Literature Review

The current legal regime allows states and corporations to despoil the environment with impunity. This injustice has inspired a new movement of legal experts and citizens calling for the codification of ecocide as a fifth crime against peace, joining genocide, crimes of aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Their work aims to transform our understanding of nature from property to an equal partner with humans in building sustainable societies. The political and enforcement hurdles are formidable, but an awakened and engaged citizenry, strengthened by the Paris climate agreement, may prove powerful enough to elevate the prevention of crimes against nature to an internationally recognized norm.

This paper explores an international law of ecocide, “the mass damage and destruction of the environment resulting from human action,” arguing that it is a legal imperative. Upon tracing ecocide’s definitional challenge, the authors present environmental law, human rights law, and torts law as developing bodies of law that support ecocide as an international crime against peace “by building upon doctrines that link humanity with the environment as trustees, stewards and equally, potential violators of the duty to protect.” The authors conclude that while “[t]he viability of ecocide being inserted into the Rome Statute, or alternatively being the impetus for an alternative forum such as an International Environment Court, is universally considered difficult” at the time of writing, “ecocide law is a legal necessity that surpasses considerations of political lethargy.”

Though a discussion of the 2019 Brazilian Amazon fires, this article examines the contested politics of environmental rights in Brazil. It analyses how the concept of ecocide can offer a useful lens with which to articulate the socio-ecological consequences of President Bolsonaro’s extractive imperialism, and the persistent failure of current international governance frameworks to address the continuing widespread destruction of the natural environment. Firstly, the article places the concept of ecocide within the context of the international governance framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the challenges that natural resource exploitation presents to the achievement of sustainable development in Latin America. Secondly, it presents an overview of the concept of ecocide that includes cultural genocide as a method for undermining a way of life and a technique for group destruction. Lastly, through an analysis of Brazil’s environmental politics, contested claims of sovereignty and the recent push for the industrialisation of the Amazon, the article considers whether claims of ecocide in the Brazilian Amazon can be substantiated when using the criteria for the crime of ecocide – namely the size, duration and impact of the extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystems in the Amazon rainforest.

The Lesotho Highlands Water Project is a bi-national collaboration between Lesotho and South Africa. One of the most comprehensive water projects in the world it aims to harness the water resources of Lesotho to the mutual benefit of both states. Once completed, about 2,200 million cubic metres per annum of water will be transferred from Lesotho to the South African network. In return, Lesotho will benefit in terms of ancillary developments and, in particular, revenue from royalties. However, due to hydropolitics, the Project has impacted negatively upon human security in Lesotho. This article examines the relationship of hydropolitics, ecocide and human security, with reference to the Project. It argues that due to the hydro-strategic interests of the political elite of both countries, co-operation exists between them over the Project. These strategic interests, however, outweigh social and environmental considerations in Lesotho, thereby constituting a threat to human security. The construction of the Project has resulted in ecocide and, as such, it has adverse environmental and social effects. It has contributed to chronic threats, while at the same time disrupting the patterns of daily life of the affected communities. Most of the displaced are no longer able to enjoy their human security as they did prior to the construction of the Project.

This essay adopts an interdisciplinary approach to consider the meaning of “eco-crime” in the aquatic environment and draws on marine science, the study of criminal law and environmental law, and the criminology of environmental harms. It reviews examples of actions and behaviors of concern, such as offences committed by transnational organized crime and the legal and illegal over-exploitation of marine resources, and it discusses responses related to protection, prosecution and punishment, including proposals for an internationally accepted and enforced law of ecocide. One key element of the policy and practice of ending ecocide is the call to prioritize the adoption of technologies that are benign and renewable. Our essay concludes with a description of the “Almadraba” method of fishing to illustrate that there are ways in which the principles of sustainability and restoration can be applied in an ethical and just way in the context of modern fisheries.

The term ecocide was first coined to categorize massive destruction of the environment in war. If the sheer scale of the harm done be the distinguishing feature of ecocide, it is contended that the term may justifiably be appled to peacetime activities that destroy or damage ecosystems on a massive scale. The author shows that, although ecocide has a long history, it had little impact on international law until the advent of catastrophic oil spills at sea, nuclear accidents, long-range air pollution, and the threat of global warmng. Then the international community began to demonstrate a growing concern, but the measures undertaken in response may already be too little and too late. The concluding part of the article deals with the more raical legal remedies (such as treating ecocide as an international crime) that may be needed to avert the threat of ecocide.

Ecocide is a structurally reoccurring phenomenon contributing to a serious disequilibrium in the Earth-system that buttress all planetary life. Ecocide is also a possible method of genocide if it fragments or destroys vital socioecological and cultural relationships between humans and nature. Practises that inflict ecocide are hence often responsible for the destruction of ecological and social life-systems that face adversities due to deteriorating ecological conditions. This article therefore articulates the importance of an international crime of ecocide that can prosecute perpetrators for acts of ecocide as well as ecocidally induced physical and cultural genocide under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In doing so, it outlines the structural drivers of ecocide, articulates the links between ecocide and genocide, and argues that the failure to establish an international crime against ecocide and its genocidal effects is a deeply rooted and unacceptable legal-epistemological disregard of alternative life-systems’ intrinsic right to existence by international law. In response, this article calls for an international crime of ecocide and its genocidal violence under the ICC not as a legal silver bullet but as a tool for larger processes of decolonisation which must be coupled with alternative methods of enforcement and resistance.

