Green crime and victimization: Tensions between social and environmental justice

Abstract

In 2011, Rio Tinto Alcan, one of the world’s largest producers of aluminium, announced the closure of the smelter at Lynemouth, Northumberland, north-east England. The plant, a major local employer, finally closed in March 2013. This article examines global concerns about environmental emission standards and the costs of compliance. This plant’s closure is a success in green terms. However, where closure is officially considered a compliance option, costs to deprived communities are high. From a (green) victimological perspective, the article contemplates the hidden costs of closure on already deprived local and regional communities. The discussion focuses on how green crime and green compliance creates victimization and reflects on the moral and ethical challenges this presents for a green criminology.

Keywords

Environmental green crime social harm social justice victimization

Introduction

The closure of the Rio Tinto Alcan (RTA) aluminium plant in Lynemouth, Northumberland, in the north-east of England is the starting point for a case study of tensions around social and environmental justices and victimizations. Social justice concerns are about the physical, economic and social impact of industrial contraction upon employees and other workers whose livelihoods and disposable income depend upon the existence of the plant. These extend to concerns about the local and regional economy and relationships and experiences in the aftermath of the closure, including the impact on work, gender relations, social networks, younger generations, family and social life. Thus, broader social concerns exist about the future of communities where closure happens. These can be represented as additional costs. Such costs have been obscured or rendered invisible on the global stage.

This article contextualizes the significance of this plant to the local and regional rural communities and provides an outline of the plant’s closure as linked to energy costs and emerging legislation. It foregrounds the green and environmental perspective in criminology and global concerns about environmental emission standards and compliance. Part of the justification for RTA’s closure of this plant was the financial cost to the business of achieving compliance with a European directive. This plant was an industrial giant sitting at the very heart of the local and regional community, and this case study illustrates how the impact of pressures to be compliant with regulatory standards effectively prevented the survival of the plant. This dilemma is facing communities all over the world, including those with low regulatory standards. The closure of this plant is a success in green terms. However, where closure is officially considered a compliance option, costs, particularly to already impoverished local and regional communities, are disproportionately high. In the move from the global to the local, this article illustrates how social costs are hidden as compared with the more visible global environmental or ‘green’ concerns about environmental emissions standards and compliance strategies. It illustrates how social and environmental justices appear to collide and be jointly and equally unsustainable. When green/brown (environmental) concerns appear to be prioritized, they engender further social harms and impact negatively on local and regional communities.

Though sympathetic to a harms-based approach, the ensuing discussion reflects on the lasting potential of a green perspective within criminology. It considers these tensions as conflicts of interests and argues for the imperative to weigh and balance these tensions and costs. The discussion takes account of the key concerns of a green criminology, alongside concerns for, and of, communities affected by the implementation of environmental policies. In exploring the nuances of what constitutes harm and victimization in such scenarios, the article also considers the relative worth and seriousness of different types of harms and exemplifies some of the tensions and dilemmas when these are juxtaposed. The suggestion is for a green dialogue on these issues and for a green victimological research agenda to draw attention to such trading of costs.

Case study: Rio Tinto Alcan and the aluminium smelter at Lynemouth

In November 2011, Rio Tinto Alcan (RTA) announced it would close the Lynemouth aluminium smelter near Ashington in Northumberland and in March 2012, RTA confirmed that the plant would shut on 29 March 2013. The plant is now being de-commissioned. The power station has been bought.

Rio Tinto is a leading industrial mining group and a global leader in the aluminium industry. It is one of the world’s largest producers of bauxite, alumina and aluminium. Aluminium is a lightweight yet strong product which is used to manufacture other recyclable and ‘green’ products with low carbon footprints. Smelting technology, together with hydropower (in some plants), combines to allow the company to boast a principled approach to sustainable development. The Lynemouth smelter in Northumberland, England, opened in 1972. Until late in 2012 it employed 515 people, with a further 111 employed at the local coal fired power station. Adding to this were 200 directly contracted workers and hundreds more indirectly in work connected to the plant at Lynemouth. In the early 1990s the numbers employed at the plant reached a peak, employees in the casting plant alone were just under 1000 but, in that decade, these numbers were halved.

