses.

This is a ‘global chain’ on which Western economies are dependent and these patterns of consumption are accepted as essential to support ‘business as usual’ (Fussey and South 2012) and a standard of living that must be guaranteed. This could be seen in particularly uncompromising fashion in the political discourses of the Bush Administration, which, as Lynch et al. (2010) demonstrated, aimed to undermine climate change evidence and reassure consumers about the acceptability of carbon-profligate lifestyles. The ‘national security’ and ‘national interest’ of the United States provided reasons why the supply chain should win any contest over appeals for restraint.

This reflects the tendency of most (or all) societies to minimize the significance of environmental crime and damage, because ‘much of the economy is based on the exploitation of natural resources’ and because ‘many of the most serious forms of environmental risk come from “normal social practice” ’ (Skinnider 2013, p. 3). According to Lynch (2013, p. 49), if we were to compare rates of ‘ordinary crime’ to environmental harms and negative impacts, the latter would significantly outweigh the former. As Skinnider (2013, pp. 2–3) points out, ‘[c]riminal law generally focuses on individual victims whereas environmental legislation often describes the environmental harm as an offence against public interest’. When one realizes that (1) the damage caused by environmental crime may be difficult to identify because it may not be immediate, (2) identifying the perpetrator of environmental crime and establishing criminal liability can be challenging given lengthy and complex chains of causation, and (3) the victims of environmental crime are not always aware of the fact that they have been victimized and, even if they are, they might not consider themselves to be ‘crime victims’ (Skinnider 2013, pp. 5–6; White and Heckenberg 2014), it becomes understandable that instances of environmental crime or harm are underestimated, overlooked or disguised, their severity minimized, and life and business continue ‘as usual’.

Contested Laws and Environmental Crimes

Environmental crime or harm can be defined in terms of either the destruction and degradation of the earth’s resources or as taking advantage of such situations and/or the efforts made (or not made) to regulate or prevent it. Acts formally recognized as crimes will have broken criminal law; harms will be interpreted more broadly and include actions which may be legally and economically acceptable although ecologically undesirable, through to those which are seen as damaging, to be discouraged and governed by forms of civil or administrative law. In some cases, actions and events may be identified as ‘harmful’ but appear to be permitted under laws relating to property or commerce, or be subject to no form of lawful oversight or intervention at all. As Higgins (2012, p. 15) says, ‘Law shapes our societies, our way of thinking, our behaviour. By labelling our world a thing of property, legal systems have legitimised and encouraged the abuse of Earth by humans’. This is the underpinning of legal rights to exploit. Nonetheless, there are systems of law and regulation, as well as normative understandings, that are concerned to prevent or minimize abuse and exploitation. The question is how effective these are or can be?

Defining matters of environmental crime and harm in law and then pursuing processes of enforcement and prosecution is not easy. For example, various populations may be exposed to hazardous waste and emissions but cases attempting to establish liability and responsibility for this may be contested by the accused and have often proved unresolvable in courts of law (Eurojust 2014; Everson 2012, p. 175; Uhlmann 2009). Establishing ‘responsibility’ may also be difficult in cases where there is denial of a ‘problem’ or where a problem occurs not because of an intentional or mistaken action but because of actions that were not taken at all. For example, in their study of over 20 examples of environmental crime cases in the Netherlands, Huisman and van Erp (2013) found the phenomenon of ‘denial’ to be a common running thread. But the behaviour that accompanies ‘denial’ – ‘doing nothing’ – was particularly significant: ‘most (although not all) of [the] … cases of environmental crimes were crimes of omission: crimes that constitute not taking actions prescribed by regulation or, in other words, crimes that consist of doing nothing’. In fact, the authors argue, white-collar crimes might often be better seen as cases where actions that might have been expected are not performed and compliance with rules is overlooked or ignored rather than there being a ‘purposeful choice to deviate from the rules by taking an alternative course of action’.

Of course, there are deliberate acts of environmental crime as well and these may involve offenders from both sides of the legal/illegal borderline. Block (2002), for example, uses routine activity theory to examine the involvement of organized crime in illegal waste disposal in New York and Haiti, describing failures of regulation. Szasz (1986) examined the relationships between legal industries that produce toxic waste and the organized crime enterprises employed to dispose of this. Here corporate actors were not ignorant or powerless in the exchange but evidently benefited from their relationship with organized crime. The Naples garbage crisis arose from profitable collaborations primarily between local government and legitimate business, with the support of organized crime groups (Ruggiero and South 2010). Indeed, as Dines (2013) shows, the 2008 ‘trash emergency’ was more a result ‘of corporate malpractice and institutional complicity’ than stereotypical Mafia activity. All of these examples suggest that normative assumptions about compliance with regulations and laws concerning unmanaged waste disposal and actions damaging to the environment and public health can be contested.

Some targeted crimes are committed because nature can yield commodities for which there may be specific demand in illegal markets. Wildlife are part of such a global trade as ‘commodities’, with the literature now providing many case studies (Nurse 2013; Wyatt 2013); e.g. elephant poaching, the ivory trade and the effect of CITES agreements (Lemieux and Clarke 2009), trafficking of fur and falcons (Wyatt 2012), trade in parrots and related species decline (Sollund 2011). In these cases it should be recalled that legal and policy frameworks are overwhelmingly anthropocentric, so laws and regulations are already limited in scope and weak in application.

Contest as Conflict: Fighting over Resources and the Future

Abundance of resources may, ironically, be a curse for a nation or community although this is not inevitable. Muffett and Bruch (2011, p. 4) note that ‘well-managed resources can help fund reconstruction efforts and help bring order from chaos’ while Lujala and Rustad (2011, p. 19) argue that ‘[h]igh-value natural resources have the potential to promote and consolidate peace’ and can ‘help to jump-start development, secure sustainable growth, raise living standards, and increase economic equality’. Nonetheless, resource contestation can lead to various kinds of conflict (see Brisman et al. 2015). Late-modern consumption is highly dependent on the exploitation of the mineral, plant and wildlife wealth of developing countries by global capital. Transnational corporations owe little allegiance to any particular nations and establish subsidiaries an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The Global Context of Environmental Crime and Green Criminology
• Part II Law Enforcement Responses to (Transnational) Environmental Crime
• Part III Alternative Methods to Combat (Transnational) Environmental Crime
• Part IV (Transnational) Environmental Crime and Criminological Research
• Index