Associate Professor Avi Brisman

This impressive collection of original essays explores the relationship between social conflict and the environment - a topic that has received little attention within criminology. The chapters provide a systematic and comprehensive introduction and overview of conflict situations stemming from human exploitation of environments, as well as the impact of social conflicts on the wellbeing and health of specific species and ecosystems. Largely informed by green criminology perspectives, the chapters in the book are intended to stimulate new understandings of the relationships between humans and nature through critical evaluation of environmental destruction and degradation associated with social conflicts occurring around the world. With a goal of creating a typology of environment-social conflict relationships useful for green criminological research, this study is essential reading for scholars and academics in criminology, as well as those interested in crime, law and justice.

This chapter discusses the potential usefulness of a visual and sensory methodology for investigating the social perception of environmental crime and harm. Given the scarcity of tools with which to approach these dynamic and elusive phenomena, we focus first on the theoretical and methodological overlaps between green, cultural, visual, and sensory criminologies. We accomplish this by considering two techniques to collect qualitative visual data: interviews-with-visual-materials (also known as photo-elicitation) and itinerant soliloquies-an innovative sociological form of mobile methodology. In doing so, we invite criminologists to reconsider the constitutive relationship between our ways of seeing and our ways of sensing and perceiving the environment in which we live.

¿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).

The phrase ¿water is the next oil¿ is widely used to describe the exorbitant profits produced as a result of its growing commodification (Zabarenko 2009). As McGee (2014) observes, ¿Companies proclaim water the next oil in a rush to turn resources into profit¿Mammoth companies are trying to collect water that all life needs and charge for it as they would for other natural resources¿.

In the children¿s book, 11 Experiments That Failed (Offill 2011), a young girl poses the question, ¿Can a message be sent in a bottle to a faraway land?¿ Her hypothesis is that ¿The hole in the bottom of the toilet leads to the sea¿, and she sets out to test this by placing a message in a bottle and seeing what happens when she flushes it down the toilet. The following page reveals an illustration of the girl¿s house with water pouring out of the windows and the girl adrift on a toilet seat. Bobbing next to her is a potpourri of household items. The girl¿s astonished mother, calf-deep in water, clutches a cordless phone. The only text on the page is as follows:

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.

The television sci-fi drama, ¿The Expanse¿, based on the novels written by James S. A. Corey, depicts a future solar system where the dwarf planet ¿Ceres¿ provides diminishing sources of fresh water for competing intergalactic colonies. In such worlds, 200 years hence, water has become more than a commodity for monetary exchange: it is now a precious, finite, politicized and respected ingredient for human survival. Corey describes the activities of ¿water smugglers¿, who seek their fortunes from dealing in this rare resource, and paints a picture of the political and diplomatic value of fresh water where societies have come to realize its intrinsic life-giving qualities; those who see it merely as a commodity are represented as criminals and outcasts. Corey thereby represents the modern day ¿water buccaneers¿¿the corporate entities that exploit and profit from fresh water¿as the pariahs of the future.

In their proposal for a new paradigm for environmental sociology, Dunlap and Catton (1979) have argued for the necessity of a broader understanding of the interdependence between humans and the biophysical environment of which they are a part. This includes recognition of systems of reciprocity and feedback. Ultimately, ecological processes will impose limits on the constant human quest for growth and consumption. Perhaps ¿water¿ provides the most significant test case regarding this proposition as we begin to understand the extent and implications of the processes of global warming and climate change that are underway.

As we have described and discussed in the preceding chapters, water issues take shape in a variety of ways. From concerns regarding access and pollution, to drought and flooding as attendant effects of global climate change, to privatization and corporate consolidation of water supplies and the deceptive marketing of bottled water, water is at the centre of a diverse array of issues with unique criminological relevance. Indeed, as our title and framing suggest, water issues can be thought of as constituting and falling on a spectrum of extremes¿water is often too dirty, expensive or secured, access to water is too restricted, while flooding and geographically and socially dependent overabundance give some too much water. In this chapter, we demonstrate a global recognition of the importance of water by highlighting and describing a few of the countless social, political and cultural moments and movements resisting the harms associated with inadequate access, poor quality, privatization and habitus. Each of the moments of resistance noted in this chapter is connected: at the centre of each is a call for ¿water justice¿.

