Special Green Edition of Radical Criminology Call for Papers

Articles are invited for a special ‘Green’ edition of the journal Radical Criminology. The overarching theme of the edition will be arguing for a green criminology as a means of addressing environmental harms (including animal abuse and wildlife crime) which are often ignored by mainstream criminology.

The editors are interested in papers that discuss how a green criminological perspective can inform criminal justice and social policy perspectives and wider social harms that extend beyond narrow definitions of crime and criminal behaviour.  The special edition follows the journal’s ‘deep green’ perspective which draws attention to and opposes the integral relationships between capitalist exploitation, business practices, and the destruction of local and global ecosystems.  We are particularly interested in papers on the following themes:

·       Environmental harm as crime

·       Environmental regulation and corporate environmental crime

·       The complicity of states, their institutions and capitalist society  in the destruction of ecosystems

·       Animal Protection and Wildlife crime

·       Social and ecological justice

·       The importance and impact of green criminology

Other topics fitting within the scope of the journal’s radical manifesto (available online) and the specific ‘green’ perspectives of the special edition are also encouraged.

Full length/feature articles to a maximum of 9,000 words in length and shorter pieces up to 4,000 words are both welcomed.  The deadline for abstracts is 31 March 2014 and a decision on acceptance will be communicated to authors by 30 April 2014.  Full versions of accepted papers will be required by 30 July 2014 with authors expected to respond to peer-reviewers’ comments with final papers no later than 20 October 2014.

Proposals should include a title and an abstract of no more than 300 words, as well as the author’s name, address, telephone number, email address, and institutional affiliation and should be sent to one of the editors below:

Dr Angus Nurse, Middlesex University – email a.nurse@mdx.ac.uk

Dr Gary Potter, London South Bank University – Email potterg@lsbu.ac.uk

Dr Nic Groombridge, St Mary’s University – email nicholas.groombridge@smuc.ac.uk

Journal Website: http://journal.radicalcriminology.org/index.php/rc

‘Floral chancers’ and ‘tea leaves’: a green criminological speculation

I first heard about the theft of a species of water lily from Kew Gardens through twitter when @JackieLeonard01 posted the item and asked what sort of person would do such a thing.  I jestingly responded a ‘floral chancer’ and later ‘a tea leaf’ before seeing the criminological, indeed the green criminological, potential of such a story.  Hence this brief blog.

This Guardian article sets out the bare facts: that on 9 January 2014 sometime during the day, one of Kew’s 50 samples of Nymphaea thermarum, the smallest water lily in the world, had been stolen.  Some of the coverage - and it received global coverage - might stem from the plant’s cuteness, rarity and therefore value.  Some incredulity might be involved in its newsworthiness.  Who or why would anyone steal such a small, precious thing?  Put like that it starts to become more obvious even to the non-criminologist why.  Small, so easily done.  Precious, nuff said? And where was the ever present (in UK society) CCTV?  Also as a criminologist I’m rarely surprised by any crime.

Also as an occasional gardener and listener to BBC’s Gardeners’ Question Time and visitor to stately homes and gardens I was aware of the issue of people acquiring/taking/stealing cuttings from gardens and nurseries.  The Guardian Gardening Blog posed this question in 2010 ‘Green collar crime - do you take plant cuttings without permission?’

The comments on the blog contain many justifications and admissions of crime (including possible border or transnational crime!) and occasional twinges of guilt.  Was the floral chancer just one such person?  Is that water lily now in someone’s green house?  Or the collection of some baddie Greenfinger?  Do they aim to propagate from it?  Possibly even to repopulate the hot spring in Rwanda from where it originates but is now extinct?

Any green crime to be studied by green criminology is not the theft in Kew but the un-explained, unexplored ‘over-exploitation’ that lead to its demise.  Well some green criminologists might think that but for me green criminology is an attitude, a perspective.  The root of the crime and the extent of the victimisation lies in that over-exploitation.  Or, perhaps, they were just a plant rights activist freeing the lily?

Litter: a green issue?

I recently gave a webinar (using Mikogo) for Zilch (slides here from Slideshare) for a number of litter activists.  And then two days later attended an ESRC funded seminar on green criminology which still further sharpened my interest.

The litter activists obviously needed no persuading that we need to do something about litter but did not seem persuaded of my criminological or even green arguments.  Many were punitive (though often involved in interesting educational or citizen action themselves) and seemed intent on cleansing the streets.  In my search for the term litter (see ‘Matter All Over the Place: Litter, Criminology and Criminal Justice’ in the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology) in criminology texts and elsewhere I found the use of litter to mean the excluded and criminalised of society found on the streets. Human detritus.

Green penology is hardly developed but I'd like to suggest that the green take on punishment should be to reduce, reuse and recycle not throw away lives, even of offenders against ‘green’ laws or sensibilities.  It is tempting to be as punitive on the polluter as society, suite and State has been on human detritus; and when we note that litter can be used in that criminalisation we may be more tempted.  But greens need to be better.  Mediation seems to be the more green option.

But and here I agreed strongly with one contributor (Clean Highways) on the power of the law to oblige local authorities and other 'amoral calculators' (or even 'political citizens' see Pearce and Tombs and my discussion of) to clean up.

More greenery at BSC2011

Ms Lieselot Bisschop
FLOWS OF TRANSNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME: CASE STUDY RESEARCH ON E‐WASTE AND TIMBER

Dr Gary Potter
RESISTANCE IS FERTILE

Environmental Activism as (potentially) criminal

Miss Hanneke Mol
SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL JUSTICE FROM AN ECOCENTRIC PERSPECTIVE: A (RE‐)CONSIDERATION OF HARM

perils of palm Oil in columbia

A green session at BSC2011

Transnational Context of Local Environmental Crimes Professor Nigel South
WATER AS A LOCAL AND GLOBAL RESOURCE: ISSUES FROM THE PERSPECTIVES OF GREEN AND CULTURAL CRIMINOLOGIES

Our locally bought water bottles unnecessary, potentially unhealthy and end up in pacific

Professor Rob White LOCALISM AND TRANSNATIONALISATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL
HARM

Toxic Towns in Tasmania

Dr Tanya Wyatt
TRANSNATIONAL WILDLIFE TRAFFICKING IN OUR BACK GARDEN: A PHOTOGRAPHIC EXPLORATION OF THE HEATHROW ANIMAL RECEPTION CENTRE

Heathrow a hub for legal and illegal animal trade and some animals end up imprisoned there without parole.

Obviously presented my own paper

MATTER ALL OVER THE PLACE: LITTER, CRIMINOLOGY AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE

a contribution to green criminology that i hope will see the light of day in Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology

I argue criminology, including green criminology, fails to take litter seriously and that the 'litterature' is too punitive or unknowing of criminological issues etc.