When Lynemouth became the home to the Alcan (since 2007 RTA) aluminium smelter and the power station in the early 1970s, there was a ready-made workforce, which was part of the pull factor for the company being attracted to the area. Lynemouth and Ellington are villages close to the town of Ashington in Northumberland, a sizeable geographical area encompassing remote rural areas bordering Scotland in the north, Cumbria in the west and the more urban area of North Tyneside to the south, with the coast to the east. Ellington was a village serving a coal pit which closed in 2005. Transport links via the port of Blyth allowed for the importation of bauxite, alumina and, after the closure of the pit at Ellington, coal and coke to Lynemouth. Good road and rail links were also key drivers of industry’s attraction to the area and for the success of the smelting operation. The pit at Ellington was, for a long time, the only remaining pit open in the region.

Coal mine closures in the early 1980s had left thousands of men in the region unemployed. The local closures were, of course, part of the general contraction throughout the European Community of coal mining. In England and Wales, this ultimately resulted in the Miners’ Strike of 1985 (Stead, 1987). Following de-industrialization in geographically isolated areas and single occupational communities, scholars have explored the human consequences of immiseration (Stead, 1987; Waddington, 2003; Waddington and Parry, 2003; Waddington et al., 1994; Wray and Stephenson, 2012). According to these analyses, Marx’s concept of immiseration is useful to any understanding of the consequences of post-industrialism.

Such was the rate of social and economic degeneration following the pit closures in this particular region in the north-east that the British government granted £28 million to the Canadian owned company Alcan to help reduce unemployment in the local authority area of Wansbeck. Since the decline of shipbuilding, the closure of the docks and the demise of the fishing industry in the north-east, the villages surrounding Ashington have long been isolated. The Wansbeck area generally has experienced de-industrialization, and few alternative opportunities for employment of any description exist in the region.

Lynemouth and the towns in the south-east part of the county of Northumberland score poorly across a range of indicators of deprivation. Out of 32,482 local super output areas (LSOAs) across the country,¹ almost 50 per cent of the areas in Northumberland are in the top 400 most deprived. Northumberland falls into the 50 most deprived local authorities for employment scale (number of people employment deprived) and is ranked 29th most deprived. Northumberland is ranked 53rd most deprived for the number of people income deprived. In the income deprivation domain, 13 Northumberland LSOAs fall into the most deprived 10 per cent and 20,221 people live in the most deprived areas. Wages in the county are lower than the national average, with the weekly average (median) pay being £474 compared to £508 in England (2011). In terms of benefits claimants as a percentage of working age population, the neighbourhood had more than double the number of those in England on benefit, job seekers’ allowance and incapacity benefits in 2010. South-east Northumberland contains the majority of the LSOAs that fall into the most deprived 30 per cent. Blyth is ranked the 400th most deprived area in England, falling into the most deprived 2 per cent of LSOAs. All LSOAs in the worst 10 per cent of the IMD (Index of Multiple Deprivation) 2010 fall into the south-east area of Northumberland, all contained within the former Blyth Valley and Wansbeck Districts. This area also contains several LSOAs that fall into the 30 per cent most deprived.

Furthermore, in terms of education and health deprivation, the neighbourhood has one of the highest levels on both of these scores, and people were 10 per cent less likely to rate themselves as in very good health as compared with the national average for England. The most extreme levels of deprivation in the Health Deprivation and Disability domains are concentrated in the south-east of the county. Levels of children in need are often linked to levels of deprivation, and one recent reports suggests that children are suffering as the pressure builds on families in the north-east, which has the highest proportion of children in need in England. Out of 12 local authority areas in the north-east, Northumberland has the fourth highest proportion of children in need in 2011–2012 (Warburton, 2013).

Background and outline of the closure

The power station at Lynemouth uses coal to produce electricity for the energy source to supply the smelter. The plant at Lynemouth has high energy needs and therefore costs. Coal is less efficient than other energy sources, and, as a fossil fuel, it produces carbon emissions and air pollution. In some other parts of the world, including Lochaber, Scotland, power is hydroelectric (HEP)—water driven, making these aluminium plants less costly, more efficient and ‘greener’. In simple terms, coal could be seen as the source of the problem, leading to the plant’s closure. It is a pollutant and unecological.

