“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible nature. Unaware that the Nature he is destroying is this God he is worshipping.”
Naomi Klein
Man shall have dominion over Earth. This declaration from the Bible has been programmed into the human psyche for a very long time. No wonder we have had such a messed-up relationship with the natural world! To have dominion over something means to control, rule over or subdue, which easily transitions into oppression, exploitation, and abuse if wielded in an unbalanced state. I think we can all agree that this is what we have done to nature and the natural resources on this planet. We even talk about nature as something separate from us, something in opposition to us. We act as the natural world has nothing to do with us: Nature is out there somewhere while we are in here. Vandana Shiva refers to it as “an intellectual architecture that has been created which artificially separates us from the earth, and from each other”. She characterizes this imagined separation between humans and nature as “eco-apartheid”: The result of a mechanistic worldview that serves industrial capitalism and is motivated by greed and the urge to dominate and control.
This strange and illogical thinking has brought us to a place in time where our exploitation, oppression, and abuse of the natural world have caught up with us. Our disconnect from our true nature has created this unnatural separation between us and the rest of the planet. Our bodies are made up of earth, we are one of the many animals that live on this planet, but still, we view ourselves as something different. This distorted view has had a traumatic effect on the natural world, but also on the humans themselves. Because we ARE that very same nature we have been exploiting and abusing, and this unconscious self-abuse has left us pretty traumatized.
GREEN CRIME
Humans’ exploitation, oppression, and abuse of nature have manifested in a myriad of ways. These include pollution of air, water, and land, deforestation, dumping of toxic waste, illegal trade of wild animals and exotic birds, threats to biodiversity, the release of damaging gases in the atmosphere, overfishing, industrialized torture of animals for food or clothing, endangerment and destructing of species and eco-systems, tilling and killing of the soil, mistreatment of animals for human entertainment…. the list goes on and on. We see nature as our property, something we can use and abuse as we wish, which has led to brutal commercialization and exploitation of the earth’s natural resources. Greed, economic growth, and the need for more, more, more have been the anthem for a long time. As a result of this, we now see a growing interest in the study of environmental crimes – also known as green crimes.
Criminology is a broad study that concerns itself with laws, people who break them, and how society responds to these people. Green crime is the branch of criminology that studies crimes and harms to the environment, human and non-human animals, committed by ordinary folks and institutions. Green crime is a very complex field of study where the effects can be very extensive and have long-lasting effects on both humans, animals, and the environment. The earth is a large and living ecosystem, where nature and the elements are in constant movement. This makes it difficult to contain pollution and environmental damage to just one area. Different laws in different countries also complicate matters, leading to businesses exporting harmful environmental activities to countries with fewer regulations. The lack of global environmental laws is indeed a big problem, but also the environmental laws in individual countries.
Another thing that makes green crimes and environmental laws unique, is that a certain amount of harmful activity is often permitted. It might be allowed to cut down a certain number of trees, but not the whole forest. It might be allowed to pollute a certain amount of water, air, and earth as long as we stay within a certain limit. We might also be allowed to kill a certain amount of animals as long as we don’t kill the whole species. These examples indicate that we don’t view these actions as inherently wrong, but rather as harmful actions that should be managed, but not stopped. We don’t see this in other branches of criminology, where we can legally hit someone a certain amount of times, as long as we don’t hurt them too badly. But when it comes to nature and its resources, the rules are obviously different. This leads us to the very important concept of green harm.
GREEN HARM
A crime is defined as an action that break the laws of a society, and which therefore is punishable by law. But some of the most destructive ecological activities being done to the environment today are not defined as crimes, but rather environmental harms. Examples of these harmful activities are the felling of old-growth forests, genetically modifying organisms in agriculture, toxic dumping, and overfishing…. Such actions are terribly destructive to our environment, but nonetheless, we allow them even if they’re hurting our planet. It’s important to note that the main difference between green crime and green harm is defined by the context of why it’s being done and who is doing it. Because it’s often the governments themselves who are committing harm to the environment, the very same institutions creating and implementing the laws and giving the punishments.
Environmental harms warrant much greater focus and should be encompassed into law. Crimes are social constructs that change over time, in tandem with the human consciousness. What is legal today might be defined as a crime tomorrow. The criminal system is a changing entity based on what we regard as unacceptable or acceptable behavior in our societies, where our current values get implemented into law. The shift from harm to crime will eventually come down to what people are willing to tolerate and not tolerate. As an example, animals are still considered as “things” or “property” in the law of most countries, but France, New Zealand, and Columbia have updated their status to be defined as “feeling creatures”. Germany is also the first country in the world to have a constitution that says “animals, just like humans, have the right to be respected by the state and should be treated with dignity”. As human awareness and knowledge rise and we understand more of the true nature of life around us, we will eventually see this reflected in our laws and regulations.
RECONNECTING WITH NATURE
Humans’ disconnection from nature is at the heart of the many environmental problems we now face. The human being is an integral part of the natural world, but it is difficult to tell in modern, developed countries. Humans are just one of Earth’s many animals, who happened to evolve their capabilities and consciousness into an impressive state. It was the interaction between the human species and the natural environment that made that possible. The irony is that we then used those incredible abilities to separate ourselves from the same nature that made that evolution possible! These evolved capabilities give us the ability to act in ways that impact the entire planet. We’ve been living in an unnatural, unconscious, and unbalanced state for a long time, unable to see our connection to the ten million other species that we share this planet with. So, when we decided that we were more important than the other species, we were sailing rapidly into murky waters. That egocentric attitude left the door open to not only disconnect, but also disinterest, lack of awareness, neglect, and even abuse and total destruction.
When an animal gets removed from its natural environment it suffers. We put predators like lions, polar bears, and orcas in captivity, which harm them both physically and mentally. These animals travel huge distances in the wild and are not meant to be contained in these small facilities. Even the best zoos in the world are inappropriate environments for these kinds of animals. In captivity they show symptoms of extreme stress, pacing up and down inside their enclosures, or behaving in other erratic ways. Some become despondent and depressed and shut down completely. This should come as no surprise because if you remove an animal from its natural environment, you traumatize it. You change the animals’ health, and behavior; the animals’ true nature. The human animal is no different. The modern human being – the homo sapiens – has spent 300 000 years evolving into its current state, while closely connected to its natural environment. It needs the natural food it was meant to eat, it needs to put its feet on the ground, its hands in the soil, and let the sun touch its skin. It needs to bond with others because the human being is a social animal that evolved in groups. It needs to use its creative spirit because that’s what sets the human apart from the other animals and what makes us so bloody brilliant. Take these things away and you get a traumatized species.
A species that abuses and destroy, and kills its environment, is essentially abusing, destroying, and killing itself. This is where we find ourselves as a species. We might view ourselves as highly evolved and superior to the plant, minerals, and other animals, but we certainly haven’t been acting like it for a very long time. We have disconnected ourselves from the rest, and it’s the disconnection that has left us in such an unconscious and traumatized state that we harm the very fabric of our existence. We are acting like the traumatized animal in the cage, disconnected and scared, acting out in unnatural and irrational ways. As a species, we are riddled with physical sickness and mental problems, social inequality, poverty, and wars. Depression, anxiety, and rage are common traits in today’s human beings, many have become despondent and feel hopeless with the situation they find themselves in. We need to heal many things on this planet, but it’s the human species that need the most healing. The Earth loves the human species, that’s why we were allowed to stay here for so long and evolve in such a spectacular way. So, let’s open the cage, connect back to nature and heal our human trauma.