Conservation, ecological justice and harm to nature - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 67

(Walters, 2009, 2013). Likewise, the global trade in electronic waste is
viewed as problematic, not only because of the scale of the problem
but the terrible damage it does to communities and local environments
(Gibbs et al, 2010b; Interpol, 2009).
What is important is that it is the victimisation of people that
frequently generates the original concern with activities that cause
systematic pollution. Sometimes public and governmental action is
called for under the activist banner of environmental justice insofar as
some groups may be disproportionately affected by air pollution than
others (see Hurley, 1995; Bullard, 2005a). In other cases a ubiquitous
problem (pollution clouds over Beijing or London) may call forth
action linked to special events such as the summer Olympics. While
the emphasis may be on cleaning up the environment, this is not
necessarily driven by concerns about or for the environment per se.
Rather, environmental health is seen to be a precondition for the
health of humans.
Legality - how the law defines a particular harm - tends to be a major
consideration in assessing environmental harm from the point of view
of conservation criminology. This reflects conventional criminological
concerns over illegal fishing, logging, traffic in wildlife and hazardous
wastes (Liddick, 2011). A limitation of this approach is that it relies
upon legal definitions as the benchmark for analysis of environmental
harms. Thus, the focus is on legal conceptions of harm as informed
by laws, rules and international conventions. The key issue is legality,
and the separation of activities into legal and illegal. Unauthorised
acts or omissions that are against the law and thus subject to criminal
prosecution and criminal sanctions are the main concern:
• illegal taking of lora and fauna - which includes activities such as
illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing, illegal logging and trade
in timber, and illegal trade in wildlife
• pollution ofences - which relate to issues such as lytipping (illegal
dumping) through to air, water and land pollution associated with
industry
• transportation of banned substances - such as the illegal transport
of radioactive materials and the illegal transfer of hazardous waste.
The overarching paradigm is mainstream criminology (often
incorporating insights from sub-areas such as situational crime
prevention) as applied specifically to the topic of environmental crime . This
sort of criminological enterprise rarely deviates from statist or legalistic
conceptions of 'what is wrong': it is the focus of the criminological gaze