ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter looks at a variety of matters linked with the environment and the ways in which environmental issues become criminalised (subject to the criminal law) or, even when not necessarily covered by criminal law, nevertheless fall into the broad category of ‘harms’ with which increasing numbers of criminologists are concerned. Generally speaking these matters tend to be referred to under the heading green criminology rather than environmental criminology, as the latter term can be confusing – because for some time it has been used to describe a body of work that looks at how crime, offending and victimisation relate to particular places and how responses to crime are infl uenced by spatial factors (for a discussion of environmental criminology, in this sense, you should consult Bottoms, 2007). A ‘green perspective’ is a new development in criminology – which, depending on your point of view on these matters, is either an indication of the relatively new priority given to such issues more generally or is another illustration of how slow criminology is to pick up on matters of importance. As Halsey (2004: 834) observes: ‘Why, at a time when most disciplines (e.g. politics, economics, history, cultural studies) have built or extended their oeuvres to include an analysis of environmental problems, has criminology seen fi t not to do so?’
