However, green criminology takes a more radical approach. It starts from the notion of harm rather than criminal law. Rob White argues that the proper subject of criminology is any action that harms the physical environment and/or the human and non-human animals within it, even if no law has been broken. In fact, many of the worst environmental harms are not illegal, and so the subject matter of green criminology is much wider than that of traditional criminology. For this reason, green criminology is a form of transgressive criminology, meaning that it oversteps the boundaries of traditional criminology to include new issues.
Green criminologists argue that powerful interests, especially nation-states and transnational corporations, are able to define in their own interests what counts as unacceptable environmental harm. This is similar to the Marxist view of ‘crimes of the powerful’. Marxists argue that the capitalist class are able to shape the law and define crime so that their own exploitative activities are not criminalised or, where they are criminalised, to ensure that enforcement is weak.
Green criminology generally adopts what White calls the ecocentric view of harm. This view sees humans and their environment as interdependent, so that environmental harm hurts humans. This view is contrasted by the anthropocentric view. This view assumes that humans have a right to dominate nature for their own ends, and puts economic growth before the environment.
Much of green crime can be linked to globalisation and the increasing interconnectedness of societies. Threats to the eco-system are increasingly global rather than merely local in nature. For example, atmospheric pollution from industry in one country can turn into acid rain that falls in another, poisoning its watercourses and destroying its forests. Similarly, an accident in the nuclear industry can spread radioactive material over thousands of miles, showing how a problem caused in one locality can have worldwide effects. These examples also show that most of the threats to human well-being and the eco-system are now man made rather than natural, This is likely because large corporations and industries take an anthropocentric view of harm. Ulrich Beck says that the massive increase in productivity and the technology have created new manufactured risks. Like climate change, many of these risks are global rather than local in nature, leading Beck to describe late modern society as ‘global risk society’.
In conclusion, although traditional criminology focuses on whether laws that protect the environment have been broken it has some major flaws, such as some environmental harm like global warming not actually being a crime as no law has been broken. This does not allow a better understanding to the nature of environmental crime as green criminology does because it starts from the notion of harm rather than criminal law.
