Green Criminology - Criminology Theories

Green criminology is a rapidly expanding area of critical scholarship that examines environmental harm, ecological crime, and justice for both human and nonhuman victims of environmental destruction. Coined by Michael Lynch (1990) and developed as a formal area of inquiry within Criminology Theories through the foundational contributions of Rob White, Nigel South, Piers Beirne, Avi Brisman, Paul Stretesky, and others, green criminology extends the boundaries of the discipline beyond conventional street crime and interpersonal violence to encompass the vast terrain of harms inflicted on the natural environment — pollution, deforestation, wildlife trafficking, toxic waste dumping, climate change, species extinction, and the corporate and state activities that produce them. Unlike environmental criminology, which examines how the built environment shapes the spatial distribution of conventional crime, green criminology examines the environment itself as a victim — asking who harms the environment, how the law responds (or fails to respond), and what forms of justice are appropriate for ecological destruction. This article traces the origins and development of green criminology, examines its core concepts and theoretical frameworks, surveys its major research domains, and assesses its criticisms, contributions, and future directions.

Outline

I. Introduction

II. Origins and Development

a. Lynch’s Call and the Naming of the Field
b. White’s Typology: Brown, Green, and White
c. Consolidation: Handbooks, Journals, and Institutional Growth

III. Core Concepts

a. Environmental Harm vs. Environmental Crime
b. Ecological Justice, Environmental Justice, and Species Justice
c. The Treadmill of Production

IV. Theoretical Frameworks

a. Political Economy and Corporate Power
b. Eco-Global Criminology
c. Conservation Criminology
d. Green Cultural Criminology

V. Major Research Domains

a. Corporate Environmental Crime and Pollution
b. Wildlife Trafficking and Poaching
c. Illegal Logging and Deforestation
d. Climate Change as Crime and Harm
e. Food Crime and Agri-Crime

VI. Environmental Justice and Inequality

a. Race, Class, and the Distribution of Environmental Harm
b. Global North–South Inequalities
c. Indigenous Communities and Environmental Harm

VII. Law, Enforcement, and Regulation

a. Environmental Criminal Law and Its Limitations
b. The EPA and Regulatory Enforcement in America
c. International Environmental Law and Governance

VIII. Green Victimology

a. Human Victims of Environmental Harm
b. Nonhuman Victims: Animals, Ecosystems, and the Biosphere
c. Intergenerational Victimization

IX. Criticisms and Debates

a. Definitional Boundaries: What Is Green Crime?
b. Anthropocentrism vs. Ecocentrism
c. The Relationship to Zemiology

X. Policy Implications

a. Strengthening Environmental Regulation and Enforcement
b. Corporate Accountability and Criminal Prosecution
c. Restorative and Transformative Environmental Justice

XI. Conclusion

XII. Related Articles

XIII. References and Further Readings

Introduction

Why does criminology overwhelmingly focus on interpersonal violence and property crime while ignoring the environmental destruction that kills millions of people, poisons entire communities, drives species to extinction, and threatens the habitability of the planet? Why are corporations that contaminate drinking water, dump toxic waste in impoverished communities, and accelerate climate change rarely prosecuted as criminals, while individuals who steal a fraction of the economic value destroyed by corporate pollution fill the prisons? And what would a criminology that took environmental harm as seriously as it takes street crime look like?

Green criminology addresses these questions by insisting that environmental harm — whether legal or illegal, perpetrated by individuals or corporations, affecting humans or nonhuman species — belongs at the center of criminological inquiry. The field challenges the conventional boundaries of the discipline by arguing that the harms inflicted on the natural world are among the most serious, most widespread, and most consequential of all forms of social harm — and that criminology’s failure to address them represents a fundamental limitation of the discipline’s analytical scope and political relevance.

Green criminology within Criminology Theories has grown from a marginal concern to a thriving subdiscipline with its own handbooks, journals, professional networks, and research programs. Its growth has been driven by the escalating urgency of the global environmental crisis — climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, deforestation, freshwater depletion — and by the recognition that these crises are not natural disasters but products of human decisions, institutional arrangements, and economic systems that criminology is uniquely positioned to analyze.

Origins and Development

Lynch’s Call and the Naming of the Field

Michael Lynch (1990) is credited with coining the term “green criminology” in a short monograph that called on criminologists to direct their analytical attention to the ecological destruction produced by capitalist economies. Writing from a political-economic perspective influenced by Marxist and radical criminology, Lynch argued that the production processes of capitalism generate massive environmental harm — pollution, resource depletion, habitat destruction, species extinction — that mainstream criminology ignores because these harms fall outside the legal definition of crime or are treated as regulatory matters rather than criminal offenses.

Lynch’s call was not the first recognition of environmental harm within criminology — Edwin Sutherland’s (1949) analysis of corporate crime had included environmental violations, and critical criminologists had long argued that the crimes of the powerful cause more harm than the crimes of the poor. But Lynch’s explicit framing of environmental harm as a criminological problem — and his coining of the term “green criminology” to describe its study — provided the label and the programmatic statement around which the emerging field could organize.

The timing of Lynch’s intervention was significant. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a series of high-profile environmental disasters — the Exxon Valdez oil spill (1989), the Bhopal gas leak (1984, with ongoing litigation and activism through the 1990s), the discovery of the ozone hole, and the growing scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change — that demonstrated the scale and severity of environmental harm and the inadequacy of existing legal and regulatory frameworks for addressing it. These events created both public demand and scholarly opportunity for a criminology that took environmental harm seriously.

White’s Typology: Brown, Green, and White

Rob White’s Crimes Against Nature: Environmental Criminology and Ecological Justice (2008) provided the most systematic theoretical framework for the emerging field. White proposed a typology that distinguishes among three categories of environmental harm based on their relationship to the natural world. Brown issues involve pollution and the degradation of environments through the release of toxic substances — industrial emissions, chemical contamination, oil spills, toxic waste disposal. Green issues involve the conservation of wilderness, habitats, and biodiversity — deforestation, species extinction, habitat destruction, and the exploitation of natural resources beyond sustainable limits. White issues involve the impact of new technologies — genetic modification, nanotechnology, nuclear energy — on environmental and human health.

