Crimes against the environment can cover a multitude. The multibillion-dollar wildlife trafficking racket, for instance, or the murders of land defenders, nearly 2,000 since 2012 accord to the NGO Global Witness. It includes acts of persecution of protected species or pollution of waterways of the kind that is all too common in Ireland.
It may also include governments themselves breaking the law by breaching legal limits on, for instance, greenhouse gas emissions, or failing to set limits in the first place. There is then the effort to expand legal jurisprudence into areas which are not yet defined, such as ecocide or the rights of nature.
In Green Crime, Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist at University College London, attempts to give us a tour of the global web of bad actors as well as providing a framework for curtailing them. It only partially succeeds in the first of these tasks.
Shaw provides solid and sometimes compelling accounts of some of the great environmental crime scenes of recent times: so-called dieselgate, when Volkswagen was found to have been lying about the emissions from its vehicles; the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010; a brutal murder in Brazil in 2011 of a couple defending their patch of the Amazon rainforest; or the epic pursuit of the Thunder, a pirate fishing boat that was chased down by Sea Shepard, an NGO, across 16,000km of ocean.
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However, many of these stories have been told before, and Green Crime fails to piece them together in a coherent manner. Shaw suggests that criminal activity can be understood under a set of headings comprising: ease, impunity, greed, desperation, the ability to rationalise criminal actions or where social norms allow for destructive activity.
These are hardly novel insights, while the book at times veers off entirely into the psychology of recycling or the spread of climate disinformation. Green Crime says nothing of novel approaches to tackling criminality, such as with AI or drones, or the legal successes in holding governments to account for climate collapse. The book offers little new to chew on despite the importance of the topic.
