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Topic 8- Green Crime - Coggle Diagram
Topic 8- Green Crime
Global risk society
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Beck: in todays late modern society we can now provide adequate resources for all (in developed countries). However, the massive increase in productivity and technology that sustains it have created new manufactured risks- dangers we have never faced before.
Many of these risks involve harm to the environment and its consequences such as global warming. Like climate change many of these risks are global rather than natural leading Beck to describe late modern society as a global risk society.
Example: Mozambique: Started in Russia where global warming had triggered the hottest heatwave in a century causing fires and destroyed part of the countries grain. Russia had to increase the world price of grain. The effect on Mozambique was a 30% rise in the price of bread which caused rioting and looting of shops which left dozens dead. There own harvest was also hit with droughts also due to global warming
Green Crimanology
What if the pollution that cause global warming is perfectly legal and no crime has occurred. There are 2 opposing answers
Traditional Crimanology
Hasn't been concerned with such behaviour since its subject matter has been defined be the criminal law and no law has been broken. There starting point is the national and international laws and regulations concerning the environment
Situ and Emmons define environmental crime as an unauthorised act that violates the law. Like other traditional approaches in criminology they investigate the patterns and causes of crime.
Evaluation
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Disadvantage: criticised for accepting the official definitions of environmental crime which are often shaped by powerful groups to serve their own interests.
Green Crimanology
Takes more radical approach and starts from the notion of harm. White argues that the proper subject of criminology is any action that harms the physical environment and or the human and not human animals even if no law has been broken.
Many of the worst environmental harms are not illegal and so the the subject matter of green criminology is much wider. Green criminology is a form of transgressive criminology meaning it oversteps the boundaries of traditional criminology to include new issues. Also known as zemiology which is the study of harm
Different countries have different laws so that the same harmful action may be a crime in one country and not another. Also legal definitions cant provide a consistent standard of harm since they are a product of individual states rather than political procedures
Green criminologists argue that powerful intreats especially nation states and transnational corporations are bale to define in their own interest what counts as unacceptable environmental harm
2 Views of harm
Anthropocentric
assumes that humans have the right to dominate nature for their own ends and put economic growth before the enviroment
Ecocentric
Sees humans and their environment as independent so that environmental harm also hurts humans. See both humans and the environmental as liable to exploitation especially by global capitalism. Green criminology adapts this view
Types of green crime
Primary green Crime
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Crimes of deforestation
Between 1960 and 1990, 1/5th of the worlds tropical rainforest was destroyed for example through illegal logging. In the Andes the war on drugs has led to pesticide spraying to kill coca and marajuina plants but has created a new green crime, destroying food crops. The criminals include the state and those who profit from forest destruction such as logging companies
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Secondary green crime
Crimes that grows out of flouting of rules aimed at preventing or regulating environmental disasters
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Green crime is crimes against the environment. Much green crime can be linked to globalisation and increasing interconnectedness of societies.