This tripartite framework provided a useful organizing structure for the diverse concerns of green criminology, demonstrating that the field encompasses a wide range of harms that differ in their causes, consequences, and the populations they affect. Brown issues are typically produced by industrial activity and regulated (however inadequately) by pollution control laws. Green issues arise from the exploitation and destruction of natural resources and are addressed (however inadequately) by conservation laws and international agreements. White issues involve emerging technologies whose environmental and health consequences are poorly understood and inadequately regulated.

White also articulated the three philosophical frameworks that organize green criminological analysis: anthropocentrism (which values the environment primarily for its instrumental usefulness to human beings), biocentrism (which ascribes intrinsic value to all living organisms), and ecocentrism (which ascribes intrinsic value to ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole). These frameworks have different implications for what counts as environmental harm, who counts as a victim, and what forms of justice are appropriate — debates that continue to animate the field.

Consolidation: Handbooks, Journals, and Institutional Growth

The decade following White’s (2008) foundational text saw the rapid consolidation of green criminology as a recognized subdiscipline. South and Brisman’s (2013) Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology brought together contributions from scholars across multiple countries and theoretical perspectives, demonstrating the field’s international reach and intellectual diversity. Lynch, Long, Stretesky, and Barrett’s (2017) Green Criminology: Crime, Justice, and the Environment provided a political-economy analysis that grounded the field in the structural dynamics of capitalist production and accumulation. Nurse (2015) developed the field’s engagement with wildlife crime and animal harm, while Wyatt (2013) established wildlife trafficking as a major research domain.

The field developed institutional infrastructure through dedicated journal sections, book series, conference panels, and academic programs. The International Green Criminology Working Group provided a professional network for scholars working in the area, and several universities established dedicated green criminology research centers and postgraduate programs. The growth of the field reflected not only increasing scholarly interest but also the escalating urgency of the global environmental crisis, which made the criminological analysis of environmental harm increasingly relevant to public policy and public discourse.

The institutional growth of green criminology has been accompanied by increasing engagement with practitioners — environmental regulators, wildlife law enforcement agencies, conservation organizations, and environmental justice advocates — who provide both the empirical data and the policy context that green criminological research addresses. This practitioner engagement distinguishes green criminology from some other critical perspectives that remain primarily academic in orientation.

Core Concepts

Environmental Harm vs. Environmental Crime

The foundational conceptual distinction in green criminology is between environmental crime (violations of environmental law) and environmental harm (activities that damage the environment regardless of their legal status). This distinction connects green criminology to the zemiology tradition, which argues that the legal definition of crime is an inadequate basis for studying the behaviors and conditions that cause serious harm. Many of the most environmentally destructive activities — fossil fuel combustion, industrial agriculture, deforestation within legal permits, the production and marketing of toxic chemicals — are perfectly legal, regulated by administrative rather than criminal law, and rarely prosecuted even when they violate environmental statutes.

Green criminologists argue that restricting the field to legally defined environmental crime would exclude the vast majority of environmental harm from analysis — leaving a discipline that studies illegal dumping of toxic waste but ignores the legal emission of millions of tons of greenhouse gases, that prosecutes poachers but not the industries that destroy the habitats on which endangered species depend. The social harm approach expands the analytical lens to encompass the full range of environmentally destructive activities, regardless of their legal status, and to examine the political and economic processes through which certain harms are criminalized while others are tolerated, normalized, or actively subsidized.

This expansive definition creates analytical challenges that mirror those faced by zemiology more broadly: if environmental harm encompasses everything from illegal dumping to legal fossil fuel combustion to climate change to species extinction, the concept may become so broad that it loses analytical precision. Green criminologists have addressed this challenge by developing typologies (such as White’s brown/green/white framework) that organize the diverse phenomena within the field’s scope, and by grounding the concept of harm in measurable indicators — ecological degradation, species loss, human health impacts, and the violation of environmental rights.

Ecological Justice, Environmental Justice, and Species Justice

Green criminology operates within three distinct but overlapping justice frameworks. Environmental justice — the most established of the three — addresses the unequal distribution of environmental harms across human populations, focusing on the ways in which pollution, toxic waste, and environmental degradation disproportionately affect poor communities, communities of color, and populations in the Global South. The environmental justice movement, which originated in the United States in the 1980s in response to the siting of hazardous waste facilities in predominantly Black communities, has documented the systematic concentration of environmental harm in communities that lack the political power to resist.

Ecological justice extends the analysis beyond human populations to encompass the rights and interests of ecosystems, species, and the biosphere as a whole. From an ecological justice perspective, environmental harm is wrong not only because it damages human health and well-being but because it violates the intrinsic value of the natural world — the value that ecosystems and species possess independently of their usefulness to human beings. This ecocentric perspective challenges the anthropocentrism that has traditionally characterized both the criminal law (which protects human interests) and criminology (which studies harms to human beings).

Species justice — developed by Beirne (1999, 2007) and Sollund (2019) — focuses specifically on harms to nonhuman animals, including both individual animals (through cruelty, exploitation, and killing) and species (through habitat destruction, overexploitation, and extinction). Species justice raises fundamental questions about the moral status of nonhuman beings, the adequacy of animal welfare laws, and the relationship between animal harm and human violence. Beirne’s concept of “nonspeciesist criminology” challenges the discipline to extend its analytical concern beyond the human to encompass the full range of sentient beings whose suffering is produced by human activity.

The Treadmill of Production

The treadmill of production — a concept developed by sociologist Allan Schnaiberg (1980) and applied to green criminology by Stretesky, Long, and Lynch (2014) — provides the political-economic framework that grounds much of green criminological analysis. The treadmill of production proposes that capitalist economies are locked into a self-reinforcing cycle of increasing production, resource extraction, and waste generation that produces environmental destruction as an inherent structural consequence rather than an accidental byproduct. Corporations compete to maximize profits by increasing production, which requires increasing extraction of natural resources (ecological withdrawals) and increasing disposal of waste products (ecological additions). Governments facilitate this cycle through subsidies, deregulation, and the suppression of environmental opposition.

