By Dr Kellie Toole, Dr Phillipa McCormack, Daan van Uhm, Marie Beillevert, Claire Williams, and Phillip Cassey
All over the world, damage to the environment has increased rapidly in recent decades. The effects of environmental damage include species decline and extinction, ecosystem loss, and climate change. Many countries have passed environmental law, but have rarely been able to sufficiently protect the environment from harm. There is no ‘silver bullet’ or simple solution to stopping damage to the environment, but changing criminal law is one way of highlighting the problem, and discouraging and punishing the most serious offenders. We present the ideas of conservation biologists, criminal lawyers, environmental lawyers, and green criminologists to argue that governmants can and should use criminal law more in protecting the environment.
However, for hundreds of years, the criminal law has focused only on harm to people and damage to their property, and for this reason does not fit well with protecting the non-human environment. Moreover, most harm to the environment is an accepted part of social and economic life and not against criminal laws already on the books. We recommend that criminal law takes into account the scientific evidence about the causes and effects of serious damage to the environment, and that politicians who pass criminal laws listen to green criminologists about which activities are so unreasonable and harmful that they should be crimes.
This change to the law would make criminal law respect the value of nature in itself, not just how it can serve humans. This change in law could change attitudes and behaviours and protect the environment into the future.
Relational Thinking 