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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Green Criminology and Political Economy
The purpose of this book is first, to describe the green criminological literature, and second, to explore and illustrate how political-economic theory is useful for analyzing green crime, harm, law, and justice. Our goal is to create an overview of this field of research and add our own perspective on the study of green crime, law, and justice to that literature. This book, therefore, does not provide solely a review of research and theories related to green criminology for students, it also includes chapters that apply green criminological concepts to new issues and supplies unique applications for studying green criminological issues relevant to researchers. To make this work accessible to these audiences, we attempt to simplify, where appropriate, concepts and idea, but we also include additional detailed information related to more complex material for those who wish to pursue research related to green criminology. At the end of each chapter, there are "student" and "researcher" sections. The student sections outline major points students should be able to conceptualize and address, while the researcher section provides some ideas for additional research that might be worthwhile undertaking. As a result, this book can be used as a textbook and to further academic research on green criminological issues.
ORIGINS OF AN IDEA
The idea of a green criminology emerged in the early 1990s (Lynch 1990; Frank and Lynch 1992), at a time when people were becoming increasingly troubled about large-scale environmental disasters that resulted from negligent and even criminal behavior. For example, in 1984, the Union Carbide gas leak disaster in Bhopal, India, instantly killed at least 2,200 people and exposed half a million people to the dangerous chemical methyl isocyanate (Lynch, Nalla, and Miller 1989; Mehta et al. 1990; Sheehan 2011). Over time, the estimated number of deaths associated with the incident was as high as 16,000 victims (Eckerman 2006). The Indian government charged several individuals with crimes related to the gas leak, including former Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson, who was accused of homicide. Anderson, however never appeared in court in India to stand trial, and under the laws of India he remained an absconder from justice until his death (September 2014) in the United States, which, much to the frustration of the Indian government, had refused to extradite him. Several other Union Carbide employees, who worked in the Indian Union Carbide subsidiary, were convicted of lesser crimes (Pearce and Tombs 2011).
Legal remedies responding to the incident took years to unfold. For example, the eight ex–Union Carbide employees convicted of crimes related to the disaster were not found guilty and sentenced until 2010 — twenty-one years after the event occurred. The site of the disaster was not "fully remediated" — cleaned up — at least officially, until 1998. Research suggests, however, that the remediation was not completed, and that as late as 2005 pollutants on the site continued to contaminate groundwater supplies (Broughton 2005). Some of those contaminants remained because the site was also used to store hazardous waste unrelated to the incident. For the people of Bhopal, this long, slow path to justice was frustrating and led to various long-term social protests, which continue today (see fig. 1.1 and resource box 1.1).
Other serious environmental disasters, which promoted interest in developing green criminology, also occurred just before the 1990s. In 1986, the Chernobyl power plant in Pripyat, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, suffered a nuclear meltdown (Petryna 2003). The meltdown did not immediately result in a large number of deaths, but long-term exposure to the nuclear pollutants released at Chernobyl are estimated to have caused anywhere between 4,000 and 93,000 deaths (see, e.g., Cardis et al. 2006; Ivanov et al. 2001). Workers at the facility who died from the accident received an average radiation dose of 6,000 millisieverts (mSv) on a scale in which exposure to 10,000 mSv is likely to cause death within a week, and 5,000 mSv is likely to kill half of those exposed in one month. The precise number of deaths attributable to Chernobyl is difficult to estimate because of two factors. First, the radiation contamination was widespread, and studies have detected radiation from the incident far from the site — some suggest worldwide — though in low doses. The radiation band from the incident that contained significant radiation spread as far as Sweden, Finland, and Eastern European nations, more than 750 miles away. Second, because the radiation was so widespread, and because its effects can take decades to develop, linking an individual's disease or death directly to the incident is not always possible. Studies, however, have linked the accident to increased thyroid cancer and leukemia rates, especially among children (Cardis and Hatch 2011; Williams 2008). As a result of this meltdown, there have been calls to treat such "accidents" as corporate crime (Slapper 2009). But one could also frame this accident as an example of green harms or crimes that result from the economic organization of production, the main theme of this book.
