ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by reminding readers how green cultural criminology—a cross-fertilisation of green criminology and cultural criminology—has attempted to: (1) examine the way(s) in which environmental crimes, harms, and disasters are constructed and represented by the news media and in popular cultural forms; (2) highlight and analyse patterns of consumption, constructed consumerism, commodification of nature, and related market processes; and (3) explore the contestation of space, transgression, and resistance, in order to understand the ways in which environmental harms are opposed in/on the streets and in day-to-day living. Acknowledging that green cultural criminology, like criminology more generally, has developed somewhat of an urban and northern bias, the authors take the opportunity in this chapter to tackle green cultural criminology’s northern predisposition. The authors weave together green, cultural, and Southern criminologies through the exposition of several key issues, including ‘the South’ as a context in which exploitative global forces may exercise power. Focussing on the construction of environmental crimes, harms, and disasters in popular cultural forms, the authors contemplate examples of Latin American cultural narratives of human–environment relationships (from the nineteenth century (e.g., Sarmiento 1845) to twentieth- and twenty-first-century presentations of tales old and new (such as The Magic Bean Tree: A Legend from Argentina (Van Laan 1998) and The Future According to Luz, a two-book graphic novel series by the Chilean-born Claudia Dávila (2011, 2012)). The authors conclude by identifying several examples of possible directions in which the intersection of green, cultural, and Southern criminologies might proceed, including studies of energy integration and diversification in Latin America and critical interpretations of media and popular narrative depictions of environmental issues within the Global South.