When, in November 2011, it was announced that RTA would close the Lynemouth aluminium smelter, subject to the completion of a 90-day consultation process with employee and union representatives, the press release also announced that the company was in exclusive discussions regarding the potential sale of the power station at the site. It stated that all affected employees would receive support, including re-training and job-search assistance, in order to mitigate the impact of any closure. In 2011, Jacynthe Côté, chief executive of Rio Tinto Alcan, reported:

This decision follows a thorough strategic review which explored every possible option for continuing to operate the smelter and power station. However, it is clear the smelter is no longer a sustainable business because its energy costs are increasing significantly, due largely to emerging legislation. We are hopeful that the power station can remain in operation under new ownership.

(RTA, 2011: 1)

On 6 March 2012, it was confirmed that RTA would close the Lynemouth aluminium smelter. Production at the smelter ended at 2 pm on 29 March 2012. The carbon plant and pot rooms closed. Production in the casting plant ceased on 2 November 2012. Rail operations and equipment lay idle, alumina no longer being needed. Orders however, were fulfilled until March 2013. This was achieved by the shipment of aluminium from Russia.

Prior to the closure, in 2009, the managing director had been upbeat. The Lynemouth power station had served the smelter and the communities which depend on it for well over 30 years. There had been heavy investment in a programme of continuous improvement to the plant’s environmental performance and to its world-class levels of energy efficiency. The Environmental Report for 2009 (RTA, 2009) summarizes the CO₂ emissions from the power station, and, in 2009, it claimed to be one of the best in its class for CO₂ emissions per unit of generation due to high plant efficiency. There were continued improvements in 2009, due to reduced coal burn following a record biomass burn. The power station, however, emitted 2.5million tonnes of CO₂ emissions, thus, looking to the future, the proposal was to secure funding to convert one of the three 140 megawatt generating units in the power station to carbon capture storage (CCS) technology and, as a result, increase energy generation from that unit by more than 150 per cent. Carbon emissions from the unit would be removed, transported via under-sea pipeline and stored safely in an off-shore aquifer. In the meantime, the power station would continue to set targets for the use of biomass to displace coal combustion and decrease CO₂ emissions. During 2009, 40,419 tonnes of biomass were used, the highest since biomass co-firing began during 2004.

In the same year—2009—the Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited Lynemouth power station to discuss proposals to demonstrate carbon capture and storage at the site. He acknowledged that the development of CCS technologies would be an important part of energy generation in the future and gave assurances that the UK government was looking at Lynemouth Power Station as a possible investment opportunity to develop a visionary retrofit project to convert one of the three 140MW units to integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) configuration with carbon capture to give an output of 375MW. The Prime Minister said:

I’ve been hugely impressed by the scale of the operation and by the technology you use. The North East of England has a long history of being at the forefront of energy innovation and with what you are proposing on carbon capture and storage, Rio Tinto Alcan and this region can lead the world in this important technology.

(Brown, 2009 in RTA, 2009: 5)

Energy costs and emerging legislation

The energy costs and emerging legislation referred to by the CEO in the November 2011 press release concern emissions from large combustion plants and concern for the environment. In April 2010, the European Court of Justice ruled that the power plant was subject to the emission limit values laid down in an environmental treaty in 2001 to fight global warming. This took the form of a directive—2001/80/EC of the European Parliament on the limitation of emissions of certain pollutants into the air from large combustion plants—the Kyoto Protocol. The UK government had been unable to succeed in court in challenging the categorizing of the smelter at Lynemouth as a large combustion plant, and the fate of the plant now looked distinctly gloomy. Following the court case, the plant was given just a matter of weeks to comply with the directive 2010/75/EC on industrial emissions (a recast of various component directives including that on large combustion plants 2001/80/EC). If it did not, the government would be liable to pay fines to the European Commission for failing to implement the directive properly.