In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker crashed in Prince William Sound in Alaska (see fig. 1.2 for an example of the consequences of this spill). Official estimates place the size of the oil spill at eleven million gallons, which were released along the Alaskan Coast, though numerous sources suggest that estimate is well below the thirty-eight million gallons that may have been spilled. The size of the spill had a devastating impact on the natural environment and on the fishing industry in Alaska. Many Alaskan citizens were impacted by the spill, and they assumed the spill was deviant, if not criminal, in nature, as "there was willful deception on the part of authorities — particularly Exxon" to cover up the extent of the problem and cleanup (Ritchie, Gill, and Farnham, 2013, 661). In the end, criminal charges were brought against Exxon and the Valdez captain, Joe Hazelwood (Mauer 2010). However, a plea deal allowed the company to avoid a criminal label by paying a $125 million fine. Hazelwood was found guilty of a misdemeanor (Mauer 2010). (For more information on the Exxon Valdez and on continued monitoring of the effects of the spill, see the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council n.d.)
Earlier environmental problems also influenced public and official concern with environmental harms. In the 1950s, high levels of air pollution were having serious public health consequences, and it was only much later that it became clear to public health researchers that adverse air pollution were causing numerous deaths worldwide. For example, a "killer smog" in London in 1952 resulted in an estimated 12,000 deaths (Bell and Davis, 2001); the British government places the estimate at 4,000 (Met Office 2015). Similar serious smog incidents linked to industrial pollution have occurred in several other areas of the world: Muse Valley, Belgium (1930: 60 deaths); Donora, Pennsylvania (1948: 20 deaths, 600 hospitalizations); New York City (1953: 170–260 deaths; 1963: 200 deaths; 1966: 169 deaths); and London (1991: 160 deaths). In the 1940s, the first smog alerts were issued in Los Angeles (Davis 2003), where they were routine throughout the 1950s and 1960s (for an example of air quality in Los Angeles, see fig. 1.3). Similar smog incidents now plague many cities in China (for examples, perform a Google image search using the phrase "smog in Chinese cities"). In March 2014, the United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that, globally, 7 million people die prematurely from exposure to outdoor air pollution More recently (September 27, 2016), the United Nations also indicated the seriousness of the extent of global air pollution. The WHO notes that 6.5 million people worldwide die each year from exposure to air pollution and that more than 80% of the global population lives in urban locations, where air pollution levels exceed recommended limits. The WHO observed that these impacts are unevenly distributed; of WHO-monitored cities with more than 100,000 residents, 98% in low- and middle-income nations are exposed to air quality that fails to meet WHO standards, whereas the percentage is only 56 in high-income nations. That difference, we suggest, has much to do with the nature of the global economy and the transference of polluting industries from developed to developing and underdeveloped nations.
Other large-scale ecological issues also influenced the emergence of green criminology. In the late 1980s, climate change became a significant environmental and social problem, and a number of widely cited studies of climate change were published (e.g., Hansen et al. 1988; Jones, Raper, and Wigley 1986; Lorius et al. 1985; Manabe and Wetherald 1987; Mitchell 1989; Mitchell, Senior, and Ingram 1989; Pastor and Post 1988; Peters and Darling 1985; Ramanathan 1988; Ramanathan et al. 1985; Roble and Dickinson 1989; E. Wilson 1989). Scientific knowledge relating to climate change was being rapidly modified, and these studies were beginning to produce social awareness concerning the problems it would present. While the science of climate change was undergoing rapid transformation, it took criminologists decades to recognize the relevance of climate change to the study of crime and justice (Agnew 2012; South 2015; Brisman and South 2015; Kramer 2013; Lynch, Burns, and Stretesky 2010; Lynch and Stretesky 2010; White 2012, 2016; White and Kramer 2015). As an example of these effects, in 2003 an extensive heat wave in France, which has been held up as an example of the consequences of climate change, was estimated to have caused nearly fifteen thousand excess deaths (Poumadere et al. 2005), a figure that is greater than the average number of homicides that occurred annually in the United States over the past five years (2011–16).
