ABSTRACT
Environmental problems are recognised to be of a central and serious kind such that those who trivialise or downplay the fate of the globe are increasingly asked by governments, by law, by green groups, by 'average' citizens to justify their position. Environmental criminological texts situated beyond liberal ecology fall into two broad ecophilosophical schools of thought –biocentrism (deep ecology) and ecocentrism. Perhaps the most worrying trend emerging from criminological work on environmental issues is that such efforts have generally been of an uncritical kind. One might say that the concepts of 'ecosystemic integrity', along with that of the 'beauty' of biotic environments, are anything but an objective means of positing a socio-environmental ethic. The utility of a definition of environmental crime will be the degree to which it elicits new types of existential territories, makes possible new modes of envisioning the human/earth nexus, and invites a reconceptualisation of the relationship between speed and damage.