As noted earlier, the managing director had, in 2009, been boasting that the power station had world-class levels of energy efficiency and was the best in its class for CO₂ emissions per unit of generation, due to high plant efficiency. Nevertheless, RTA Lynemouth CO₂ emissions are around 350,000 tonnes. This site total CO₂ figure is dwarfed by the contribution from the coal fired power station which emits 2.5 million tonnes. The CO₂ emissions from the smelter (pot rooms and casting emissions) are more complex because low level PFCs (polyflurocarbons) emissions from ‘anode effects’ during the smelting operations need to be considered. The aim is to have as few anode effects as possible. Gas used in the furnaces is the main source of CO₂ production in the carbon plant (carbon anode plant emissions).

Table 1 shows the calculated costs to the business from compliance with the various strands of new or impending legislation. Clearly, all of the costs are increasing. The projected cost from the Large Combustion Plants Directive (LCPD) increases almost fivefold in 2011–2015 to a total of £31m. This is alongside further projected costs from 2013 to 2015 arising from the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) and Carbon Price Support (CPS). These projected costs add a further £74m costs onto the £31m—totalling £105m projected costs from compliance with the various strands of new or impending legislation.

Table 1.

Emissions data and projected costs.

	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
LCPD	£7m	£11m	£17m	£28m	£31m
EU ETS	NA	NA	£46m	£46m	£46m
CPS	NA	NA	£10	£21m	£28m
Total	£7m	£11m	£73m	£95m	£105m

Notes: LCPD = Large Combustion Plants Directive; EU ETS - European Union Emissions Trading Scheme; CPS = Carbon Price Support.

In 2007 when the company became RTA, the market price of aluminium was at its height. Rio Tinto PLC had built its reputation as a leading mining group of copper and iron ore. The criterion of a 40 per cent rate of return had become the standard from its businesses. In the aluminium processing industry a rather different policy had operated. Alcan had included measures of worldwide smelter performances in its business model and the plant did not risk closure according to these criteria though other plants did close between 2003 and 2006. Since 2007, due to the gross margin level in a processing, rather than mining, industry, it was always going to be very difficult to achieve a 40 per cent rate of return, especially when power costs at a particular plant are high. Though this rate of return is not rigidly applied across Europe, the Lynemouth smelter faced further losses through emerging environmental legislation and the price of aluminium has dropped significantly since 2007 too. RTA’s criterion of a 40 per cent rate of return from its businesses would be impossible to achieve if the plant were required to become compliant by 2014. The British government decided it would not just meet emissions targets but would set much higher standards. This decision effectively sealed the fate of the plant. Closure left business to go to countries such as China, Russia and elsewhere across the globe, where there are fewer emission standards to comply with, if any. Rio Tinto took the decision to focus on its assets that were large, long-life, low-cost. Lynemouth was considered to be none of those.

Tensions, costs and losses

What happened following the optimism, noted earlier, from the Managing Director and the (ex) Prime Minister in 2009 concerning the power plant and sustainable energy? Part of the explanation for the closure, as proffered by the Chief Executive, was emerging environmental regulations and legislation. This begs the question—should the British government have worked harder to find a solution to the environmental challenges? Compliance could be achieved in one of three ways: one, achieve the emissions standards (known as Emission Limit Values). This was impossible via the existing technology at the plant and would, therefore, require a hugely expensive retrofit (c. £250–£300m); two, purchase sulphur credits from plants that were emitting less than their permitted levels; three, close. Under the scope of the directive, closure was not a consequence of the legislation; it was officially considered a compliance option.

Reducing the probability of dangerous climate change is of course a significant challenge, and doing so in a socially just way creates additional challenges for governments (Friends of the Earth, 2011). While the challenges for governments are significant and include debating the principles that policy-makers adhere to, the discussion here examines the challenges these scenarios pose for a green criminology/victimology. The closure of this plant is a success in (British) green terms. Yet the brunt of the costs to achieving this are felt by those living in an isolated and already impoverished rural community. This green achievement is now considered and juxtaposed against the notion of a victimized community. The discussion is framed loosely around the seriousness of different types of harms and injustices. First, green issues are foregrounded. Second, victimized communities are explored. Third, a sociological analysis is introduced.