Stretesky, Long, and Lynch (2014) applied the treadmill framework to green criminology, arguing that environmental harm is not produced by the deviant behavior of individual corporate actors but by the normal operation of the capitalist economic system. The treadmill produces environmental crime and harm structurally — through the economic pressures that incentivize cost-cutting on environmental compliance, the political dynamics that weaken environmental regulation, and the cultural ideologies that normalize environmental destruction as the price of economic progress.

The treadmill framework connects green criminology to the broader critical criminological tradition — particularly to conflict theory and Marxist criminology — by locating the causes of environmental harm in the structural dynamics of capitalist accumulation rather than in the individual decisions of corporate managers or the inadequacies of environmental law. It also provides a framework for understanding why environmental regulation is systematically weak and under-enforced: because the economic and political forces driving the treadmill of production are more powerful than the regulatory institutions designed to constrain them.

Theoretical Frameworks

Political Economy and Corporate Power

The political-economy perspective has been the dominant theoretical framework in green criminology, particularly in the work of Lynch, Stretesky, and their collaborators. This perspective locates the causes of environmental harm in the structural dynamics of capitalism — the competitive pressures that drive corporations to externalize environmental costs, the political influence that enables corporations to shape environmental regulation in their favor, and the ideological systems that legitimate environmental destruction as a necessary cost of economic growth.

Lynch and Stretesky (2003, 2014) argued that green criminology should adopt a political-economy framework because the most serious environmental harms are produced not by individual criminal actors but by the normal operations of corporate and state institutions acting within the structural logic of capitalist production. Corporations pollute not because their managers are morally deficient but because the economic system rewards the externalization of environmental costs and punishes firms that invest in environmental protection at the expense of profitability. States permit and facilitate environmental destruction because their political and economic power depends on the continued operation of the treadmill of production.

Kramer (2013) extended the political-economy analysis to climate change, arguing that the failure of the United States government to address climate change constitutes a form of state-corporate crime — a politically motivated refusal to act on scientific knowledge in order to protect the economic interests of the fossil fuel industry. This analysis illustrates the political-economy perspective’s insistence that the most serious environmental harms are produced by the interaction of corporate and state power rather than by individual criminal acts.

Eco-Global Criminology

White’s (2011) concept of eco-global criminology extends green criminological analysis to the transnational scale, examining environmental harm as a global phenomenon that transcends national boundaries and requires global analytical frameworks. Environmental harms — climate change, ocean acidification, transboundary pollution, wildlife trafficking, illegal fishing, the global trade in hazardous waste — are inherently transnational in scope: they are produced in one jurisdiction, affect populations in others, and require international cooperation for their prevention and remediation.

Eco-global criminology examines the global governance frameworks — international environmental treaties, multilateral environmental agreements, international law enforcement cooperation — that address transnational environmental harm, and it assesses their effectiveness in preventing harm and holding perpetrators accountable. White argued that existing international environmental governance is systematically inadequate: treaties are weakly enforced, compliance is voluntary, and the most powerful polluting nations frequently exempt themselves from binding commitments.

The eco-global framework also examines the unequal distribution of environmental harm across the global system. The extraction of natural resources in the Global South for consumption in the Global North, the export of hazardous waste from wealthy to poor countries, and the disproportionate impact of climate change on the world’s most vulnerable populations all represent forms of global environmental injustice that require analytical frameworks capable of operating at the transnational scale.

Conservation Criminology

Conservation criminology — developed by Gibbs, Gore, McGarrell, and Rivers (2010) — applies criminological theory and methods to the study of crimes against biodiversity and ecosystems. The field examines the illegal activities that threaten wildlife and wild spaces — poaching, wildlife trafficking, illegal logging, illegal fishing, and the destruction of protected habitats — and seeks to develop evidence-based strategies for preventing these crimes and protecting the species and ecosystems they threaten.

Conservation criminology distinguishes itself from other branches of green criminology by its focus on conservation outcomes and its engagement with the natural sciences — ecology, wildlife biology, conservation biology — that provide the scientific understanding of the species and ecosystems that conservation criminology seeks to protect. The field has developed productive collaborations with conservation organizations, wildlife management agencies, and international bodies such as CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) and INTERPOL‘s Environmental Security programme.

Lemieux and Clarke (2009) applied situational crime prevention principles to wildlife crime, demonstrating that the same opportunity-reduction logic that prevents burglary can be applied to preventing poaching and wildlife trafficking. Their analysis of the international ivory trade ban illustrated how changes in the legal and economic environment — specifically, the creation of legal ivory stockpiles and the periodic authorization of legal ivory sales — affected poaching rates in Africa. This application of environmental criminology (crime and place) frameworks to green criminology (environmental harm) concerns illustrates the productive intersection between the two fields.

Green Cultural Criminology

Brisman and South (2013, 2014) developed green cultural criminology as a framework for examining the cultural dimensions of environmental harm — the meanings, representations, emotions, and consumer practices that shape how societies produce, experience, and respond to environmental destruction. Green cultural criminology examines how advertising, media, and consumer culture promote environmentally destructive consumption patterns; how environmental activists construct counter-narratives that challenge dominant ideologies of growth and consumption; and how communities affected by environmental harm experience, interpret, and resist their victimization.

The cultural dimension is important because environmental harm is not merely a physical or economic phenomenon — it is also a cultural one, shaped by the meanings that societies attach to nature, consumption, progress, and risk. The cultural normalization of environmentally destructive practices — the framing of fossil fuel consumption as essential to economic prosperity, the marketing of disposable consumer products as expressions of personal freedom, the portrayal of environmental regulation as a threat to jobs and liberty — creates the ideological conditions under which environmental harm is produced and tolerated.

Green cultural criminology has examined how media representations of environmental disasters (oil spills, chemical explosions, nuclear accidents) shape public perceptions of environmental risk and influence policy responses. It has also examined the cultural practices of environmental resistance — from direct action protests to artistic representations of ecological destruction to the everyday practices of sustainable living — as forms of counter-hegemonic cultural production that challenge the ideological foundations of the treadmill of production.

Major Research Domains

Corporate Environmental Crime and Pollution

Corporate environmental crime — the violation of environmental laws by corporations in the course of their economic activities — is the most extensively studied topic in green criminology. Research has documented the enormous scale of corporate environmental violations, the inadequacy of enforcement and sanctions, and the structural conditions that make environmental offending a normal feature of corporate behavior rather than an aberration.

