Synopses & Reviews
The EPA was established to enforce the environmental laws Congress enacted during the 1970s. Yet today lethal toxins still permeate our environment, causing widespread illness and even death. Toxic Loopholes investigates these laws, and the agency charged with their enforcement, to explain why they have failed to arrest the nation 's rising environmental crime wave and clean up the country 's land, air, and water. This book illustrates how weak laws, legal loopholes, and regulatory negligence harm everyday people struggling to clean up their communities. It demonstrates that our current system of environmental protection pacifies the public with a false sense of security, dampens environmental activism, and erects legal barricades and bureaucratic barriers to shield powerful polluters from the wrath of their victims. After examining the corrosive economic and political forces undermining environmental law making and enforcement, the final chapters assess the potential for real improvement and the possibility of building cooperative international agreements to confront the rising tide of ecological perils threatening the entire planet.
Review
“Rob White has been at the forefront of green criminology, developing frameworks of analysis for understanding ecological degradation. In this book, he blazes an important new trail, establishing a moral basis for action.”
Review
“White provides a magisterial overview of the promise and the performance of recent green writing about environmental, ecological and species justice. His insight is keen and genuine, his commentary on difficult and troubling issues always fair-minded.”
Review
"There are few scholars whose names are as synonymous with the fields of green criminology and the study of environmental harm as is Rob White’s. . . . Environmental Harm continues to refine the conceptual and theoretical boundaries of green criminology and the study of environmental problems. . . . A concise and practical read that handily summarizes key arguments and debates that any green criminologist or environmental harm researcher should be aware of. It should find a place on the bookshelves of many scholars."
Synopsis
Toxic Loopholes investigates U.S. environmental laws and the EPA to explain why they have failed to arrest the nation's rising environmental crime wave and clean up country's land, air, and water.
Synopsis
Investigates U.S. environmental laws and the EPA to explain why they have failed to clean up the country's land, air and water.
Synopsis
Challenging conventional definitions of environmental harm, this book considers the problem from an eco-justice perspective. Rob White identifies and analyzes three interconnected approaches to environmental harm: environmental justice (which focuses on harm to humans), ecological justice (which focuses on harm to the environment), and species justice (which focuses on harm to nonhuman animals). Examining the efforts of activists and social movements engaged in these causes, White describes the tensions between the three approaches and calls for a new eco-justice framework that will allow for the reconciliation of these differences.
About the Author
Rob White is professor of criminology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania, Australia. His books include Transnational Environmental Crime: Toward an Eco-Global Criminology and Crimes Against Nature.
Table of Contents
List of tables, figures and boxes
About the author
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Environmental harm and social harm approaches
Green criminology and environmental harm
An eco-justice perspective
Conflicting views and moral dilemmas
1 Justice-based approaches to environmental harm
Introduction
Components of an eco-justice perspective
Contentious concepts
Key questions about harm
The moral calculus: weighing up the harm
Conclusion
2 Environmental justice and harm to humans
Introduction
Contentious concepts: environmental justice
Social patterns of harm and risk
Harm, place and the local
Transborder conflicts over land
Conclusion: measuring the value of human life
3 Conservation, ecological justice and harm to nature
Introduction
Contentious concepts: ecological justice
Transforming nature
Land, property and the global commons
Conservationism and social division
Conclusion: measuring the value of nature
4 Species justice and harm to animals
Introduction
Contentious concepts: species justice
Categorising animals
Crime, criminology and animals
Animals, particular species and individuals
Conclusion: measuring the value of animals
5 Toward eco-justice for all
Introduction
Contentious concepts: eco-justice
Nature, species and culture
Socio-economic context of environmental harm
Eco-justice in practice
Conclusion: where to from here?
References
Index