Environmental Crime

What is environmental crime?

• As it suggests in the title, environmental crimes are crimes that damage the environment.

• It is a relatively new area of criminology, but is increasingly relevant due to environmental concerns taking centre stage in the 21st century.

• Environmental crime also includes the harming or illegal trading of endangered animals, such as poaching elephants for their ivory for capturing orang-utans for the illegal pet trade.

• Some environmentalists also consider activities such as whaling as criminal.

Environmental crime by Individuals

• This includes Fly-Tipping, littering, picking protected wild flowers and dealing in endangered animals.

• Individual green crime is different to other forms of crime because many of the perpetrators do not consider themselves as criminals.

• It is very much a new kind of crime and up until recently, it wasn’t considered deviant to do things such as dump your rubbish.

• It is only relatively recent that the public have been made aware of the dangers of these activities; partly by the actions of the Enviroment Agency, and partly by the wider concerns over global warming.

• The most unusual forms of environmental crimes in this country include egg collecting, badger baiting and most recently, fox hunting, which was made illegal in 2005.

Environmental crime by Businesses

• This kind of criminal activity mostly takes the form of polluting and fly tipping.

• The most recent example would be the BP Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

• The spill continues to cause extensive damage to marine and wildlife inhabitants there, and has had a massive impact on Mexico’s fishing and tourism industry.

• The company cutting corners of safety in order to work cheaply and make a profit caused the oil spill.

Environmental crime by Government

• Many Governments of the West commit environmental crimes by not disposing nuclear waste and weapons safely.

• Many Environmentalists argue that the British Government is criminal for planning to build more nuclear power stations, as they believe nuclear power will never be a safe source of energy.

• Another area of concern is the danger of Nuclear disasters such as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, when a Russian nuclear power station exploded.

• Many Governments around the world legitimate the activity of whaling, including Japan, Canada, Iceland and Norway, despite international opposition.

• Whaling has a devastating affect on the whale population, as it has lead to 5 out of 13 whale species becoming endangered.