Environment Crime

In response to misconceptions and sub-optimal assessment of situational interaction in the criminological literature, this volume is a comprehensive resource for researchers of person-environment interaction in human behavioural outcomes, with a focus on acts of crime. It provides a bridge between strong complex theory about causal situational interaction in crime and the appropriate methods for empirically testing proposed situational mechanisms. It is underwritten by the principle that research should be driven by theory and served by method.

Over the last century, international law has sought to keep pace with sweeping changes that have revolutionised the international community. It has done so in various ways: by developing new fields, adopting new legal instruments, and including new actors and entities in the international fora. Human rights law and environmental law have emerged to address essential issues raised by civil society. Treaties, judgments and soft law instruments have attempted to fill the gaps in regulation. International organisations, corporations, civil society organisations and individuals have all worked to make and enforce, also by judicial means, legal rules. But is all this sufficient?

This book compares and contrasts traditional crime scenes with scenes of climate crisis to offer a more expansive definition of crime which includes environmental harm. The authors reconsider what crime scenes have always included and might come to include in the age of the Anthropocene – a new geological era where humans have made enough significant alterations to the global environment to warrant a fundamental rethinking of human-nonhuman relations.

A global history of environmental warfare and the case for why it should be a crime
The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment―"environcide"―constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature.