Green Criminology and Indigenous Communities

Green criminology and indigenous communities intersect through sustained scholarly attention to how extractive industry, land dispossession, and environmental degradation disproportionately affect indigenous peoples worldwide, while indigenous environmental knowledge and resistance movements have simultaneously shaped green criminology’s own theoretical development. Indigenous communities frequently occupy or maintain traditional relationships with land possessing significant ecological value, positioning them at the center of conflicts over resource extraction, conservation policy, and environmental protection in ways that raise distinctive questions regarding land rights, self-determination, and environmental justice. The discussion that follows examines indigenous land rights and environmental governance, extractive industry impacts on indigenous communities, indigenous environmental knowledge and resistance movements, and the theoretical accounts connecting settler colonialism to green criminology’s broader analytical framework.

Introduction

Indigenous peoples worldwide maintain traditional and often legally unrecognized relationships with land that frequently overlaps with territory targeted for resource extraction, conservation designation, or agricultural conversion, creating persistent conflict between indigenous land use and external economic or environmental development priorities. Kyle Whyte’s scholarship on indigenous climate change studies argues that indigenous communities’ relationship to environmental harm cannot be adequately understood through conventional environmental justice frameworks alone, since many indigenous communities have already experienced environmental and social disruption comparable to contemporary climate change impacts through historical processes of colonization and forced displacement (Whyte, 2017).

Green criminology’s engagement with indigenous communities has developed along two related but distinct tracks, examining both the disproportionate environmental harm indigenous communities experience as victims of extractive industry and land dispossession, and the distinctive contributions indigenous environmental knowledge and resistance movements have made to broader environmental protection efforts. This dual focus positions indigenous communities within green criminology scholarship simultaneously as a population experiencing documented environmental victimization and as a source of alternative environmental governance models that some scholars argue offer valuable correctives to conventional Western environmental regulatory approaches.

Indigenous Land Rights and Environmental Governance

Formal legal recognition of indigenous land rights varies enormously across national jurisdictions, ranging from comparatively strong recognition in some nations to near-total absence of formal recognition in others, a variation that directly shapes indigenous communities’ capacity to resist externally imposed land use decisions affecting territory they traditionally occupy or use. Rob White’s transnational environmental crime scholarship situates this recognition gap within a broader pattern in which property law systems developed within colonial governance traditions frequently failed to recognize land tenure arrangements organized according to indigenous customary principles, a gap that continues to shape land rights disputes in many nations today (White, 2011).

Winona LaDuke’s influential account of indigenous struggles for land and life documents how this recognition gap has historically enabled resource extraction and land conversion on indigenous territory with minimal formal legal obstacle, even in cases where indigenous communities maintained continuous traditional use of the affected land across multiple generations preceding the disputed extraction or development activity (LaDuke, 1999). This historical pattern continues to inform contemporary indigenous land rights advocacy, which frequently must simultaneously contest specific extraction or development proposals while also pursuing broader legal recognition of the underlying land rights claims those proposals implicate.

Environmental governance arrangements increasingly incorporate at least nominal indigenous consultation requirements, reflecting growing international recognition of indigenous rights through instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, though the practical effectiveness of these consultation requirements varies considerably depending on whether they carry binding legal force or function as advisory processes that development proponents can proceed past even absent indigenous consent.

Piers Beirne and Nigel South’s edited collection on green criminology situates indigenous land rights disputes within the field’s broader foundational concern with how legal categories themselves can facilitate rather than prevent environmental harm, treating the formal legal recognition gap facing many indigenous communities as illustrative of a pattern in which law’s own structure, rather than any failure of law enforcement specifically, enables continued environmental and social harm (Beirne & South, 2007).

Extractive Industry Impacts on Indigenous Communities

Mining, oil and gas extraction, and large-scale logging operations on or near indigenous territory have generated extensively documented environmental and social harm, including water contamination affecting traditional subsistence practices, habitat destruction affecting culturally significant species, and social disruption associated with the influx of outside workers and infrastructure development into previously remote indigenous territories. David Rodríguez Goyes and Nigel South’s analysis of green criminology’s engagement with Latin American environmental harm documents how extractive industry expansion in the region has disproportionately targeted indigenous territories, exploiting the same land tenure recognition gaps examined in the previous section to proceed with minimal formal legal obstacle despite indigenous opposition (Goyes & South, 2016).