Foregrounding the green

The foundations of green criminology are to be found in ecofeminism, environmental racism and ecological socialism, whereby each variously see the rich minority exploiting the poor majority on a global scale (Lynch, 1990). A green criminology or green perspective seeks a green, environmental and ecological justice. Environmental crimes, non-compliance and risks create harms to the health of humans and the natural world (Gibbs et al., 2010). Environmental harm is itself deemed to be a (social and ecological) crime, regardless of its legal status as a crime—if harm is done to humans or environments or animals, then this ought to be considered a ‘crime’. A green perspective, therefore, raises some controversial issues about what constitutes crime. The politics of definition and denial (White, 2008: 88) come into play here and there are collisions between what constitutes crime, harm, injury and injustice (White, 2011). A harms-based discourse ‘zemiology’ is relevant to such understandings (Hillyard et al., 2004) where the study of harms includes crimes as well as non-criminal victimizations and experiences of injustice, unfairness and prejudice. Often, though not always, a green perspective signals a harms-based discourse as opposed to a crime-based discourse. Harms-based proponents argue that crime has no ontological reality and serves to maintain power relations, that criminalization is ineffective and counter-productive and that addressing social injustice is a priority (Hillyard, 2005; Hillyard and Tombs, 2007; Hillyard et al., 2004). A harms-based approach takes on an expansive definition of harm (or victimization), where justice is achieved, according to Hudson (2001: 278), by adhering to the following principles: ‘The fair distribution of opportunities, rewards and responsibilities in society. Principles and institutions for the distribution of meaningful social goods—income, shelter, food, health, education, freedom to pursue individual goals.’ A green society would be one in which, among other aspirations, humans would live in ways which minimally disrupt the rest of nature. Present generations ought to act in ways that do not jeopardize the existence and quality of life of future generations. In green terms, coal, as a fossil fuel, produces greenhouse gas emissions and is a pollutant contributing to global warming by increasing the levels of carbon dioxide in the air and, in turn, contributing to the depletion of the ozone layer. Hundreds of the dirtiest coal fired power stations across Europe are currently under threat of closure by 2015 (Gosden, 2013). Protagonists make a strong and convincing case for such issues to be a criminological concern:

Simply put the world is warming and evidence is provided from a range of sources attesting to this … Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, in particular, have risen quite sharply over the last two centuries and more evidence is offered in support of this together with predictions about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere quadrupling by 2100 producing climate related disasters including heat waves, hurricanes, drought, and varieties of flooding.

(Wachholz, 2007: 163)

Some have acknowledged that a foregrounding of the green in criminology must be premised on the principles of environmentalism and broader issues of environmental justice (Walters, 2007: 199). Benton (2007) also recognizes that green issues pose deep and serious questions for established views on justice and, vice-versa, that considerations of justice pose a challenge to some versions of green social and political thought. Skinnider (2011: 2) points out that: [M]any environmental disruptions are actually legal and take place with the consent of society. Classifying what is an environmental crime involves a complex balancing of communities’ interest in jobs and income with ecosystem maintenance, biodiversity and sustainability.’

