Definition
Green criminology is the school of thought that takes environmental harm — to ecosystems, to non-human species, and to future generations — as a legitimate and central object of criminological inquiry. It refuses to limit the discipline to behaviour that is illegal under existing law, and instead asks which ecological harms a society ought to prosecute and why some go unpunished.
The term was coined by Michael Lynch in 1990 and developed through the work of Nigel South, Rob White, Piers Beirne, and others. White's eco-global criminology pushes the analysis to transnational supply chains and treaty regimes; Beirne's species-justice strand extends moral standing beyond humans. The school overlaps with critical, state-corporate, and zemiological (social-harm) criminologies, and it has produced a steady stream of empirical work on illegal logging, wildlife trafficking, mining pollution, and climate-related harms.
Why it matters
How it works
Green criminologists work with three lenses. The legal lens follows existing environmental offences and their (typically weak) enforcement. The harm lens asks what ecological damage is being produced, lawful or otherwise, and who benefits and who pays. The justice lens — anthropocentric, biocentric, or eco-centric — defines whose interests the analysis should weigh. The choice of lens shapes whose stories the research tells: regulators and prosecutors, communities living near pollution, displaced wildlife, or future inhabitants of a warmed planet.
The school's strength is its willingness to follow harm wherever it leads — into corporate supply chains, state-issued permits, international treaty failures. Its difficulty is reach: empirical access is hard, jurisdictions disagree on definitions, and policy levers are concentrated in regulators rather than police. As climate change accelerates, green criminology is positioned to absorb a growing share of the discipline's empirical agenda.