Avi Brisman

A green-cultural criminology: An exploratory outline

Within the last two decades, “green criminology” has emerged as a distinctive area of study, drawing together criminologists with a wide range of specific research interests and representing varying theoretical orientations. “Green criminology” spans the micro to the macro, from work on individual-level environmental crimes to business/corporate violations to state transgressions, and includes research conducted from both mainstream and critical theoretical perspectives, as well as arising out of interdisciplinary projects. With few exceptions, there has been little work attempting to explicitly or implicitly integrate cultural criminology with green criminology and vice versa. This article promulgates a green-cultural criminology—an approach that seeks to incorporate a concern with the cultural significance of the environment, environmental crime, and environmental harm into the green criminological enterprise. It begins by demonstrating how cultural criminology is, at some levels, already doing green criminology. It then attempts to map a green criminology onto several key dimensions of cultural criminology: (a) the contestation of space, transgression, and resistance; (b) the way(s) in which crime is constructed and represented by the media; and (c) patterns of constructed consumerism. This article concludes by showing how a green-criminology-cultural-criminology cross-fertilization would be mutually beneficial.

The Cultural Silence of Climate Change Contrarianism

This chapter presents a view of climate change from the perspective of green cultural criminology. The substantive focus of the chapter is on how climate change contrarianism is manifested in the mass media. Denial is profoundly ideological in nature; how it is conveyed and transmitted is of importance to those who wish to reorient collective thinking to not only recognizing the urgency and seriousness of the problem but also recasting it in criminal terms. As this chapter demonstrates, it is vital to understand and expose the dynamics and social construction of deception and “contrary” opinion if positive action is to be taken to address climate change issues.

‘Life-Stage Dissolution’, Infantilization and Antisocial Consumption Implications for De-responsibilization, Denial and Environmental Harm

Hayward (2012, 2013) asserts that the opposition between adolescence and adulthood is increasingly challenged as late-modern capitalist culture artificially extends the former. Hayward introduces the concept of ‘life-stage dissolution’—and its attendantbidirectionalprocesses of ‘adultification’ and ‘infantilization’—to propose that it isbecomingdifficult for young people to differentiate and disassociate themselves from the generation immediately ahead of them and vice versa. This article makes a contribution to a ‘green cultural criminology’ (Brisman and South, 2013b, 2014) by extending Hayward’s argument to the realm of environmental harms and concerns. It provides examples of ways in which ‘life-stage dissolution’ and the resulting ‘generational mulch’ impede efforts towards environmental protection that might take into account future generations, and it explores how such responsibility is denied even while scientific awareness grows that over-consumption is damaging the environment that future generations will inherit.

‘Multicolored’ green criminology and climate change’s achromatopsia

While green criminology may be an effective name or label for the sub-field or perspective within criminology that considers a wide range of environmental issues, it is, in reality, a ‘multicolored green’ – a criminology that engages a spectrum of issues, that reflects the interests of some racial groups more than others, that reveals and analyzes environmental harms which disproportionately impact some racial groups more than others, and that can be approached from a number of vantage points or that can be viewed with variously tinted lenses. This article begins with an overview of climate change, including a discussion of its anticipated impacts and indicators of its already-being-felt effects. It then offers some general comments on the disproportionate impact of environmental threats and harms before turning to a discussion of the present and anticipated distributional impacts of climate change. Here, this article argues that climate change is, in effect, achromatopsic – it is color-blind, in that it affects us all regardless of skin color – but that those impacts will be distributed unevenly/unequally and that various groups are and will continue to be in different positions to adapt to climate change. This article concludes by suggesting that while the environmental harms caused by climate change are real – and the risks and threats they pose tangible and serious – climate change presents an exciting challenge for our creative potential as humans. In the process of reducing our consumption of fossil fuels and stabilizing (or, better yet, reducing) our greenhouse gas emissions, we might better assist those geopolitical regions most at risk (i.e. poor, developing countries) to become more resilient – an approach that is necessary for both the physical health of the planet and the prospects for social justice.

State-Corporate Environmental Harms and Paradoxical Interventions: Thoughts in Honour of Stanley Cohen

Stanley Cohen was concerned with the crimes and harms that are perpetrated by legitimate bodies, such as states and corporations, and with the way in which these acts and omissions, their impacts and consequences (discussed further below), have been routinely ignored, overlooked, excused or simply denied. In various influential works, such as his 1993 article, ‘Human rights and crimes of the state: The culture of denial’, his 1985 book, Visions of Social Control, and his 2001 book, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, Cohen appealed to us to open our eyes, see and acknowledge the hidden crimes, horrors and indignities inflicted by humans on others, and his work explored important themes of truth and deception: the distortion of the former and the ways in which we produce the latter individually and collectively. The victims of ignored or almost invisible crimes and harms can easily be overlooked when offenders seek to hide their actions and the injuries caused, and when these victims are already socially invisible, marginalized or forgotten (Davis et al., 2014; Hall, 2014). No great effort at camouflage or disguise is required if the perpetrators or conspirators can enlist the willing cooperation of many or most in buying into the cover-ups, the denials and the comfortable avoidance of challenge. Stealthy misdirection, misinformation and the power to pay for legal harassment and media control shape a socioeconomic landscape in which the crimes and harms for which the powerful are responsible continue much as ever (Brisman, 2012).

