In his Pulitzer price-winning novel Empire Falls, Richard Russo (2001) wrote, ‘Lives are like rivers, eventually they go where they must.’ Academic disciplines are also like rivers, over time they go were they must, and Robert White's Crimes Against Nature reflects this trend. It is part of a small but growing body of literature known as green criminology that addresses issues tied to environmental harm and ecological justice. Those writing in this area are slowly moving the discourse surrounding environmental crime from the margins of criminology toward the centre, drawing the issue to where it must be, given the depth of our global environmental problems.
White, a prolific author and researcher, is one of the leading voices in the field of green criminology. Written for the classroom, Crimes Against Nature is the most comprehensive book to date about environmental crime. Following a logical progression, it is divided into three sections spanning 10 chapters: part one reviews key environmental philosophical concepts and the social construction of environmental crime; part two sets out to explain environmental harm and also explores various examples of environmental violations, including transnational crime; finally, part three discusses responses to environmental crime, ranging from persuasion, agency regulation, criminal justice intervention and large-scale changes to transnational corporate capitalism.
Woven throughout the book is White's central premise that the dominant structural arrangements of late capitalism have fostered and legitimized the majority of environmental harms experienced around the world. These conditions, he argues, allow powerful corporations to exploit the world's natural resources and operate with little fear of sanction or prosecution for their environmental crimes.
White begins his book with an examination of several core philosophical concepts relating to the relationship between humans and nature, such as anthropocentrism and species justice. The discussion in this chapter allows readers to understand how ecophilosophies organize feelings, courses of action and cognitive understandings about environmental crime. White warns that ‘for some readers this chapter may seem a bit ‘hard going’’ (p. 4). He is right. The chapter may indeed be difficult terrain for some students, but it lays a conceptually rich foundation for the book.
In the first chapter White also explores the concept of environmental justice, but focuses exclusively on race and class-based inequality. Although research has begun to signal that in many nations it is disproportionately poor racial-minority women who are most apt to experience environmental injustice, White does not address this concern. His stony silence on gender is present throughout the book.
One of the important contributions of Crimes Against Nature is that it provides insight into many different forms of environmental harm, such as climate change, overfishing, biopiracy, illegal toxic dumping and genetically-modified organisms. White directs considerable attention to transnational environmental crimes and explores how they are intrinsically tied to global inequality.
In tackling the challenge of explaining environmental crime, White devotes a chapter to a provocative discussion of how environmental destruction is built into the nature and imperatives of capitalist forms of production, consumption and distribution. Within this chapter, however, White controversially suggests that population pressure is not a driver in environmental harm. He argues that much of the ecological-environmental problem has been falsely attributed to a simple population problem. In this instance, White ignores the vast body of scientific literature that points to how human numbers, per caput consumption and technology together are harming biophysical and atmospheric processes.
Unfortunately, it is not clear whether the book is printed on FSC certified/100% post-consumer paper; if not this a searing irony. However, if environmentally preferred publishing practices were followed an opportunity to model sustainability has been lost, this should have been mentioned on the copyright page. On balance though, Crimes Against Nature is an important, clearly written and well-researched book. Ultimately, it raises more questions than it can answer, but this is to be expected given that criminology has just opened the door on this field of study. White has moved green criminology forward, and has done so with clarity and passion.