Gibbs et al. (2010: 133) focuses on the criminalization debate: ‘A grey area emerges for environmental risks that are not currently subject to regulation or criminal enforcement but where further understanding of the risk may lead stakeholders to argue for regulation and/or criminalization.’ Thus, for some, this invites debate about which harms constitute serious harms and which ought to be considered a crime. From White’s (2008) perspective, environmental degradation is a crime, regardless of legal status as a crime. There are different views about how to achieve an environmental justice, though essentially the debate is similar to that rehearsed by those concerned about white collar and corporate crimes and which have manifested themselves in the regulation or compliance versus criminalization debate (see the exchange between Hawkins and Pearce and Tombs in the 1990 and 1991 editions of the British Journal of Criminology—Hawkins, 1990, 1991; Pearce and Tombs, 1990, 1991). However, it is clear what the ambitions of a green perspective are, and, in the context of the closure of the plant at Lynemouth, there are at least three green connections. First, green criminology demands that air pollution be seen as a serious crime, offence and injurious type of behaviour. Second, effective compliance strategy should be in place to enforce regulations and to reduce air quality problems. Third, green issues open up a range of possibilities for interdisciplinary work. A green criminology directs attention to causes of harms, crimes and conflicts as well as the related connections and consequences. Within green criminology several scholars have acknowledged that environmental harms tend adversely to affect specific individuals and groups such as the poor, racial minorities and the disadvantaged much more than they do more powerful social strata (Stretesky, 2003; Stretesky and Lynch, 2002; White, 2007, 2011). Wachholz (2007: 161) has drawn attention to the bearing of gender inequality on women’s vulnerabilities to the adversities associated with climate change and she illustrates the ways in which climate change encourages male violence against women while Lynch and Stretesky (2012) focus on five examples of environmental injustice against Native Americans to document how Native American communities bear much of the brunt of the ill effects of toxic hazards and pollutants. In the case study here we see how a green perspective on crime has successfully achieved effective compliance strategies through the closure of the plant. We now explore the closure due to green concerns with a view from sociology and with insights from victimology. From this interdisciplinary and harms-based perspective, we now examine some of the related connections and consequences through the concept of victimized communities.

A victimized community?

As Evans and Fraser (2004) have argued, there are several links between communities and victimization. In the context of this article, an appreciation of potentially negative impacts, such as job and disposable income losses as a consequence of closure, are considered as victimological harms. The related economic and social connections and affective consequences of closure in an isolated and already impoverished community, as described earlier, are explored below. In order to appreciate the relevance of a victimized community, first, victimological concepts are explored.

From a critical social science perspective, victimologists (Davies et al., 1999, 2004, 2007) suggest that ‘invisible’ social harms and injustices take place within the global world that are worthy of examination. Such harms incur suffering akin to victimization, yet are rendered invisible for a number of reasons, including their non-crime status. Such harms impact substantially on the lives of their victims and the communities in which they occur, and, in turn, these injustices impact heavily on the work of social, health, welfare and criminal justice agencies and other regulatory bodies. It is not a crime to close an industrial plant, yet doing so in an area whose economic wealth is generated almost exclusively from a single industry causes significant further harms and losses that impact substantially in terms of costs to individuals, families and communities.

The concepts of indirect, tertiary and secondary victimization in part explain suffering that does not meet the criteria of criminal victimization (Davies, 2011a). The concept of secondary victimization refers to those who are indirectly harmed following criminal victimization, for example, the significant others of murder or rape victims. This is also sometimes known as indirect or tertiary victimization. Essentially, it draws attention to the impact that crime has on those not directly involved in the particular event concerned but to a wider circle of ‘victims’ who may have been affected by a particularly shocking event or life-changing experience. Another meaning of secondary victimization is similar to being re-victimized. Here, victimization occurs at the hands of criminal justice system staff or anyone else responding to an offence. It results from the insensitive treatment of significant others, bystanders, witnesses, victims of crime—often inadvertently—by the criminal justice system (or by friends and acquaintances). Barristers, jurors, police officers may be a cause of secondary victimization and, through their insensitivity, may exacerbate feelings of victimization (Davies, 2011a). In the context of this article’s case study, those vicariously victimized are those individuals and families in the local and regional community who bear the brunt of the closure. They have been disempowered, and a major plank of their social capital has been removed. They have experienced the equivalent of having been robbed of their jobs and financial resources, and their chances of replacing these losses in the aftermath of the closure, by legitimate means, are, as the deprivation data suggest, severely restricted.

The question of whether higher environmental standards threaten employment levels is vexing. Though there is little published on this, there is some recent research, in the very different context of the north-east states of the USA, that supports the argument that there is no detrimental effect. A report on an 11-state regional clean fuels programme suggests that Green House Gas (GHG) emissions can be reduced by introducing low carbon fuels. At the same time, this would have a small but positive impact on jobs, gross regional product and disposable income (NESCAUM, 2011). While this does not support the arguments being developed in this article, it does suggest that empirical work within such communities to explore what social harms have or have not befallen them as a consequence of closure is worthwhile.