Tombs and Whyte (2015) argued that corporate environmental crime must be understood within the context of the structural imperatives of capitalist production: corporations externalize environmental costs because the competitive logic of the market rewards those that minimize their production costs and penalizes those that invest in environmental compliance beyond the legally required minimum. Environmental regulation is systematically weak because the corporations it seeks to regulate wield disproportionate political influence over the legislative and regulatory processes that determine the stringency of environmental standards and the vigor of their enforcement.

Long, Stretesky, Lynch, and Fenwick (2012) examined environmental crime in the American coal industry, documenting the extensive pattern of safety and environmental violations that characterize the industry and the structural conditions — the treadmill of production, the political power of the coal lobby, the revolving door between industry and regulatory agencies — that make these violations endemic. Their analysis illustrated the political-economy perspective’s argument that corporate environmental crime is a structural feature of capitalist production rather than the product of individual corporate malfeasance.

Related discussions of these dynamics appear in Corporate Environmental Crime, Chemical Industry Crime in America, Oil and Gas Industry Crime in America, and Nuclear Industry Crime and Regulation.

Wildlife Trafficking and Poaching

Wildlife trafficking — the illegal trade in wild animals, plants, and their derivatives — has emerged as one of the most significant research domains in green criminology. Estimated at $23 billion annually by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC, 2024), wildlife trafficking ranks among the most lucrative forms of transnational organized crime, alongside drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and human trafficking. The trade threatens biodiversity, drives species toward extinction, undermines ecosystem functioning, and generates public health risks through the introduction of zoonotic diseases.

Wyatt (2013) provided one of the earliest systematic criminological analyses of wildlife trafficking, examining the trade in endangered species and the inadequacy of law enforcement responses. She argued that wildlife trafficking has been treated as a low-priority offense by criminal justice systems — receiving minimal investigative resources, light sentences, and limited international cooperation — despite its enormous ecological consequences and its connections to organized crime, corruption, and violence.

Nurse (2015) extended the analysis to the broader category of animal harm, arguing that crimes against animals — including poaching, trafficking, animal cruelty, and the exploitation of animals in entertainment and agriculture — should be understood as forms of environmental harm that reflect and reinforce broader patterns of human domination over the nonhuman world. His work connects green criminology to the animal rights movement and to the species justice framework developed by Beirne and Sollund.

This subject is explored in greater depth in Wildlife Trafficking and Poaching and Illegal Fishing and Marine Crime.

Illegal Logging and Deforestation

Illegal logging — the harvesting of timber in violation of national laws or international agreements — accounts for an estimated 15–30 percent of all timber traded globally and generates between $50 and $150 billion annually, according to INTERPOL and UNEP estimates. Illegal logging drives deforestation, destroys biodiversity, undermines Indigenous land rights, generates greenhouse gas emissions, and deprives governments of billions of dollars in tax revenue.

Green criminologists have examined illegal logging as a case study of the structural conditions that produce environmental crime: the global demand for cheap timber, the weakness of forest governance in many producer countries, the corruption that enables illegal operators to evade enforcement, and the complexity of global supply chains that obscure the origins of illegally harvested timber. Situational crime prevention approaches have been applied to illegal logging, with interventions including satellite monitoring of forest cover, supply chain certification (such as the Forest Stewardship Council), and trade restrictions on timber from high-risk sources.

The connection between illegal logging and Indigenous rights illustrates the environmental justice dimension of green criminology. Deforestation disproportionately affects Indigenous communities, whose livelihoods, cultures, and identities are tied to the forests that illegal logging destroys. Green criminological research has documented the violence — including the assassination of environmental defenders — that accompanies illegal logging in many countries, highlighting the human costs of environmental crime.

This topic is addressed at length in Illegal Logging and Deforestation and Land Grabbing and Environmental Crime.

Climate Change as Crime and Harm

The framing of climate change as a criminological concern has been one of the most provocative and theoretically ambitious contributions of green criminology. Agnew (2012) argued that climate change produces many of the conditions that criminological research has identified as causes of crime — including increased strain, reduced social control, weakened social bonds, and expanded criminal opportunity — and that the resulting increase in crime should be understood as one of the many harms produced by the activities (primarily fossil fuel combustion) that drive climate change.

Kramer (2013) went further, arguing that the political and corporate actors whose decisions perpetuate fossil fuel dependence despite scientific knowledge of its consequences should be understood as engaged in state-corporate crime — the knowing production of massive, preventable harm through the interaction of corporate economic interests and government political decisions. White and Kramer (2015) developed this analysis into a framework for understanding climate change as a form of “ecocide” — the deliberate or negligent destruction of ecosystems on a scale that threatens the habitability of the planet.

The criminological framing of climate change raises difficult questions about causation, responsibility, and the appropriate scope of criminological analysis. Critics argue that climate change is too diffuse, too structurally embedded, and too globally distributed to be meaningfully analyzed as crime — that the concept of crime loses its analytical power when extended to encompass the aggregate consequences of billions of individual decisions made within structural contexts that no single actor controls. Green criminologists respond that the failure to hold the most powerful contributors to climate change accountable — fossil fuel corporations, petrostates, and the political actors who enable them — is itself a criminological concern, and that the discipline’s silence on the most consequential environmental harm of the twenty-first century represents a failure of scholarly responsibility.

These themes are developed further in Climate Change and Green Criminology and Climate Change, Disaster, and Crime.

Food Crime and Agri-Crime

The application of green criminology to the food system has opened a new research domain examining the environmental, health, and animal welfare harms produced by industrial agriculture and the global food supply chain. Gray and Hinch (2018) developed the concept of agri-crime to describe the illegal and harmful activities associated with agricultural production — including the contamination of food products, the fraudulent labeling of food origins and contents, the illegal use of pesticides and antibiotics, and the exploitation of agricultural workers.

The food crime perspective connects green criminology to public health, consumer protection, and animal welfare concerns. Industrial agriculture produces environmental harm through the emission of greenhouse gases (livestock production is responsible for approximately 14.5 percent of global emissions), the pollution of waterways through agricultural runoff, the destruction of biodiversity through monoculture farming, and the overuse of antibiotics that promotes antimicrobial resistance. These harms are largely legal, regulated by agricultural and food safety agencies rather than the criminal justice system, and rarely prosecuted as criminal offenses.

