ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by noting how green criminology and cultural criminology both push against the conventional boundaries of criminology, and so tend to upset the definitional and epistemic order of the discipline. Drawing on Brisman and South (e.g., 2013b, 2014), the author demonstrates the potential for a convergence of green criminology and cultural criminology through a consideration of consumer culture as ecological harm. The author seeks to locate cases of environmental destruction within the exploitative dynamics of contemporary economic arrangements, and he illustrates how the dynamics, features, and processes of everyday ecological resistance and everyday criminalisation serve as another point of a convergence of green criminology and cultural criminology. Drawing on more than a decade of ongoing research into, and participation with, the various contemporary subcultures of trash picking, urban scrounging, and dumpster diving, the author explains how trash pickers and activists can be understood as participants in an eclectic, wide-ranging global phenomenon that intertwines alternative economic arrangements, environmental activism, and desperate day-to-day survival. The chapter laments how despite their environmentally benevolent activities (see Brisman 2010)—or perhaps because such informal waste scrounging threatens to expose the very logic of consumer capitalism and its concomitant environmental harm—those participating in informal recycling and environmental reclamation frequently find their activities criminalised.