Alongside the relevance of victimological concepts for understanding the predicament of residents in south-east Northumberland, equally important are their affective experiences. Within the social sciences, sociological perspectives are increasingly suggesting that human emotion is important generally in understanding social relations, and, increasingly, emotions are seen as a crucial link between micro and macro levels of social reality. Subjective, embodied and experiential aspects of social change are important (see Davies, 2011a, 2011b), and virtually all theories of emotions in society visualize emotions as mobilizing and guiding behaviour (Turner and Stets, 2005). If policies at very local levels are to be seen and experienced as fair and just, grass-roots understanding (Davies, 2008) of where the impacts of change would have the greatest emphasis—on families and sets of personal relationships, on local social dynamics, formal and informal networks in communities—is essential. Closures due to policy change emanating from Europe can be viewed and experienced as far removed, abstracted and damaging if broader and potentially destructive unintended consequences are not adequately considered.

While an ethics of sympathy and affective civilities more generally is difficult to achieve in the new ‘civilized’ barbarism inspired by neoliberalism, which makes empathy and compassionate sentiments difficult to expand past domestic sentimentalism, this does not justify a paucity of theoretical discussion and debate that brings emotion back in (Davies, 2011b). In drawing together these arguments around the concept of victimization, together with an ethic of affective civility, to understand the predicament of those experiencing the aftermath of the closure, Lynemouth and its surrounding area emerges as a victimized community. While continuing to draw on the affective dimensions to the closure, these additional costs of closure to the community are now extended with reference to previous sociological analysis of similarly devastated communities.

Sociological analysis

Three of the eight characteristics belonging to pit communities identified by Bulmer in 1975 are physical isolation, the economic preponderance of a single industry and a working-class majority of the population. These applied to the communities around Lynemouth when the plant closed. Bulmer’s remaining five characteristics (daily experience of arduous work pervading the community; endemic industrial conflict; segregated gender roles; leisure public and male dominated; and social networks close-knit, overlapping and supportive) have been slipping away from this community since the closure of the pits. These defining characteristics of the local and regional communities might now be lost forever. They are additional costs, yet to be measured and quantified; the qualitative assessment of these invisible costs has yet to be exposed.

Studies in the wake of the closure of the coal mines and demise of the pit communities have explored sociological questions about the effects of closure on family and social life and the impact on family relations, including money problems, stress, illness, family disputes and young people’s futures (Stead, 1987; Waddington et al., 1991). The gendered nature of the experiences and activisms following closures is a key theme in such work and the gender patterns to crime and victimization are well established. Furthermore, there is a gender patterning to emotions linked to victimization. As women, and as indirect, tertiary and secondary victims, we feel the pains, harms and victimizations of those close to us (Davies, 2008). Women’s emotional labour involves responding to others’ stresses and distresses in a selfless ‘caring’ way (Lupton, 1998). This suggests a gender bias in the nature of emotional work. Women appear to bear a disproportionate burden of harm, suffering and victimization by taking on the woes of others (Davies, 2011b). Northumberland has an ageing male and female population; a trend which is set to continue. These trends have implications in terms of the services provided as well as the prospects for community activism, social and economic rejuvenation.

The dependence of the mining community in Lynemouth on the pits as a major employer was transferred to a dependence on Alcan in the 1970s. This second closure of a single industry major employer in the area reinforces an already existing pessimism about present and future employment prospects. Unlike the chronology of the miners’ strike (February 1984–March 1985), the chronology of the closure of the RTA plant has not had the same ‘cause célèbre’. There has been no significant trade union or any such strike activity. Unlike the miners’ strike, there was no ‘coming together’, no international politics and no militancy. Indeed, in Britain, membership of trade unions has declined yet membership in green and animal welfare organizations has risen dramatically. Increasingly, with little prospect of future employment, those actively seeking employment, and especially young people, will have no option other than to move away or risk exclusion from the labour market. The local authority is keenly aware of the need to put in place polices which help retain the young and the 50–59 age group, where the largest projected falls are expected to occur (NCC, 2012).

