Literature Review

The intensive development of weapons, forms and methods of armed struggle in armed conflicts of the 20th-21st centuries significantly increased the long-term negative impact on the natural environment and actualized the need to formalize generally accepted approaches to minimizing the impact of hostilities on the natural environment as components of international law. As a result, the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I) of June 8, 1977, prohibits to the parties of an armed conflict to use methods or means of warfare intended, which are intended to inflict or, as can be expected, will cause extensive long-term and serious damage to the natural environment (Article 35). At the same time, the application of measures to cause damage to the natural environment as one of the forms of reprisals is prohibited by the specified protocol. During the large-scale invasion of the russian federation into the territory of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the russian occupation forces captured the Chornobyl and Zaporizhzhia NPPs, the Kakhovka HPP and other critical infrastructure facilities. Objectively, as a result of the violation of their regular functioning, the risks of emergency situations with potentially catastrophic consequences for the population and the natural environment have significantly increased. This determined the extreme relevance of remote monitoring of the situation at such facilities. The subject of this publication is the results of remote sensing monitoring of the state of one such critical infrastructure facility, namely the Kakhovka HPP.

The planetary crisis that we face today is not only a result of human-induced environmental degradation, but also of a deep crisis of meaning and value in human existence. In consequence, this article will demonstrate the value of phenomenology towards the existential paradigm within green criminology and its importance to overcome a lived experience that is opposed to the planet’s ecological balance. The article will present Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology through his conception of ‘being-here’, which elaborates on the modes of unreflective and unselfconsciousness of everyday existence. This will then be developed into the theory of being-towards-ecocide that is concerned with the meaning of the individual’s encounter with ecocide. Finally, the value of phenomenology as a conceptual tool for the analysis of green crimes and harms will be outlined as a necessary shift towards transcending ecocide and for an existential, theoretical, and systematic construction for the world of everyday life.

Climate change necessitates urgent legal action at both national and international levels to protect the planet and ensure sustainable global cooperation. The concept of “climate neutrality”, which aims to balance positive and negative emissions to combat climate change effectively, demands the establishment of an effective Climate Criminal Law which should limit climate damaging behaviours while reconciling individual liberties with climate protection. While dogmatic approaches are essential, they encounter difficulties in defining the object of protection, proving causality and addressing social utility concerns. On an institutional level, the development of climate criminal law must involve the community of states, acknowledging that the atmosphere is a shared resource. Therefore, global jurisdiction and transnational cooperation are essential.

Criminal law plays a unique role in protecting environmental rights. Ecocide as an environmental problem is a global problem that has transcended national borders and turned into environmental pollution and regional and global ecosystem problems. The use of criminal law and determining the guarantee of execution, both in the domestic and international dimensions, to protectenvironmental rights, will have an effective impact on the protection of the global environment. Internationally, environmental rights are defined as the right to have a good environment. However, this concept is developing and a precise definition of the crime of ecocide of material and spiritual elements and what place ecocide has in the definition of the crime has not yet been provided. Governments, groups, and companies with power and wealth, as the main cause of environmental destruction, what restrictions do they create in establishing and passing laws related to ecocide? This article analytically and descriptively shows that criminal behavior in the field of environmental crimes is a very serious issue. These behaviors include illegal activities related to water and air pollution, destruction of natural resources, illegal hunting and wildlife trade, migration developments, smuggling of biological products, and other activities that harm the environment as destruction. In other words, the purpose of this research is to map where ecocide is located under the criminal law offense and provide directions for future research.

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In this article we adopt a political economic lens to analyse the revival of the concept of ecocide in present international legal scholarship and practice. The current campaign to codify the crime of ecocide under international criminal law represents the epitome of a problem-solving approach, which conceives of the law as external to society and as a corrective to its evils. Yet, a large body of critical literature has drawn attention to the constitutive role of international law and to the problems with its depoliticized approach when it comes to tackling global injustices. We build upon this diverse scholarship to illuminate how the technical, acontextual, and ahistorical legal debate on the codification of ecocide ends up normalizing the violent structures of extractive capitalism and its hierarchies. Further, we situate the proposed crime within the wider context of how international law regulates and constitutes the natural world. Drawing on critiques of sustainable development and of business and human rights discourse, we argue that the ‘imbroglio’ of ecocide, in its current legal definition, lies in presenting ecological preservation and devastation as simultaneously legitimate aims. The article ultimately raises the question of the role of international law in progressive political agendas, a question that could not be more pressing in times of entangled socio-ecological-economic disruptions.

The paper argues that Myanmar's current political conflict reflects an intersection of ecocide, indigenous struggle, and pro-democracy conflict. The paper observes that in the wake of the February 2021 Myanmar military coup, pro-democracy unrest encompassed a resumption of the military's historical conflicts against various indigenous minorities along with the military's escalation of natural resource extraction. The paper asserts that the military's actions against indigenous peoples and the environment are related, in that Myanmar's natural resources are predominately located within indigenous territories and the military has historically engaged extractive industries to consume those natural resources. As a result, theenvironment exists as a tension point between indigenous aspirations for self-determinationand military operations for domination, making environmental destruction an integral component of Myanmar's current political crisis. The paper frames Myanmar as a demonstration of how ecocide, indigenous peoples, and pro-democracy struggles can be associated together, and draws implications for the manifestation of such an association in conflict zones elsewhere.

