The Theft of Nature: Perspectives from Green Criminology

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

In the last twenty-five years, green criminology has developed into a fertile area of study that now attracts criminologists from around the world with a wide range of research interests and theoretical orientations. Indeed, green criminology spans the micro to the macro–from work on individual-level environmental harms to business/corporate crimes to state transgressions–and includes research conducted from both mainstream and critical theoretical perspectives, as well as arising from interdisciplinary efforts. In this panel, a particular type of environmental harm is considered—what we refer to as the “theft of nature.” Drawing on examples from both the Global North and Global South, the papers in this panel illuminate and describe the “theft of nature” through and from processes of biopiracy, agro-industry expansion, legal and illegal trafficking of free-born non-human animals, and climate change denial.

Sub Unit

• Area II. Types of Offending and Victimization / 21. Environmental/Green Crime

Individual Presentations

• The theft of land and nature: land-grabs, bio-piracy and the inversion of justice - David Rodriguez Goyes, Universidad Antonio Nariño; Nigel South, University of Essex

• “In 10 years from now all this will simply be a myth”: impacts and mechanisms of agro-industry expansion - Hanneke Mol, University of Kent (UK) / Utrecht University (Netherlands)

• Trafficking in free-born animals: Practices, consequences and injustice - Ragnhild Sollund, University of Oslo

• The Role of Denial in the Theft of Nature: A Comparison of Biopiracy and Climate Change - Tanya Wyatt, Northumbria University; Avi Brisman, Eastern Kentucky University

Chair

• Avi Brisman, Eastern Kentucky University