The missing link in discussions and debates about climate change are the carbon criminals. These are governments (the key focus for climate action) and transnational corporations (the key drivers of global warming). While state-corporate collusion in support of activities that add to and rationalise carbon emissions is widely acknowledged, rarely are such activities and denials of harm subject to the discourses of criminalisation. Recent efforts to name these as transgressions and injustices have done so under the rubric of ecocide. Despite foreknowledge of the immense harms it will cause, global warming continues apace. This article explores the dynamics of climate change criminality through discussion of the perpetrators of climate-related harm, issues of responsibility and responses to the causes of climate injustice.

Questions concerning (nonhuman) animal rights have been increasingly addressed within the criminological literature due to growing interest in green criminology. Often within criminology, animal rights issues have been primarily addressed from philosophical standpoints, which omit how animal rights are addressed in more concrete terms through the legal system. This philosophical orientation toward animal rights, while important, has led to a neglect of the ways in which animal rights might be promoted through legal means. This article addresses that latter point by exploring the use of writs of habeas corpus for animals promoted by Steven Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) in the US. Much of the NhRP’s efforts have been devoted to nonhuman primates, and consistent with that approach, this assessment focuses attention on legal efforts to protect nonhuman primates’ rights. In addition to NhRP efforts, other possibilities for using the law to obtain rights for animals in the US are examined. While this article focuses on circumstances in the US, several nations employ such writs or similar legal mechanisms.

This article provides an outline for action against climate change ecocide. Critical criminology has primarily focussed on exposing the political economy surrounding global warming and the powerful interests that perpetuate harmful practices even in the light of overwhelming scientific evidence. Questions of activist intervention have been less forthcoming, although specific attention has been given to concepts such as ecocide to highlight the criminality and social and ecological injustices involved in “business as usual.” After discussing the nature and dynamics of the nation-state and global capitalism, the article then presents an action plan matrix that incorporates elements relating to law and legal reform, environmental law enforcement, courts and adjudication, and social action. The article argues for the necessity of greater integration of theory and practice through the development of a social praxis for climate change justice.

The term ecocide was used as early as 1970, when it was first recorded at the Conference on War and National Responsibility in Washington, where Professor Arthur W. Galston “proposed a new international agreement to ban ‘ecocide’”. Ecocide as a term had no strict definition at that time: “although not legally defined, its essential meaning is well-understood; it denotes various measures of devastation and destruction which have in common that they aim at damaging or destroying the ecology of geographic areas to the detriment of human life, animal life, and plant life”. What was recognised was that the element of intent did not always apply. “Intent may not only be impossible to establish without admission but, I believe, it is essentially irrelevant.” Richard A. Falk, in his draft (1973) Ecocide Convention, explicitly states at the outset to recognise “that man has consciously and unconsciously inflicted irreparable damage to the environment in times of war and peace”. By the end of the 1970s the term itself seems to have been well understood. So how was it that an international crime whose name was familiar to many who were involved in the drafting of the initial Crimes Against Peace was completely removed without determination? Documents that have only now been examined and pieced together shed a whole new light on a corner of history that would otherwise be buried forever. What is so remarkable is that the collective memory has erased this crime in just 15 years, and yet documents tell a story of engagement by many governments who supported the criminalisation of ecocide in peacetime as well as in wartime. Extensive debate over 40 years, with committees of experts specifically tasked to undertake examination of ecocide and environmental crimes, documented in the paper trail left behind tells us that this was well-considered law; early drafts, which have been referred to in some of the papers that have been uncovered, provide definitive reference to ecocide as a crime which was to stand alongside genocide as a Crimes Against Peace – both during peacetime as well as wartime.

A number of studies have shown that ecocide can be a method of genocide if, for example, environmental destruction results in conditions of life that fundamentally threaten a social group's cultural and/or physical existence.Footnote1 With the ever-increasing rise of such cases of ecological destruction brought on by the extractive industries, or indirectly induced by anthropogenic climate change, we argue that the field of genocide studies should draw from the rich scholarly tradition of political ecology and environmental sociology. Indeed, it is the contention of the authors that, given the looming threat of runaway climate change in the twenty-first century, the advent of the geological phase classified by geologists and earth scientists as anthropoceneFootnote2 and the attendant rapid extinction of species, destruction of habitats, ecological collapse and the self-evident dependency of the human race on our biosphere, ecocide (both ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’) will become a primary driver of genocide. It is therefore incumbent upon genocide scholars to attempt a paradigm shift in the greatest traditions of scienceFootnote3 and to cohere a synthesis of the sociology of genocide and environmental sociology into a theoretical apparatus that can illuminate the links between, and uncover the drivers of, ecocide and genocidal social death.Footnote4 Following a discussion of both the conceptual and legal nexus between ecocide and genocide, we further contend that capitalist ‘land grabs’ carried out by extractive industries, industrial farms and the like are, through the annexation of indigenous land and the associated ‘externalities’, the principal vectors of ecologically induced genocide when the genos in question is an indigenous people.