The biosphere of planet Earth can be described as ¿a seamless continuum¿ comprised of the interacting elements of water, soil, air and living organisms. This is the system that sustains and reproduces life and, as Everard (2013: 28) points out, the depth of the interdependence of these constituent parts is ¿exemplified by the water cycle¿:

As an emerging perspective, green cultural criminology seeks to bring together green criminology and cultural criminology, and to identify points of overlap (Brisman and South 2013a, 2014).2 More specifically, green cultural criminology endeavours to illuminate how cultural criminology¿s attention to space is central to green criminology (and thus that cultural criminology is, at some levels, ¿already doing¿ green criminology). In addition, green cultural criminology attempts to highlight means by which green criminology might adopt a cultural criminological lens: (1) by assigning greater consideration to the way(s) in which environmental crime, harm and disaster are constructed and represented by the news media and in popular culture forms; (2) by dedicating increased attention to patterns of consumption, constructed consumerism, commodification of nature and related market processes; and (3) by devoting heightened concern to the contestation of space, transgression, and resistance, in order to analyse the ways in which environmental harms are opposed in/on the streets and in day-to-day living (Brisman and South 2013a, 2014; see also McClanahan 2014).

This collection includes chapters that range across a variety of forms or examples of conflict related to environmental matters.2 This is deliberate in order to achieve several goals. First, we wished to pull together such disparate examples to provide a baseline resource for a criminology concerned with environment and conflict relationships. Although well explored in fields like political ecology, political science, geography and conflict studies, this is not a topic that has received much attention within criminology, despite the fact that crimes and harms of considerable seriousness and significance are intertwined with these conflicts. Second, we wanted to continue to highlight the international compass of a green or environmentally sensitive criminology (South and Brisman 2013; White 2010, 2011; White and Heckenberg 2014). The contributors to this volume exemplify this global engagement and they bring to bear on their chosen topics a keen intellectual interest, academic rigour and passionate concern. Finally, we wanted to explore our own thinking about a typology of environment-conflict relationships. In this introductory chapter, we start by outlining and filling out in a preliminary way what such a typology might look like. We then move to an overview of the chapters that follow.

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.

In the spirit of green cultural criminology, which considers the way(s) in which environmental crime, harm, and disaster are constructed, represented, and envisioned by the news media and in popular cultural forms, and narrative criminology, which explores how stories can influence (promote, curb, prevent, or resist) action, including harmful action, this provisional article seeks to intercede (although, perhaps, ¿intervene,¿ in the McGregorian sense, is more accurate) in the debate, of sorts, between the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh and the British critic, editor, and theorist Mark Bould. Whereas Ghosh, in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), laments the failure of contemporary literature to engage with climate change, Bould, in The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture (2021), considers whether all stories might be stories about climate change. Taking Salman Rushdie¿s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) as an example, this article argues that this phantasmagorical tale about the problems of censorship could be applied to and analyzed in the context of climate change. The article considers how we might tell (more, better) stories of climate change and concludes by calling for a marshalling of diverse stories to reflect the most pressing issue of our time.

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.

As of June 2020, there have been at least 2,540 mass shootings since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, CT, on December 14, 2012. Some have suggested that the repeated trauma of these massacres has created a collective ¿emotional numbness,¿ lessening our empathy. This article asks whether a similar phenomenon is occurring with respect to environmental crime and harm. It considers whether we have developed ¿compassion fatigue¿ regarding environmental violence and contemplates a ¿workout regimen¿ for empathy for Gaia¿s suffering. In so doing, it seeks to engage with emerging work in the penumbra of narrative criminology and green cultural criminology.

