Going for Growth, an industry-led strategy to expand the agri-food sector, was adopted by the Northern Irish government in 2013 in order to encourage farming intensification in Northern Ireland. This approach, however, threatens an already fragile natural environment and has already had detrimental consequences for human health and well-being. This article employs an environmental justice perspective to scrutinize farming intensification in a community affected by this phenomenon. Based on findings from semi-structured interviews with local residents, the article describes their exposure to environmental risks as a result of farming intensification. The uneven distribution of environmental burdens is also coupled with limited opportunities for the local residents to engage in environmental decision-making and to be recognized as active agents of change. The article concludes that farming intensification in Northern Ireland is marked by procedural environmental injustice and should be addressed by downscaling levels of production and reforming decisionmaking processes.
Antarctica is recognized as being geopolitically and scientifically important, and as one of the regions with the greatest potential to affect and be affected by global climate change. Still, little is known in practice about how climate change will be handled within the main governance framework of the continent: the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). Using qualitative interviews, participant observations and policy document analysis, this paper explores the perspectives of Chilean scientific, political and non-governmental actors regarding the implications of climate change for the current Antarctic governance framework. Results corroborate a misalignment of the climate change agenda and the ATS, stemming from the divergent views displayed by a wide network of actors. From the interviews, two predominant visions emerge: (i) climate change as an opportunity, where actors recognize the role of Antarctica in regulating global climate and stress greater opportunities to conduct Antarctic-based climate change research, the need for strategic international collaboration, and the reinforcement of Chile's position in Antarctica through science; (ii) climate change as a burden where actors acknowledge climate change as a global problem, largely external to Antarctica, express disbelief regarding the effectiveness of local actions to tackle climate change and do not associate with climate change governance. The study concludes that climate change may become a dividing, rather than a unifying, field of action in Chilean Antarctic governance, reinforcing previously existing geopolitical tendencies.
Food production may involve serious harms that lie beyond traditional definitions of crime and are not statutorily proscribed. One example of a criminologically under-researched source of harms is intensive farming. Taking a case study of rising intensive pig farming in Northern Ireland, this paper innovatively applies the state-corporate crime framework to analyse the catalysts for environmental and social harm in the country, expanding the knowledge of complex relationships between political and economic actors from a green criminological perspective and further advancing the agenda of ‘greening’ of state-corporate crime (Bradshaw, 2014). It concludes that a state-corporate symbiosis supports and reinforces a market-oriented, profit-driven model of farming that prioritises efficiency and ultimately leads to ‘lawful but awful’ intensification.
Green criminology is now an established subfield of criminology. Having emerged in the 1990s, green criminology has rapidly grown, particularly in the last 10 years. Scholarship remains rooted in the critical and radical traditions that inspired its creation and challenge the orthodoxy of most criminological scholarship. This means that research in green criminology does not stick within the confines of only what is deemed criminal by the state but also uncovers harmful and injurious behaviors, particularly of the powerful, such as states and corporations. These once-hidden harms are approached from an environmental justice perspective that exposes the injury and suffering of marginalized people and also to the environment itself (ecological justice) and to nonhumans (species justice). More recent iterations of green criminology feature culture in addition to political economic explanations of crimes and harms against the environment and other species. Both theories of green crimes criticize capitalist societies and the ongoing problems of commodification and excessive consumption. In addition, new contributions, particularly from the Global South, are challenging the hegemony of Western criminological and environmental discourses, offering new (to the West) insights into relationships with nature and with other people. These studies have the potential to shape new prevention strategies and intervention mechanisms to disrupt green crimes and harms. This is urgent as the magnitude of environmental degradation is increasing—ranging from the threat of climate change, the possible extinction of a million species in the near future, and the ubiquity of plastic pollution, to name just a few forms of environmental destruction that humans have been, and are, perpetrating against the Earth.
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