The concept of food crime also encompasses food fraud — the deliberate mislabeling, adulteration, or substitution of food products for economic gain. The 2013 horsemeat scandal in Europe, in which horsemeat was fraudulently sold as beef in processed food products across multiple countries, illustrated the scale and complexity of food fraud in globalized supply chains and prompted increased attention to food crime as a criminological concern.

This domain is explored in Agricultural Crime and Food Safety.

Table 1. Major Research Domains in Green Criminology

Domain	Scale of Harm	Key Scholars	Policy Framework
Corporate pollution	Millions of premature deaths annually from air pollution alone (WHO)	Lynch & Stretesky (2014); Tombs & Whyte (2015)	Environmental regulation; criminal prosecution; corporate liability
Wildlife trafficking	$23 billion annually; major driver of species extinction	Wyatt (2013); Nurse (2015); Lemieux & Clarke (2009)	CITES; INTERPOL Environmental Security; SCP
Illegal logging	15–30% of global timber trade; deforestation driver	INTERPOL/UNEP estimates	Satellite monitoring; supply chain certification; trade restrictions
Climate change	1.1°C warming; escalating extreme events; displacement	Agnew (2012); Kramer (2013); White & Kramer (2015)	Paris Agreement; fossil fuel regulation; ecocide law
Food crime	Public health harm; animal welfare; consumer fraud	Gray & Hinch (2018)	Food safety regulation; supply chain transparency

Environmental Justice and Inequality

Race, Class, and the Distribution of Environmental Harm

The environmental justice literature has documented the systematic concentration of environmental harms — pollution, toxic waste, industrial facilities, contaminated water — in communities that are poor, predominantly nonwhite, and politically marginalized. Bullard (1990), in the foundational study Dumping in Dixie, demonstrated that hazardous waste facilities in the American South were disproportionately sited in Black communities — not because of the communities’ economic characteristics alone but because of the intersection of racial discrimination and political powerlessness that made these communities unable to resist the imposition of environmental burdens.

The Flint, Michigan, water crisis (2014–present) provided a vivid contemporary illustration of environmental injustice. The decision to switch the city’s water supply from treated Lake Huron water to inadequately treated Flint River water — a cost-cutting measure imposed on a predominantly Black, economically disadvantaged city by state-appointed emergency managers — exposed approximately 100,000 residents to dangerous levels of lead contamination. The crisis illustrated the intersection of race, class, political disenfranchisement, and institutional neglect that produces environmental injustice — and the inadequacy of the criminal justice response (which resulted in limited individual prosecutions while leaving the structural conditions that produced the crisis intact).

Green criminologists have argued that environmental injustice should be understood as a form of structural violence — harm produced not by the intentional acts of identifiable perpetrators but by institutional arrangements and policy decisions that systematically concentrate environmental burdens on the most vulnerable populations. The distributional pattern of environmental harm mirrors the distributional pattern of criminal justice harm: both fall disproportionately on the poor and on racial minorities, and both are produced by structural conditions that mainstream criminology has been slow to analyze.

This theme is developed at length in Environmental Justice in America and Race, Class, and Environmental Crime.

Global North–South Inequalities

Environmental injustice operates not only within nations but between them. The global political economy systematically concentrates environmental harm in the Global South — through the extraction of natural resources for consumption in the Global North, the export of hazardous waste from wealthy to poor countries, the siting of polluting industries in nations with weak environmental regulation, and the disproportionate impact of climate change on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations.

The international trade in electronic waste (e-waste) illustrates this dynamic. Discarded electronics from the United States and Europe are exported — often illegally — to countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, and China, where they are dismantled by unprotected workers who are exposed to toxic metals and chemicals. The Basel Convention (1989) was intended to regulate the transboundary movement of hazardous waste, but compliance and enforcement remain weak, and the trade in e-waste continues to transfer environmental harm from wealthy to poor countries.

Climate change represents the most consequential manifestation of global environmental injustice. The nations that have contributed least to greenhouse gas emissions — predominantly poor, tropical countries in Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands — are the nations most severely affected by climate change, through rising sea levels, extreme weather events, agricultural disruption, and forced displacement. The disproportionate burden of climate change on the world’s poorest populations represents a form of global structural violence that green criminology is uniquely positioned to analyze.

This dynamic is examined further in International Environmental Crime and Toxic Waste and Illegal Dumping.

Indigenous Communities and Environmental Harm

Indigenous communities face distinctive and disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. The extraction of natural resources — mining, drilling, logging, dam construction — frequently occurs on or near Indigenous lands, producing environmental degradation that threatens the physical health, cultural practices, and spiritual connections to the land that constitute Indigenous identity and well-being. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (2016–2017) illustrated the intersection of Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and the political economy of fossil fuel extraction.

Green criminologists have examined the dispossession and environmental degradation of Indigenous lands as forms of colonial violence — harm produced through the historical and ongoing processes of colonization, territorial appropriation, and the exploitation of Indigenous resources for the benefit of settler economies. This analysis connects green criminology to the decolonial tradition and to the growing body of scholarship on the relationship between colonialism, environmental destruction, and Indigenous rights.

The recognition of Indigenous environmental knowledge — traditional ecological knowledge developed over generations of close relationship with specific ecosystems — represents both a scholarly contribution and a practical resource for environmental protection. Indigenous communities possess detailed knowledge of the ecosystems they inhabit — knowledge that can inform conservation strategies, sustainable resource management, and the monitoring of environmental change. Green criminology supports the incorporation of Indigenous perspectives and Indigenous rights into environmental governance frameworks.

This subject receives dedicated treatment in Green Criminology and Indigenous Communities.

Law, Enforcement, and Regulation

Environmental Criminal Law and Its Limitations

Environmental criminal law — the body of statutes that define environmental violations as criminal offenses — provides the legal framework for the prosecution of environmental crime. In the United States, the principal environmental criminal statutes include the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), CERCLA (Superfund), and the Endangered Species Act. These statutes authorize criminal penalties — including imprisonment and substantial fines — for knowing violations of environmental standards.