Resource Wealth, Power, Crime, and Conflict

The global flow of capital and competitive trading across borders has been accompanied by the weakening of the ability of regulators and sovereign countries to monitor and restrict harmful activities of multinational corporations. Multinationals often exert a disproportionately large amount of influence over the regulatory agencies that are charged with regulating them - a condition referred to as ‘regulatory capture’ (see Stigler, 1971 in Borak, 2011) - and they have increasingly taken advantage of these globalising circumstances to lower environmental standards and to collude in violation of the rights of inhabitants of threatened locations (human and nonhuman) and of activists seeking to protect the environment (see, for example, Boelens et al., 2011; Clark, 2009; Global Witness, 2012; Newell, 2001; Williams, 1996).

Green Criminology, Zemiology, and Comparative and Inter-Relational Justice in the Anthropocene Era

The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers to a proposed new geological epoch characterised by the unprecedented impact of human activities on the Earth’s climate and ecosystems. This chapter begins by noting how humans have affected every aspect of our environment—from the far reaches of the atmosphere to ocean bottoms. Next, it considers how criminologists have approached environmental harms—both those that are statutorily proscribed and those that are not, but that are still ecologically destructive. From here, the chapter (1) contemplates Green and Ward’s (Social Justice 27:101–115, 2000) position that ‘crime’ should not be extended to cover all social harms (and that criminology should retain at its essence the concept of ‘deviance’); and (2) explores whether criminology should adopt a zemiological approach to the adverse human impacts on the environment. This chapter then ponders how criminology should contemplate individual-level environmental harm before posing a series of questions oriented around ideas of ‘comparative’ and ‘inter-relational justice’.

Too Dirty: Water and Pollution

Most countries will impose restrictions on the discharge of pollutants into water and, in particular, will set standards for the quality of drinking water. Of course, whether these restrictions are applied with any rigour and whether these standards are met raise the kind of questions with which this book is concerned. We start here with the issue of pollution of water because it tends to be the most common water concern, crime or harm of which people are aware: often, although not always (as we will discuss below in the context of Flint, Michigan), polluted water looks, tastes or smells foul. Of course, for many people across the world, the greater issue is access to water in the face of drought—thirst and related starvation—and in such circumstances, polluted water is consumed on the basis that dirty water is better than no water at all. In other instances, water pollution leads to issues of water scarcity: a region may rely on a specific water body and when it becomes polluted, access to clean freshwater becomes frustrated (see generally Smith 2015).Our point is that while water pollution and access to clean water are often conceptualized as separate problems with different socioeconomics and geopolitics, this is not always necessarily the case (McClanahan et al. 2015).We shall discuss these circumstances and the issues related to health and inequalities in a later chapter. For now, back to pollution—and to the different ways in which it occurs—not always so easily detectable as might be assumed—as well as the different ways in which it is responded to, for purposes of prevention and prosecution of polluters.

Representing the “invisible crime” of climate change in an age of post-truth

This article builds on prior writing on the ophthalmological aspects of climate change to argue that in an age of climate change denial and “post-truth”—which Oxford Dictionaries defines as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”—developing a visual language of climate change becomes of paramount importance. This article suggests that while media representations of climate change may serve to reduce climate change to a stock set of visual clichés certain art may improve our visual acuity of climate change. Accordingly, this article looks at select examples of artwork on the causes and consequences of climate change and considers the capacity of such work to inspire personal and political action.

Too Insecure: Water and Security

‘Environmental security’ has been defined as ‘[t]he current and future availability (determined by the factors—supply, accessibility and management) of life-supporting ecosystem services and goods for human needs and natural process which contribute to poverty alleviation and conflict deterrence’ (Hecker 2011: 12). While other permutations have been offered, in general, the concept of environmental security tends to ‘link environmental degradation and the associated scarcity of resources with human conflict at individual, group, and state levels’ (Hall 2013: 228; 2015: 44–45; South 2012: 104–109). With the end of the Cold War and increasing knowledge of the negative effects of environmental degradation, scholars have come to recognize that environmental destruction and despoliation present severe threats to ‘human security’ (itself a contested term: compare Bennett and colleagues (2015); Cao and Wyatt (2016); Mobley (2011); Newman (2016); Shearing (2015); Valverde (2014)) and all life of Earth—that the harms and crimes of air and water pollution, deforestation and soil erosion from civilian and military activities can and do adversely and dramatically impact our living conditions—and that such environmental damage can be both a cause and consequence of environmental conflict (Graeger 1996; see also Brisman et al. 2015).