Ecocide, ecocentrism and social obligation

Abstract

The cataclysmic consequences of climate change and biodiversity loss are revealed in the climate disruptions and escalating extinction of species around the globe. The causes of global warming are directly associated with carbon emissions, the result of the fossil fuel industry and deforestation. Species extinction stems from unfettered resource extraction and the contamination and modification of Nature linked to the growth imperatives of global capitalism. These are crimes of ecocide, crimes that involve foreknowledge, government-provided legitimacy and unprecedented harms to humans, ecosystems and non-human environmental entities such as rivers, mountains, trees, birds and koalas. This article synthesises ideas about ecocentrism, rights of Nature and ecocide within a general framework of criminal law (e.g. prohibition via criminalisation) and social obligation (e.g. prescription via a general environmental duty of care). How best to bring carbon criminals and environmental vandals to justice is the crucial question of our age. As with crimes of the powerful generally, there are profound difficulties in dealing with corporate criminality and state-corporate crime. And yet climate justice demands nothing less than transformative change in circumstance. An ecology-based general duty of care provides a framework whereby social obligation is entrenched in a manner that simultaneously reinforces the criminality of ecocide.