Contamination from extractive activity carries particular significance for indigenous communities maintaining subsistence relationships with local land and water resources, since contamination of traditional hunting, fishing, or gathering grounds can disrupt not only immediate nutritional needs but also cultural practices tied to specific traditional resource use patterns that communities may have maintained across many generations. This dimension of harm extends beyond the conventional environmental damage metrics typically used to assess extractive industry impact, encompassing cultural and spiritual harm that standard environmental impact assessment frameworks often inadequately capture.

Conservation-driven displacement, distinct from extractive industry displacement but sharing similar underlying dynamics, has affected indigenous communities in cases where protected area designation excludes traditional indigenous land use even when that use predates and, in some documented cases, actively contributed to the ecological conditions that motivated the conservation designation in the first place. James Fairhead, Melissa Leach, and Ian Scoones’s analysis of green grabbing specifically identifies indigenous displacement for conservation purposes as a significant and underappreciated category of environmentally motivated land dispossession, complicating any simple narrative that treats conservation and indigenous interests as necessarily aligned (Fairhead, Leach, & Scoones, 2012).

Indigenous Environmental Knowledge and Resistance

Indigenous environmental knowledge systems, developed and refined across generations of direct engagement with specific local ecosystems, have increasingly attracted scholarly and policy attention as a potential complement to conventional Western scientific approaches to environmental management, particularly in domains such as fire management, water conservation, and biodiversity monitoring where traditional practices have demonstrated ecological effectiveness across extended time periods. Winona LaDuke’s advocacy scholarship argues that this traditional knowledge deserves recognition not merely as a supplementary data source for conventional environmental management but as an alternative governance paradigm reflecting fundamentally different relationships between human communities and the natural environment than those embedded in conventional Western property and resource management frameworks (LaDuke, 1999).

Indigenous-led resistance movements opposing extractive industry expansion and land dispossession have generated their own body of scholarly attention within green criminology, examining both the movements’ organizing strategies and the state and corporate responses these movements have generated, including in some documented cases the criminalization of indigenous land defenders through application of trespass, terrorism, or organized crime statutes to protest activity. Kyle Whyte’s scholarship on settler colonialism and environmental injustice argues that this criminalization pattern reflects a broader structural dynamic in which state legal systems, themselves products of the same colonial processes that originally dispossessed indigenous communities of their land, continue to treat indigenous assertion of land rights as inherently suspect or threatening rather than as a legitimate exercise of recognized legal rights (Whyte, 2018).

International indigenous rights advocacy has achieved significant, though incomplete, success in securing formal recognition instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, even as translating these international instruments into effective domestic legal protection and practical land rights enforcement remains an ongoing challenge across many jurisdictions where indigenous communities continue to face extractive industry and development pressure on traditionally occupied land.

Theoretical Explanations: Settler Colonialism and Green Criminology

Settler colonialism theory, increasingly incorporated into green criminology’s analytical framework through scholars including Kyle Whyte, argues that contemporary environmental harm affecting indigenous communities cannot be adequately understood as a series of discrete contemporary policy failures but must instead be situated within an ongoing historical process of land appropriation and indigenous displacement that predates and continues to shape contemporary extractive industry and conservation practices alike (Whyte, 2018). This framework treats environmental harm to indigenous communities as continuous with rather than separate from the broader historical processes of colonization that established the underlying property and governance systems within which contemporary environmental decisions are made.

Political economy frameworks complement this settler colonialism analysis by examining how contemporary extractive industry expansion onto indigenous territory reflects the same structural growth pressures documented across other corporate environmental crime categories examined throughout this discussion, with the historically weaker legal protection afforded indigenous land claims making indigenous territory a comparatively accessible target for extraction as more easily secured land becomes fully exploited. David Rodríguez Goyes and Nigel South’s analysis situates this dynamic within a broader account of how green criminology’s own theoretical development has been shaped by engagement with Latin American indigenous dispossession, suggesting that indigenous experience has informed rather than merely been analyzed by the field’s evolving theoretical framework (Goyes & South, 2016).

