Crimes against nature: environmental criminology and ecological justice

Environmental issues dominate media headlines today and are forcing many people to re-evaluate their day-to-day practices as citizens, as workers, as parents and as members of communities. So, too, concern about the environment is now starting to have greater resonance within the criminal justice field, albeit in a still fairly modest fashion. Within this context of social and professional concern about environmental matters we have also seen in recent years the emergence of a distinctly 'green' criminology. The aim of this book is to consider the key concerns, concepts and conundrums of environmental or green criminology. The intention is to explore and to question, to initiate and to summarise, to provoke and to stimulate. The book as a whole is meant to develop further this particular approach to criminological study. The book is based on work undertaken specifically on environmental crime over the last fifteen years or so. It incorporates current research and scholarship that spans diverse disciplines and fields. It is also based on an appreciation that there are pressing issues that ought to be of more central concern to criminologists. Hence the book offers something 'old', something 'new', and a guide to that which still requires critical scrutiny and practical action. The book deals with specific issues that pertain to the nature of and responses to environmental harm. These particular crimes against nature include a wide variety of transgressions against humans, against environments, and against nonhuman animals. The book also deals with broad agendas, in the sense of trying to apply and generate conceptual understandings of harm, victimisation, law enforcement and social regulation that are relevant for a criminological approach to environmental issues. The combination of, and dialectic between, practical example and theoretical conceptualisation is essential to mapping out the terrain occupied by green criminology.