‘Multicolored’ green criminology and climate change’s achromatopsia

Abstract

While green criminology may be an effective name or label for the sub-field or perspective within criminology that considers a wide range of environmental issues, it is, in reality, a ‘multicolored green’ – a criminology that engages a spectrum of issues, that reflects the interests of some racial groups more than others, that reveals and analyzes environmental harms which disproportionately impact some racial groups more than others, and that can be approached from a number of vantage points or that can be viewed with variously tinted lenses. This article begins with an overview of climate change, including a discussion of its anticipated impacts and indicators of its already-being-felt effects. It then offers some general comments on the disproportionate impact of environmental threats and harms before turning to a discussion of the present and anticipated distributional impacts of climate change. Here, this article argues that climate change is, in effect, achromatopsic – it is color-blind, in that it affects us all regardless of skin color – but that those impacts will be distributed unevenly/unequally and that various groups are and will continue to be in different positions to adapt to climate change. This article concludes by suggesting that while the environmental harms caused by climate change are real – and the risks and threats they pose tangible and serious – climate change presents an exciting challenge for our creative potential as humans. In the process of reducing our consumption of fossil fuels and stabilizing (or, better yet, reducing) our greenhouse gas emissions, we might better assist those geopolitical regions most at risk (i.e. poor, developing countries) to become more resilient – an approach that is necessary for both the physical health of the planet and the prospects for social justice.

Keywords:

• environment
• climate change
• green criminology
• social problems
• ecology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For more on red-green perspectives (although not necessarily couched within green criminology), see, e.g. Bahro (1984), Benton (1996), Burkett (1999), Foster (2000), Pepper (1993), Sarkar (1999). For a recent contribution, see Foster and Clark (2012).

2. In this article, I employ the term ‘climate change’ instead of ‘global warming’ to refer to human-induced changes in average weather conditions or in the distribution of weather around the average conditions (i.e. more or fewer extreme weather events) because some regions of the world may experience a substantial cooling effect as a result of increases in anthropogenic Greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations (see, e.g. Epstein, 2004; Gore, 2010). Thus, ‘climate change’ is a more accurate term than ‘global warming’ (Brisman, 2005, p. 15 n. 28; McCright & Dunlap, 2003, p. 348 n. 1; cf. Lynch and Stretesky, 2010, pp. 62–63). In addition, ‘climate change’ is the preferred term by most scientists and members of the policy community; the words ‘climate change’ also tend to appear more frequently than ‘global warming’ in the titles of research and policy organizations in the field (e.g. the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, the Purdue Climate Change Research Center, the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the IPCC). For a discussion of the qualitative and quantitative differences between public understanding of ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming,’ see Whitmarsh (2009); see generally Williams (2004).

3. Note that the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the IPCC was scheduled to be finalized in 2014. See www.ipcc.ch/index.htm#.UgydFWTTVSY and www.ipcc-syr.nl.

4. In a subsequent publication on transnational environmental crime, White (2011, p. 36, 51) restates this position, beginning his chapter on climate change by describing it as ‘arguably the most important issue, problem and trend in the world today’ and concluding the chapter with ‘[t]he pressing issue today is that of climate change.’

5. For additional descriptive examples, see Brisman (2012, 2013). For concerns about using the language of catastrophe and imminent peril when discussing climate change, see Hulme (2009, pp. xxxiii, 345).

6. I intend a broad and capacious conception of ‘racial.’ As Giroux (2004, p. 171 n. 2) points out, we often think of race in terms of ‘black-white relations.’ For him, a more robust understanding of racial conditions, ideologies, policies, and practices takes into account ‘the wide range of groups who constitute diverse peoples of color and ethnic origin’ (2004, p. 171 n. 12). That is my goal here in this article.

7. ‘Environmental justice’ means different things to different people (for a discussion of different conceptualizations, see Brisman, 2008; Kuehn, 2000). For this article’s purposes, Heckenberg’s (2009, p. 13) definition suffices: ‘[Environmental justice] [r]efers to the distribution of environments among peoples in terms of access to and use of specific natural resources in defined geographical areas, and the impacts of particular social practices and environmental hazards on specific populations (e.g. as defined on the basis of class, occupation, gender, age, ethnicity).’

8. Note that distributive justice issues involve not just the proximity of populations to environmentally-threatening activities and land uses, but also ‘allegations that certain racial, ethnic, or income groups are disproportionately exposed to occupational hazards’ (Kuehn, 2000). As Bullard and Wright (1986, p. 71) make clear ‘[b]lacks, lower-income groups, and working-class persons are also subjected to a disproportionately large amount of pollution within their workplace as well as in their neighborhoods.’

9. For an in-depth discussion of the relationship between political power (specifically, the ability to affect governmental decision-making processes) and environmental justice, see, e.g. Brisman (2007), Lynch and Stretesky (2007), Pinderhughes (1996).

10. This is not to suggest that these activities occur only in the United States. As Simon (2000, p. 634) explains, ‘most large American environmental polluters are transnational in scope. Not only do these firms commit environmental offenses within the United States, but many exhibit a disturbing pattern of international wrongdoing.’ Thus, for example, pollution by Plant #1 of Company A in Country A may cause harm to individuals who live close to Plant #1, slightly less harm to those who live slightly farther away from Plant #1, little harm to those who live even farther from Plant #1, and no harm to those who live in Country B. But Company A may have another plant (Plant #2) in Country B. Individuals in Country B may experience levels of harm comparable to those living in Country A and based on their proximity to Plant #2. If Country A and Country B neighbor each other, it is possible that a resident of Country A could experience very little pollution from Plant #1, if he/she lives far away from the plant, but significant cross-border pollution if he/she lives near Country B and Plant #2 is located near the border of Country A and Country B. To further complicate matters, given that ‘international corporations commit a wide variety of criminal offenses’ (Simon, 2000, p. 634), it is possible that a resident of Country A could experience air pollution from Plant #1 and water pollution from Plant #2.

