ABSTRACT
Ecocide is conceptually, historically and institutionally linked to the more famous term: genocide. Ecocide is, however, somewhat under-theorized in comparison, and has a much shallower intellectual history. The nucleus of the concept of genocide can be traced back to 1933 when Raphael Lemkin, a Polish jurist, spoke at the International Conference for Unification of Criminal Law in Madrid and urged the international community to ban the physical and cultural destruction of human groups, invoking the linked concepts of 'barbarity' and 'vandalism'. The Genocide Convention was stripped of its coherence and conceptual integrity, and a major method of genocide envisaged by Lemkin was not fully criminalized. As such, its applicability to a whole range of colonial and settler-colonial contexts was thereby denied. The Eradicating Ecocide campaign draws attention to the numerous examples of ecocide and its human consequences worldwide, at a time when preventing further ecological destruction could not be more pressing.