Environmental justice frameworks extend green criminology’s broader concern with unequal distribution of environmental harm to indigenous communities specifically, though scholars including Kyle Whyte have argued that conventional environmental justice analysis, developed primarily to address contemporary distributional inequality, requires supplementation with the historical and self-determination dimensions that settler colonialism theory brings to bear, since indigenous environmental justice claims frequently center on sovereignty and self-governance questions that extend beyond the distributional focus of conventional environmental justice analysis (Whyte, 2017).

Conclusion

Green criminology and indigenous communities intersect across multiple dimensions, from documented environmental victimization through extractive industry and conservation-driven displacement to indigenous communities’ own contributions to environmental knowledge and resistance movements that have shaped broader environmental protection efforts. The persistent gap between formal legal recognition of indigenous land rights and the practical land use decisions affecting indigenous territory continues to generate the conditions for the extractive industry and conservation-driven harm examined throughout this discussion.

Settler colonialism theory’s increasing incorporation into green criminology’s analytical framework reflects a broader recognition that indigenous environmental harm cannot be adequately understood through conventional contemporary policy analysis alone, requiring instead sustained attention to the historical processes of land appropriation that continue to shape contemporary environmental governance. Continued scholarly and policy attention to both the harms documented here and the alternative governance models indigenous communities have developed remains essential to any sustained progress on the environmental justice concerns this discussion has identified.

References and Further Reading

Beirne, P., & South, N. (Eds.). (2007). Issues in green criminology: Confronting harms against environments, humanity and other animals. Willan Publishing.
Boekhout van Solinge, T. (2008). Deforestation crimes and conflicts in the Amazon. Critical Criminology, 16(4), 265–277.
Boekhout van Solinge, T. (2010). Equatorial deforestation as a harmful practice and a criminological issue. In R. White (Ed.), Global environmental harm: Criminological perspectives (pp. 20–36). Willan Publishing.
Borras, S. M., & Franco, J. C. (2012). Global land grabbing and trajectories of agrarian change: A preliminary analysis. Journal of Agrarian Change, 12(1), 34–59.
Brack, D. (2003). Illegal logging and the illegal trade in forest and timber products. International Forestry Review, 5(3), 195–198.
Brisman, A., & South, N. (2014). Green cultural criminology: Constructions of environmental harm, consumerism, and resistance to ecocide. Routledge.
Fairhead, J., Leach, M., & Scoones, I. (2012). Green grabbing: A new appropriation of nature? Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2), 237–261.
Goyes, D. R., & South, N. (2016). Green criminology before “green criminology”: Amnesia and absences. Critical Criminology, 24(4), 503–519.
LaDuke, W. (1999). All our relations: Native struggles for land and life. South End Press.
Lynch, M. J., Long, M. A., Stretesky, P. B., & Barrett, K. L. (2017). Green criminology: Crime, justice, and the environment. University of California Press.
Pellow, D. N. (2007). Resisting global toxics: Transnational movements for environmental justice. MIT Press.
Ruggiero, V. (2013). The crimes of the economy: A criminological analysis of economic thought. Routledge.
South, N. (1998). A green field for criminology? A proposal for a perspective. Theoretical Criminology, 2(2), 211–233.
Stretesky, P. B., Long, M. A., & Lynch, M. J. (2013). The treadmill of crime: Political economy and green criminology. Routledge.
Taylor, D. E. (2014). Toxic communities: Environmental racism, industrial pollution, and residential mobility. New York University Press.
Uhlmann, D. M. (2009). Prosecuting crimes against the earth. Trends in Organized Crime, 12(2), 130–140.
White, R. (2011). Transnational environmental crime: Toward an eco-global criminology. Routledge.
White, R. (2013). Environmental harm: An eco-justice perspective. Policy Press.
Whyte, K. P. (2017). Indigenous climate change studies: Indigenizing futures, decolonizing the anthropocene. English Language Notes, 55(1–2), 153–162.
Whyte, K. P. (2018). Settler colonialism, ecology, and environmental injustice. Environment and Society, 9(1), 125–144.
Wyatt, T. (2013). Wildlife trafficking: A deconstruction of the crime, the victims, and the offenders. Palgrave Macmillan.
Zimmerman, M. E. (2003). The black market for wildlife: Combating transnational organized crime in the illegal wildlife trade. Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, 36(5), 1657–1690.