11. Orfield (2005, p. 155) makes clear that poor minorities are at a particular disadvantage in this regard; ‘[p]oor whites,’ on other hand, ‘have been able to avoid many of the ravages of environmental injustice, because they have much broader housing choices than blacks and Latinos of similar income levels, and thus can move into environmentally safer neighborhoods.’

12. For a discussion of how all disasters, at some level, are local, see Ganyard (2009).

13. Bryant and Hockman (2005, p. 34) note that ‘not only people in developing countries will suffer more if the threat of climate change is ignored, but so too will people in the United States suffer – some disproportionately more than others.’ Similarly, Lynch and Stretesky (2010, p. 76) observe that inequality in the distribution of harms caused by climate change ‘are not confined to less developed nations.’ Likewise, Osofsky (2009, p. 599) reports that ‘European ski resorts have begun wrapping their glaciers, and wine growers [are now] try[ing] to take climate change into account when planting new grapes.’ Thus, all of these commentators seek to underscore that more developed countries will not be immune from the negative impacts of climate change. But at the same time, all of these commentators – Bryant and Hockman (2005), Lynch and Stretesky (2010), and Osofsky (2009) – and in line with Kramer and Michalowski – recognize the effects of climate change are unevenly distributed, falling most heavily on the world’s poor, specifically, those poor people in developing countries. For example, Osofsky (2009, p. 599) concludes that the choices people have in response to changes in their physical environment and the options to limit the damages that they will suffer from the changing climate where they live are ‘often more fundamental for those who have few resources and live in close connection with the land.’

14. Parenti (2013) notes that adaptation is both a technical and a political challenge. ‘Technical adaptation,’ he explains, ‘means transforming our relationship to non-human nature as nature transforms. Examples include building seawalls around vulnerable coastal cities, giving land back to mangroves and everglades so they can act to break tidal surges during giant storms, opening wildlife migration corridors so species can move away from the equator as the climate warms, and developing sustainable forms of agriculture that can function on an industrial scale even as weather patterns gyrate wildly.’ In comparison, ‘political adaptation … means transforming social relations: devising new ways to contain, avoid, and deescalate the violence that climate change is fueling and will continue to fuel. That will require progressive economic redistribution and more sustainable forms of development. It will also require a new diplomacy of peace building.’

15. According to Revkin (2007a), two-thirds of the atmospheric build-up of CO₂ have come in nearly equal proportions from the US and western European countries, whereas Africa accounts for less than 3% of the global emissions of CO₂. Elsewhere, Revkin (2007b) further contextualizes and fleshes out these data: ‘[t]he United States, where agriculture represents just 4 percent of the economy, can endure a climatic setback far more easily than a country like Malawi, where 90 percent of the population lives in rural areas and about 40 percent of the economy is driven by rain-fed agriculture. As big developing countries like China and India climb out of poverty, they emit their own volumes of GHGs; China is about to surpass the United States in annual emissions of carbon dioxide. But they remain a small fraction of the total human contribution to the atmosphere’s natural heat-holding greenhouse effect, which is cumulative because of the long-lived nature of carbon dioxide and some other heat-trapping gases. China may be a powerhouse now, but it has contributed less than 8 percent of the total emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use since 1850, while the United States is responsible for 29 percent and Western Europe 27 percent.’ Bandarage (2013) puts this another way: ‘About 80 percent of the world’s environmental damage is attributed to the wealthiest 20 percent of the world’s population – the “overconsumers” of the industrialized North …’ For a helpful table listing the top 20 CO₂ equivalent-producing nations, with regional totals for 2007, see Lynch and Stretesky (2010, pp. 66–67).

16. It bears mention that just because more developed/wealthier countries can invest money in climate change adaptations does not mean that the process will be easy. As Rachlinski (2000, p. 300) warns, just as preparing for or coping with the adverse effects of climate change can ‘dash the prospective for economic improvements in poor [countries],’ such efforts, initiatives, plans, and responses have ‘the potential to drain the resources of wealthy nations.’

17. McNall (2011, p. 91) offers a similar definition of a ‘wicked problem’: a problem that is ‘part of a complex web of connected systems.’ ‘Tame problems,’ in contrast to ‘wicked problems,’ are those that, while complicated, ‘have relatively well-defined and achievable end-states and hence are potentially solvable’ (Hulme, 2009, p. 334).

18. While I adopt the ‘silver buckshot’ metaphor in this article, I do so somewhat reluctantly. Elsewhere, I argue against framing our approach to climate change in the language of violence, battle, or war (see McClanahan & Brisman, 2013).

19. Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway and now special envoy to the UN secretary-general on climate change, has made a similar argument, contending that [c]limate change is not gender-neutral ... [Women are] more dependent for their livelihood on natural resources that are threatened by climate change ... With changes in climate, traditional food sources become more unpredictable and scarce. This exposes women to loss of harvests, often their sole sources of food and income.’ (quoted in Foerstel, 2008, p. 132).