Our relationship with plastic is complex. While the societal benefits of plastic are undeniable, plastic has also come to occupy a central role within a culture of waste and disposable living that constitutes a significant problem for health and the natural environment. Public awareness of the harms asociated with plastic is high, thanks, in part, to a range of sustained media exposure. This, however, has so far failed to materialize in any significant global reduction in plastic pollution. Meaningful regulatory change that adressess the harms of plastic at the point of production is curiously absent, while some apparent gains have been rolled back¿against a backdrop of a global pandemic and a rehabilitation of plastic. This article highlights the assemblage of media, government and corporate interests that performs the role of what we identify as the ¿Environmental Crisis Industry¿ (¿ECI¿), which perpetuates stasis in the face of environmental catastrphe. The ECI manages our anxieties through media discourses of precarity and danger, while at the same time, offering us attainable ¿solutions¿ that exist well within the logic of consumer capitalism¿in effect, compelling us (at least morally) to become eco-consumers. In this way, the political energy of grassroots climate resistance is ¿pre-corporated,¿ so to speak, into the product design of major corporations, dissipating the chance of real progressive change in favor of a new green spirit of capitalism.

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.

This article argues that the focus of many criminologists and art crime scholars is too often rather narrow, and promotes a more expansive notion of "art crime" -one that centers not on crime, but on the relationship between art and crime. More specifically, this article argues for an approach to "art crime" that contemplates "socially injurious acts" or omissions involving art that are not defined as "crime" or proscribed by civil or criminal statutes. Employing this "harm-based" approach, this article examines the responses to Damian Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living-a piece consisting of a 14-ft tiger shark (caught by a fisherman commissioned to do so) immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine of glass and steel-to demonstrate how art criticism can be employed as a tool for dissent, especially in cases involving art that causes ecological or environmental harms. © 2011 SAGE Publications.

Since its genesis, critical criminology has been committed to a critique of domination and to developing and exploring broader conceptions of "crime" to include "harms" that are not necessarily proscribed by law. Without diminishing the contributions of early or current critical criminologists, this article suggests that critical criminology can further its goals by looking to anthropology. Such a recommendation is not without risk. Early "criminal anthropology" regarded criminality as inherited and contended that individuals could be "born criminal" (e.g., Fletcher 1891). Subsequent anthropological investigations of crime were and have continued to be sporadic, and the discipline's approach to crime has not been particularly unified. (Anthropology has often considered crime within broader explorations of law, for example, or through related, albeit different, examinations of sorcery and witchcraft.) Despite these limitations or shortcomings, this article presents three ways in which anthropology can speak to, and engage with, critical criminology's "insistence that criminological inquiry move beyond the boundaries imposed by legalistic definitions of crime" and its critique of domination (Michalowksi 1996:11): 1) anthropology can help reveal processes of domination that are pervasive; 2) anthropology can remind us that what constitutes "crime" is culturally specific and temporal; and 3) anthropology can help provide paradigms for better living-allowing critical criminologists to be not just critical, not just prescriptive, but aspirational. A wide range of ethnographic accounts is considered. © 2011, The Western Criminology Review.

Since Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976)-the Supreme Court case that permitted the resumption of capital punishment in the United States-1203 executions have been carried out. One hundred and thirty-four (134) executions have involved "volunteers" of all races-individuals who waive or withdraw appeals at a point when viable claims still exist in their cases. This paper explores the power struggle between the State and the condemned over the timing and conditions under which an inmate is executed. It begins with a discussion of current public opinion about the death penalty and the ways in which the death penalty has been resisted. Next, it describes capital defendants who elect execution over life imprisonment and considers some of the reasons proffered for waiver and withdrawal. This paper then contemplates whether some instances of "volunteering" should be regarded as "extreme communicative acts" (Wee 2004, 2007)-non-linguistic communicative acts that are usually associated with protest, especially in the context of a lengthy political struggle (such as hunger strikes, self-immolation, and the chopping off of one's fingers). In so doing, this paper weighs in on the larger questions of who ultimately controls the body of the condemned and what governmental opposition to waiver and withdrawal may reveal about the motives and rationale for the death penalty. This paper also furthers research on how the prison industrial complex is resisted and how State power more generally is negotiated.