Despite the availability of criminal sanctions, environmental criminal prosecution remains rare relative to the scale of environmental violation. The vast majority of environmental violations are addressed through administrative enforcement (warning letters, compliance orders, administrative penalties) or civil litigation rather than criminal prosecution. Criminal prosecution is typically reserved for the most egregious violations — those involving knowing and willful conduct, significant environmental damage, and demonstrable harm to public health.

Green criminologists have argued that the rarity of criminal prosecution reflects the structural power imbalances that characterize environmental governance: corporations possess the legal resources, political influence, and regulatory access to resist criminal prosecution, while regulatory agencies are chronically underfunded, politically constrained, and structurally oriented toward compliance rather than punishment. The result is a system in which environmental crime is treated more leniently than street crime — despite causing far greater aggregate harm.

This subject is treated comprehensively in Environmental Law and Criminal Justice.

The EPA and Regulatory Enforcement in America

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), established in 1970, is the primary federal agency responsible for enforcing environmental law in the United States. The EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division (EPA-CID) investigates environmental crimes and refers cases to the Department of Justice for prosecution. In addition, state environmental agencies and state attorneys general conduct their own enforcement actions under both federal and state law.

EPA criminal enforcement has declined significantly in recent decades. The number of criminal cases initiated, defendants charged, and prison sentences imposed have all fallen from their peaks in the late 1990s and 2000s, reflecting reduced staffing, budget constraints, and shifting political priorities. Green criminologists have documented this enforcement decline and argued that it reflects the structural dynamics of the treadmill of production: as corporate political influence over environmental policy increases, regulatory enforcement weakens, and the effective impunity of corporate environmental offenders grows.

The tension between regulatory and criminal approaches to environmental enforcement reflects a broader debate within green criminology about the appropriate response to environmental harm. Some scholars advocate for stronger criminal prosecution of corporate environmental offenders, arguing that the deterrent effect of criminal sanctions is necessary to change corporate behavior. Others argue that the criminal justice system is poorly suited to addressing structural environmental harm and that regulatory, civil, and community-based approaches are more effective and more equitable.

This subject is examined in depth in EPA Criminal Enforcement in America and Environmental Crime Investigation and Enforcement.

International Environmental Law and Governance

International environmental law provides the governance framework for addressing transnational environmental harm. Key instruments include the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its Paris Agreement (2015), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), CITES, the Basel Convention on hazardous waste, and the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances. These instruments establish international standards, reporting obligations, and (in some cases) enforcement mechanisms for addressing environmental harm across national boundaries.

The effectiveness of international environmental governance has been mixed. The Montreal Protocol is widely regarded as one of the most successful international environmental agreements, having achieved substantial reductions in the production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances. The Paris Agreement, by contrast, relies on nationally determined contributions that are voluntary, inadequately ambitious, and weakly enforced — a governance structure that green criminologists regard as insufficient to address the scale and urgency of the climate crisis.

The proposal to establish “ecocide” as an international crime — prosecutable by the International Criminal Court alongside genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity — represents the most ambitious application of green criminological thinking to international law. An independent expert panel convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation proposed a legal definition of ecocide in 2021, and several nations have expressed support for including ecocide in the Rome Statute. If adopted, ecocide law would provide the international legal framework for holding states and corporations criminally accountable for the most severe forms of environmental destruction.

Green Victimology

Human Victims of Environmental Harm

Green victimology — the study of the victims of environmental crime and harm — examines how environmental degradation affects human health, well-being, and life chances. The World Health Organization estimates that environmental risk factors — including air pollution, water contamination, chemical exposure, and climate-related events — contribute to approximately 12.6 million deaths annually, representing nearly one-quarter of all global deaths. These deaths are not randomly distributed but are concentrated among the poorest and most marginalized populations — those with the least political power to resist the imposition of environmental burdens and the fewest resources to protect themselves from their effects.

Hall (2013) developed the concept of green victimization to describe the process through which individuals and communities are harmed by environmental crime and destruction. Green victimization differs from conventional criminal victimization in several respects: the harm is often diffuse and delayed rather than immediate and concentrated; the causal chain between the perpetrator’s action and the victim’s harm may be long and complex; the victim may not be aware that they have been victimized (as when communities are unknowingly exposed to toxic contamination); and the perpetrator may be a corporation or a state rather than an individual.

The temporal dimension of environmental victimization is particularly important. The health effects of toxic exposure may not manifest for years or decades after the initial exposure — creating a gap between the harmful act and its consequences that complicates both criminal prosecution (which requires proof of causation) and victim recognition (which requires awareness of harm). Communities exposed to environmental contamination may experience elevated cancer rates, reproductive problems, and developmental disorders decades after the contamination occurred — long after the responsible corporation has moved on and the regulatory evidence has been lost or destroyed.

Nonhuman Victims: Animals, Ecosystems, and the Biosphere

The extension of victimhood to nonhuman animals, ecosystems, and the biosphere represents one of the most theoretically ambitious and contested contributions of green criminology. Beirne (1999, 2007) argued for a “nonspeciesist criminology” that extends the discipline’s moral concern beyond the human to encompass all sentient beings capable of suffering. Sollund (2019) developed the concept of species justice to examine the harms inflicted on nonhuman species through poaching, trafficking, habitat destruction, industrial agriculture, and the global extinction crisis.

The inclusion of nonhuman victims challenges the anthropocentrism that has characterized both the criminal law and criminological scholarship. If nonhuman animals and ecosystems are recognized as victims of environmental harm, then the scope of criminological concern expands dramatically — encompassing not only the harms that environmental destruction inflicts on human populations but also the suffering and extinction it inflicts on the millions of nonhuman species with which humans share the planet.

The recognition of nonhuman victims also raises questions about representation and voice. Nonhuman victims cannot testify, advocate for their interests, or participate in justice processes. Green criminologists have argued that the discipline has a responsibility to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves — to document the harms inflicted on nonhuman beings and to advocate for legal and institutional frameworks that protect their interests. This advocacy function connects green criminology to the animal rights movement, the conservation movement, and the growing international recognition of the rights of nature.