In the context of discussions focused on global environmental problems, Lynch (1990) issued a call for the development of green criminology. As noted, that call came at a time when environmental harm appeared to be increasing in intensity and scale, but also at a time when public concern for the environment was at an all-time high. In 1989, for instance, a Gallop poll reported that 72% of Americans worried "a great deal" about the pollution of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs; 63% worried "a great deal" about air pollution; and 69% worried "a great deal" about contamination of the soil by toxic waste (Jones 2010). More recently, various studies (e.g., Capstick et al. 2015) examining trends in public concern with the environment across nations have noted that concern with climate change was increasing in many nations from the 1980s through 2007. But in some nations, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom but in other developed nations as well, the public has more recently lost confidence in scientific evidence related to climate change, leading to a decline in public concern from about 2007 through 2010. This may be related to the fact that US and UK media more often contain skeptical commentary on climate change (Capstick et al. 2015).
GREEN CRIMINOLOGY: ORIGINAL PREMISE
Lynch (1990) suggested green criminology as an extension of radical criminology and political-economic analysis (see also, Lynch et al. 2013; Frank and Lynch 1992; Ruggiero and South 2013; Stretesky, Long, and Lynch 2013a). The greening of criminology was, above all, a call for criminologists to focus on the economic origins of crimes against the environment. When green criminology emerged, environmental crimes — even though they were the focus of public attention and concern — were largely neglected in the criminological literature. And when they were discussed, they were examined in reference to state, corporate, and organized crime, and not as important topics in their own right. For instance, Block and Scarpitti (1985) analyzed the extent of the Mafia's participation in the illegal disposal of hazardous waste and the consequences of the movement of organized crime into the profitable toxic waste business in New York. Later, Block and Bernard (1988) examined how changes in the petroleum industry intersected with changes in environmental laws, to open up a hazardous waste market that was taken over by the Mafia and used to illegally dispose of toxic wastes in fuel sold on the free market to consumers. Criminologists and sociologists also examined violations of environmental laws in corporate crime research (e.g., Clinard and Yeager 1980; Frank and Lynch 1992). To be sure, researchers continue to study organized, state, and corporate crimes relating to toxic waste (e.g., Massari and Monzini 2004) and natural resources violations, including poaching (Hauck and Sweijd 1999). However, green criminology has also come of age and is now orienting the field of criminology around concepts related to the production of environmental/ green harms.
More than twenty-five years later, the field of green criminology has expanded considerably. As a result, there are now numerous explanations of what green criminology does or is about. Not surprisingly, many of these descriptions are tied to the theoretical orientation of the researcher. Thus, references to green criminology are no longer exclusively focused on political-economic explanations, as Lynch (1990) once envisioned. As a result, we are reminded of what Alvin Gouldner (1971, 490) suggested: social scientists "must — at the very least — acquire the ingrained habit of viewing [their] own beliefs as [they] view those held by others." Consistent with that argument, we acknowledge that this book specifically focuses on political-economic approaches to green criminology, while still attending to the kinds of issues green criminologists have drawn attention to over the past quarter of a century.
WHAT IS GREEN CRIMINOLOGY?
We begin our description of green criminology by drawing on the view of Rob White (2008, 50), who proposed that "green criminology emphasizes environmental justice, with a special focus on human rights and social equity; and ecological justice, with a special focus on the biosphere generally and the rights of non-human as well as human." Indeed, some of the earliest green criminological studies explored the problem of environmental justice or the uneven distribution of ecological harms in society as they affect humans (Lynch and Stretesky 1998, 1999; Stretesky and Lynch 1998, 1999; see also ch. 9 on environmental justice).
Like White, Carrabine et al. (2009, 316) pointed out that "green criminology suggests that we reappraise more traditional notions of crimes, offences and injurious behaviours and start to examine the role that societies (including corporations and governments) play in generating environmental degradation." Building on prior descriptions of green criminology, Lynch and Stretesky (2011, 2) stated that the purpose of green criminology is to "provide space within criminology to examine the nexus between environmental problems, the definition of harms against nature as crimes, the need to reconsider criminal justice practices and policy in relationship to the environmental harms they produce, the variety of victims environmental offenses create (for human and non-human species, as well as ecological segments such as wetlands, forests, air, and land, etc.) and the effect of environmental toxins on ecological systems and species' health and behavior." Finally, the definition of green crime tells researchers what they should explore. As Eman, Mesko, and Fields (2009, 576–77) stated, "Green criminology ... represents the branch of criminology that deals with research into criminality against the environment and associated phenomena." Other definitions of green crime can be found in resource box 1.2.
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