Originating from my experience and fascination with the phenomenon of ecological grief, this project travels with the term, investigating it in an effort to think differently about the potentiality of ecological grief, rather than seeking methods for its resolution. I begin by delineating the temporality of grief as it is presently constructed, to make clear how even as ecological grief expands the boundaries of grievability, chrononormative demands constrict ecological grief to remain in accordance with capitalist cycles of consumption and substitution. This constriction forecloses the possibility of ecological grief to be generative, and sees it instead as illness requiring cure. Building from psychoanalysis, queer death studies and queer ecology, I then shift my focus to the concept of ecological melancholia. I present ecological melancholia as a politicized, queer and generative reformulation of ecological grief that resists, rather than naturalizes ecological loss. I explore ecological melancholia specifically for its sensory and temporally disruptive qualities. This presents the phenomenon as an affective mode of relation to the more-than-human that disturbs notions of normative futurity implicit in much environmental discourse. Displacing humanist notions of grief and staying true to my commitment to thinking alongside ecologies, rather than for them, I then illustrate the generative possibilities of ecological melancholia via submergence in what I deem a melancholy ecology. Thus this thesis ends with a journey to boglands. I learn from the ways that bogs “become-with” (Haraway 2008) death so as to begin to imagine alternative futurities outside capitalist chrononormativity, undetermined by the binary of promise and ruin. Instead, alongside the bog, I offer a line of flight for environmental imaginations in Anthropocene scenes of mass death, which foreground staying with what has been deemed ruined, rather than abandoning loss in the quest for continual progress. Alongside theory and analysis, this project incorporates ecopoetics to foreground the embodied, affective, and indeterminate elements of queerly understood ecological grief.

This chapter highlights how the devastation of Mexico's rich natural resources is facilitated by ongoing ties between transnational corporations and government institutions that deny critical environmental protections while marginalizing Indigenous communities and other at-risk populations. The central concepts of ecocide, ethnic rights and extractivism provide a guide for understanding how the intensive exploitation of natural resources for profit does violence to the environment, and to ethnic groups who have long been subordinated in Mexican society. Environmental justice movements are an important form of community action to redress past damage, reclaim rights and territory, protect the future of the planet and assert Indigenous people's rights to exist in peace. The chapter explores recent environmental justice struggles in four regions of Mexico: (1) an Indigenous group based in west-central Mexico attempting to reclaim and protect sacred desert lands known as Wirikuta, (2) a rural and community-based insurrection that returned self-rule and autonomous forest management to the highland town of Cherán, (3) a labor strike by agricultural workers in the Valley of San Quintín export zone near the U.S. California border, (4) infrastructure projects in Southern Mexico that have coincided with environmental activist land defenders being harassed, kidnapped and assassinated.

Over the course of 2021, several local councils across the island of Ireland introduced motions recognizing the ‘Rights of Nature’. To date, little research has been conducted into these nascent Rights of Nature movements, even though they raise important questions about the philosophical, cultural, political, and legal drivers in pursuing such rights. Similarly, much remains unclear as to the implications of such initiatives, both in their domestic context and for Rights of Nature movements around the world. This article contributes to addressing this gap by exploring these themes through an analysis of interviews with key stakeholders conducted across the island of Ireland in June 2022. In particular, it explores the impact of international movements, colonial legacies, cultural heritage, and years of inadequate environmental governance, in motivating local councils to pursue a Rights of Nature strategy.

This article aims to present an analysis of the evolution and contributions developed and integrated into the corpus of Earth Jurisprudence from practice in seven (7) South American countries where 135 records were found between 2005 and 2023. The case study was carried out using the methodological approach of the qualitative approach, the hermeneutic method, and the documentary review technique. The unit of analysis was based on the recognition of rights to nature, the data and information organized according to legal/political provisions, the state, the actor that initiated the action, and the ecological actor involved. Among the most outstanding findings, it is evident that a large number of records are concentrated in Ecuador and Colombia. The first correlates with the constitutionalization of the rights of nature and coincides with the second as they have been part of the stream known as new Latin American constitutionalism. In addition, a notable jurisprudential development recognizes nature as a subject of rights and declares it a victim of the armed conflict. Bolivia, which also joined this emerging denomination, has a different tendency than it had in its beginnings, not as the two countries mentioned above have done. Brazil stands out for its considerable increase in such legislative recognition. Argentina has a stronger emphasis on animal law. Peru has an incipient contribution to some regulatory implementation. Finally, Chile, the most laggard, tries it with a new constitution that recognizes these rights without having the approval at the ballot box. It is concluded the need to elevate the rights of nature and animals to constitutional status, claiming indigenous and ancestral cosmogonies regionally since it includes a legal stability that would facilitate the work of judicial and legislative actors and decision-makers for developing public policies, which would contribute to the practical development of the new Latin American constitutionalism and the Earth Jurisprudence.

Law has long been implicated in the extractivist practices that have made nature a global standing reserve, and the reckoning that is proposed by the discourse of rights of nature is long overdue. But judging by the cases that are held up as the leading precedents of Earth jurisprudence, cases such as that of the Whanganui river, the strategy of ascribing legal personality to natural beings has not achieved that reckoning. The effect of recognizing ‘Nature’ as a person is not to protect it from the depradations of global, corporate, capital. On the contrary, the ascription of personhood to nature merely resolves or suspends tensions that have been generated within the extractivist economy that took shape in the colonial period. And, ironically, this is because the discourse of rights of nature originates in the very epistemic conditions that generated twentieth-century fossil capital. The theoretical impulse generates images of a possible posthuman Earthly legality turns out to be genealogically complicit with the sense of surfeit that was generated by the availability of oil and processed energy (principally gasoline and electrical current), and which nurtured the neoliberal economy.