Intergenerational Victimization

Environmental harm frequently produces intergenerational effects — consequences that extend beyond the immediate victims to affect future generations. Climate change, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and the depletion of nonrenewable resources all impose costs on future populations who had no voice in the decisions that produced them. The concept of intergenerational justice — the obligation of present generations to preserve the environmental conditions necessary for the well-being of future generations — has become an increasingly important theme in green criminological scholarship.

The intergenerational dimension connects green criminology to the broader philosophical literature on justice between generations and to the concept of sustainable development — development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Green criminologists have argued that activities that destroy environmental assets for short-term economic gain — deforestation, fossil fuel extraction, overfishing, groundwater depletion — constitute a form of intergenerational theft, in which present generations consume the ecological capital on which future generations depend.

The legal recognition of intergenerational environmental rights is advancing in some jurisdictions. Courts in several countries have recognized the standing of future generations to challenge environmental decisions that threaten their interests, and constitutional provisions in some nations explicitly protect the environmental rights of future generations. These legal developments reflect the growing recognition that environmental harm is not confined to the present but extends across generations — a recognition that green criminology has helped to articulate and defend.

Table 2. Green Criminology: Theoretical Frameworks Compared

Framework	Key Scholars	Analytical Focus	Justice Perspective
Political economy	Lynch & Stretesky (2014); Stretesky et al. (2014)	Treadmill of production; corporate power; capitalist structure	Structural transformation of economic system
Eco-global criminology	White (2011)	Transnational harm; global governance; North-South inequality	International law reform; global environmental governance
Conservation criminology	Gibbs et al. (2010)	Wildlife crime; biodiversity protection; situational prevention	Evidence-based conservation; law enforcement partnerships
Green cultural criminology	Brisman & South (2013, 2014)	Consumer culture; media; meanings of environmental harm	Counter-hegemonic cultural production; activism
Green victimology	Hall (2013); Beirne (2007); Sollund (2019)	Human and nonhuman victims; intergenerational harm	Environmental, ecological, and species justice

Criticisms and Debates

Definitional Boundaries: What Is Green Crime?

The most persistent criticism of green criminology concerns the breadth and ambiguity of its central concept. If green criminology studies environmental harm rather than environmental crime, its scope potentially encompasses every human activity that affects the natural world — from industrial pollution to personal consumption to the routine operations of the global food system. Critics argue that this breadth makes the field analytically unwieldy and risks diluting the concept of crime to the point of meaninglessness.

Green criminologists have responded that the breadth of the concept is necessary because the legal definition of environmental crime excludes the vast majority of environmental harm — and that the field’s task is precisely to make visible the harms that the legal system renders invisible. The tension between breadth and precision is real, however, and the field continues to debate where the boundaries of “green crime” should be drawn — whether the concept should encompass legal but harmful activities (fossil fuel combustion, industrial agriculture), whether it should extend to harms against nonhuman species and ecosystems, and whether it should include the intergenerational consequences of present-day environmental decisions.

The definitional debate mirrors the broader debate in zemiology about the concept of social harm, and the resolution is likely to be similar: the field will continue to operate with a broad concept of environmental harm while developing typologies and analytical frameworks that organize the diverse phenomena within its scope and provide criteria for distinguishing the most serious harms from the most trivial.

Anthropocentrism vs. Ecocentrism

The tension between anthropocentric and ecocentric perspectives has been one of the most productive debates within green criminology. Anthropocentric approaches value the environment primarily for its instrumental usefulness to human beings and define environmental harm in terms of its effects on human health, well-being, and economic interests. Ecocentric approaches ascribe intrinsic value to ecosystems and species and define environmental harm as any activity that degrades ecological integrity regardless of its effects on human populations.

The anthropocentric perspective has the advantage of aligning with the existing legal and institutional frameworks through which environmental harm is regulated — frameworks that are organized around the protection of human health and human property rather than the protection of the environment for its own sake. The ecocentric perspective has the advantage of capturing the full range of environmental harm — including harms to species and ecosystems that have no direct effect on human well-being — but it raises difficult philosophical questions about the moral status of nonhuman entities and the practical challenges of extending legal protection to ecosystems and species.

Most green criminologists adopt a position between these poles — recognizing the intrinsic value of the nonhuman world while acknowledging that the most politically and practically effective arguments for environmental protection are those that demonstrate the consequences of environmental harm for human health, economic well-being, and social justice. This pragmatic approach allows the field to engage with existing legal and policy frameworks while maintaining its critical commitment to the broader vision of ecological justice.

The Relationship to Zemiology

The relationship between green criminology and zemiology has been one of mutual influence and occasional tension. Both fields challenge the adequacy of the legal definition of crime as the central concept of criminological inquiry, and both argue that the most serious harms are produced by corporate and state actors whose harmful activities are largely legal. Green criminology can be understood as a specific application of the zemiological framework to environmental harm — an application that demonstrates the power of the social harm approach in a domain where the gap between legal definitions of crime and the actual distribution of harm is particularly stark.

However, some green criminologists have been reluctant to adopt the zemiological label, preferring to maintain their identity within criminology rather than positioning themselves outside it. Copson’s (2018) reconciling approach — maintaining dialogue between criminological and zemiological perspectives rather than polarizing them into mutually exclusive camps — provides a framework for navigating this relationship that many green criminologists have found productive.

The practical relationship between the two fields is close: many scholars contribute to both, and the theoretical insights of each inform the other. Zemiology provides the broader conceptual framework (the social harm approach) within which green criminological analysis operates, while green criminology provides the empirical substance (the documentation and analysis of specific environmental harms) that the zemiological framework requires.

Policy Implications

Strengthening Environmental Regulation and Enforcement

The most immediate policy implication of green criminology is the need to strengthen environmental regulation and its enforcement. This includes increasing the staffing and budgets of environmental enforcement agencies, expanding criminal prosecution of serious environmental violations, increasing the penalties for environmental crime to levels that provide genuine deterrence for corporate offenders, and closing the regulatory loopholes that allow corporations to externalize environmental costs with impunity.

Green criminologists have also advocated for the adoption of strict liability provisions for environmental crimes — provisions that would allow criminal prosecution without the requirement of proving mens rea (criminal intent), which is the principal obstacle to prosecuting corporate environmental offenses. The difficulty of proving that corporate managers knew about or intended environmental violations — particularly in large organizations where decision-making is diffuse and responsibility is difficult to assign — is one of the primary reasons that environmental criminal prosecution is so rare.

