Ecocide: Fifth war crime
Making those guilty of environmental destruction
accountable:
Gar Smith
“What does it matter to us? Look away if it makes you sick.” Heinrich
Himmler, in response to outrage about Auschwitz
That quote appeared at the top of an article in the Summer 1997 Earth
Island Journal. The essay, which raised the question: “How Do We Handle
Industrial Evil?” was prompted by Congressional hearings that revealed
how the tobacco industry, despite decades of denial, had long known that
cigarettes caused cancer. The Government offered Big Tobacco a deal:
Cough up US$ 368 billion, stop advertising, and finance anti-smoking
programs. In exchange: immunity from all future lawsuits.
Environmental destruction |
Was the sentence appropriate for a corporate holocaust that claims
five million lives a year? “When individuals and corporations commit
crimes of demonstrable evil,” the Journal asked, “by what standard
should they be judged?”
One standard was established on May 3, 1947, at a Nuremberg Tribunal
convened to consider the crimes of 24 officials of I G Farben, a
powerful company accused of sponsoring mass murder at its notorious
Auschwitz plant.
Sixty-three years later, former British barrister Polly Higgins has
revived the debate over Corporate Evil with a proposal that asks the
United Nations to recognize ‘ecocide’ as a fifth ‘crime against peace’ -
one that could be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court
alongside ‘genocide,’ ‘war crimes,’ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and ‘crimes
against humanity.’
Diminished territory
Higgins defines ecocide as, ‘the extensive destruction, damage to or
loss of ecosystem(s) or a given territory, whether by human agency or by
other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the
inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished.” (A UN
report bolsters Higgins’s concern, estimating that 3,000 of the world’s
largest companies have caused $2.2 trillion in environmental damage.)
Higgins’s definition is even broader than it first appears, since her
definition of “inhabitants” includes plants and animals, as well as
human populations.
Higgins cannot be easily dismissed. The Ecologist magazine has called
her “One of the Top Ten Visionaries to Save the Planet,” and in 2008,
she was invited to present her proposal for a Universal Declaration for
Planetary Rights before the United Nations. (So far, only Bolivia has
formally adopted the Declaration while neighboring Ecuador has enshrined
the “Right of Nature” in its Constitution.)
Higgins’s concern was inspired by the damage wrought by extractive
industries - mining, logging, oil drilling. “If you keep over-extracting
from your capital asset,” Higgins reasons, “we’ll have very little left
and we will go to war over - the last of it.” London’s The Guardian
reports that the proposal has won support from the UN and the European
Commissions, and among climate scientists, environmental lawyers and
international campaign groups.
Reaction from the pro-growth community has been predictably volatile.
As one alarmed commentator on the conservative RedState.com saw it, the
proposal was nothing less than an ‘activist’s war on private property,
industrialization and the Free Market” that would impose “a restriction
on our rights to personal wealth” and might even, God forbid, “prevent
over-production and over-consumption.”
Environmental destruction
A real challenge with defining ecocide comes from trying to figure
out what level of environmental destruction constitutes a “crime against
peace.” Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the conservative Discovery
Institute, observes: “Equating resource extraction and/or pollution with
genocide trivializes true evils such as the slaughter in Rwanda.”
Genocide involves cold-blooded criminal intent while ecocide is
typically a byproduct of greed and negligence. As UN University Senior
Academic Officer Dr. Vesselin Popovski notes: “Nobody in the Soviet
Union deliberately planned the Chernobyl disaster in the same way as
Stalin planned the deportation of Chechens in 1944.”
Fair enough. But even when you can’t prove intent, you can show
criminal negligence - and demand accountability.
The destruction of the rainforest ecosystems of the Amazon and
Indonesia, the knowing destabilization of the world’s climate system,
and BP’s massive pollution of the Gulf of Mexico should clearly meet the
test of “ecocide.” All of them, after all, have caused great conflict.
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