The strengthening of international environmental enforcement — through enhanced cooperation among national enforcement agencies, the expansion of INTERPOL’s environmental security capabilities, and the development of binding international environmental standards with effective enforcement mechanisms — is also a priority. Wildlife trafficking, illegal logging, illegal fishing, and the transboundary movement of hazardous waste all require international cooperation for effective enforcement, and the current level of cooperation is inadequate to address the scale of the problem.

Corporate Accountability and Criminal Prosecution

Green criminology supports the expansion of corporate criminal liability for environmental harm — including the prosecution of individual corporate executives who authorize, direct, or tolerate environmental violations. The “responsible corporate officer” doctrine — which holds senior executives criminally liable for regulatory violations committed by their organizations — provides a legal basis for individual prosecution, but it has been applied sparingly in environmental cases.

The development of corporate deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) and consent decrees has been criticized by green criminologists as an inadequate substitute for criminal prosecution. DPAs allow corporations to avoid criminal conviction by paying fines, implementing compliance programs, and submitting to monitoring — but they rarely result in meaningful behavioral change and they do not carry the stigma and deterrent effect of criminal conviction. Green criminologists argue that meaningful corporate accountability requires the willingness to prosecute and convict — not merely to negotiate — and that the current pattern of enforcement reflects the structural power imbalances that enable corporate environmental offending.

The proposal to establish ecocide as an international crime — discussed above — represents the most ambitious policy implication of green criminology. If ecocide were recognized as a crime under international law, it would provide a legal framework for holding the most powerful environmental destroyers — fossil fuel corporations, mining companies, industrial agriculture conglomerates, and the states that enable them — criminally accountable for the most severe forms of environmental destruction.

Restorative and Transformative Environmental Justice

Green criminology has also contributed to the development of restorative and transformative approaches to environmental justice. Restorative environmental justice processes — including community-based mediation between polluters and affected communities, environmental restitution programs, and collaborative monitoring arrangements — seek to repair the harm caused by environmental crime and to rebuild the relationships between communities and the natural environments on which they depend.

Transformative environmental justice goes further, addressing not only the immediate harm but the structural conditions — corporate power, regulatory capture, political disenfranchisement — that produced it. Transformative approaches seek to change the power relations, institutional arrangements, and economic structures that generate environmental harm — a goal that connects green criminology to the broader critical tradition and to the social movements working for environmental justice, climate action, and ecological sustainability.

The Indigenous concept of Earth jurisprudence — the legal recognition of the rights of nature — represents one of the most innovative contributions to transformative environmental justice. Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2010) have incorporated the rights of nature into their constitutions, and courts in New Zealand, India, and Colombia have recognized the legal personhood of rivers and ecosystems. These developments reflect a paradigm shift in environmental governance — from the treatment of nature as property to be exploited to the recognition of nature as a legal subject with rights that must be protected.

These policy directions are examined in detail in Green Criminology and Public Policy.

Conclusion

Green criminology has established itself as one of the most vital, theoretically ambitious, and politically relevant areas of contemporary criminological scholarship. By directing the discipline’s analytical attention to the environmental destruction that conventional criminology ignores — corporate pollution, wildlife trafficking, climate change, deforestation, toxic waste, species extinction — the field has exposed a vast terrain of harm that is among the most consequential of all forms of social harm and yet remains among the least studied, least prosecuted, and least punished.

The field’s theoretical contributions are substantial: the distinction between environmental crime and environmental harm, the treadmill of production framework, the tripartite justice model (environmental, ecological, species), the eco-global perspective on transnational environmental governance, and the development of green victimology and green cultural criminology have all enriched criminological thought and expanded the boundaries of the discipline. Its practical contributions are equally significant: the application of situational crime prevention to wildlife crime, the documentation of corporate environmental offending, the analysis of environmental justice inequalities, and the advocacy for ecocide law have all demonstrated that green criminological scholarship can inform and improve the policy frameworks through which environmental harm is addressed.

The future of green criminology lies in the continued expansion of its empirical evidence base, the refinement of its theoretical frameworks, the strengthening of its engagement with the natural sciences and with environmental practitioners, and the translation of its findings into legal and policy reforms that protect both human communities and the nonhuman world from the environmental destruction that threatens them both. In an era of climate emergency, biodiversity crisis, and accelerating ecological degradation, the questions that green criminology asks — who harms the environment, why the law fails to prevent it, and what justice requires — are among the most urgent questions in contemporary social science.

Green criminology’s growing body of applied scholarship is explored in depth across the following articles, organized by subject area.

Foundations and Enforcement

Corporate and Industrial Crime

Environmental Justice and Communities

Wildlife, Land, and Natural Resources

Climate and Disaster

Global Governance and Policy

References and Further Readings

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Beirne, P. (1999). For a nonspeciesist criminology: Animal abuse as an object of study. Criminology, 37(1), 117–148. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999.tb00481.x
Beirne, P. (2007). Animal rights, animal abuse, and green criminology. In P. Beirne & N. South (Eds.), Issues in green criminology: Confronting harms against environments, humanity and other animals (pp. 55–83). Willan.
Beirne, P., & South, N. (Eds.). (2007). Issues in green criminology: Confronting harms against environments, humanity and other animals. Willan.
Brisman, A., & South, N. (2013). A green-cultural criminology: An exploratory outline. Crime, Media, Culture, 9(2), 115–135. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659012467026
Brisman, A., & South, N. (2014). Green cultural criminology: Constructions of environmental harm, consumerism, and resistance to ecocide. Routledge.
Bullard, R. D. (1990). Dumping in Dixie: Race, class, and environmental quality. Westview Press.
Copson, L. (2018). Beyond ‘criminology vs. zemiology’: Reconciling crime with social harm. In A. Boukli & J. Kotzé (Eds.), Zemiology: Reconnecting crime and social harm (pp. 33–56). Palgrave Macmillan.
Gibbs, C., Gore, M. L., McGarrell, E. F., & Rivers, L. (2010). Introducing conservation criminology: Towards interdisciplinary scholarship on environmental crimes and risks. British Journal of Criminology, 50(1), 124–144. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azp045
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