As a rural and deprived community, in Lynemouth the negative social justice impacts are compounded and are likely to increase inequalities in the region and increase the pressures towards anti-social behaviour and crime in the decimated communities of Blyth and Ashington. Areas in the three most deprived deciles of the crime domain are already concentrated in these two towns in the south-east area of Northumberland (ONS, 2011). Degeneration of community, as Crawford (1997: 151) explains, ‘is viewed as both the cause and effect of crime and the fear of crime’, so that, ‘rebuilding community, it is supposed, will lead to less crime’. A weakening of informal social control mechanisms—those ties that link people together in relations with each other and with community-based institutions (e.g. schools, family and work)—is likely to have a deleterious effect in terms of decreasing levels of ‘social capital’—resources and skills that individuals can draw upon throughout their life course and that derive from positive and ‘interdependent’ relationships with local social institutions such as school, family and workplace (Sampson and Laub, 1993: 19). These relationships connect residents and local institutions to resources which, in turn, influence the wider public sphere. As Hope (1995: 24) states:

the paradox of community crime prevention … stems from the problem of trying to build community institutions that control crime in the face of their powerlessness to withstand the pressures towards crime in the community, whose source, or the forces that sustain them, derive from the wider structure.

Spence and Stephenson (2007: 311) paint a stark picture in ex-mining villages:

Pit closures and related socio-economic decline have been accompanied by weakening and fragmentation of the masculine organisational framework in which local cultural norms, with their gemeinschaft characteristics (Tönnies, 1955; Bauman, 2001) were previously reproduced in the public domain. Inevitably, the loss of work and the destruction of associated systems of socialisation, power and cultural reproduction have been accompanied, as predicted (Samuel et al., 1986), by an increase in the range of problems associated with low income, insecurity and decreased levels of civic participation (Putnam, 2001; Waddington, 2003). In degraded environments, where the identifying adjective ‘mining’ no longer has a material reference point, it has been difficult to sustain ‘community’ derived from connections between work and place with assumptions of collective endeavour reflecting patterns of male work underground. As place of residence and rhythms of life cease to revolve around the mine, the family and neighbourhood base of women’s traditional role in community is also disturbed. Meanwhile, young people have no visible reference point for inheriting a common culture located in local community life and relationships.

In bringing this discussion of tensions and costs to a close, it is appropriate to draw attention to a point made by Nigel South (2007: 235) seven years ago:

One consistent theme in global political discourse about environmental rights is the need to establish a reasonable balance of interests between environmental protection and the costs of providing this. This has been seen in operation at a global level as part of the underlying opposition of the USA to the Kyoto agreement, viewed by US anti-environmental ‘hawks’ as a European conspiracy to damage America’s competitiveness and ‘reduce’ its standard of living to European levels.

This quote captures the delicate balancing act which involves making compromises between different interests, for example economic costs and environmental considerations. The costs referred to are largely economic or fiscal costs. The earlier discussion of the broader social and affective civilities is not cast solely or mainly in monetary terms. It is nuanced by the inclusion of additional social costs to closure and the less visible losses to those in local communities.

Conclusion: Justice for all?

Official responses to environmental harm tend to be guided by a concern with environmental protection. Policies and regulations are designed to prevent or minimize destructive or injurious practices into the future, based upon analysis and responses to harms identified in the present. But the moral and ethical challenge for a green criminology is when, why and how should green justice override other risks and harm to communities. In this case, a green view of justice collides with other communitarian accounts of justice.

This article underlines the potential diffuse and negative impact the closure of a single large employer may have on people’s lived experiences with risks of, in the aftermath of closure, a degeneration of community. The article has explored tensions that appear to represent value conflicts between social and environmental justice. The causes of death to this plant—corporate greed, LCPD, the new EU Policy Industrial Emissions Directive (IED) and the Carbons Price Floor—have cost jobs, with the likelihood of increasing inequalities and poverty. The social right to livelihood is pitted against the environment and imperatives to sustain environments (Benton, 2007: 46). I conclude by suggesting there is a further sub-set of research around a communitarian victimization that seeks to explore unidentified regressive impacts resulting from some environmental policies and the potentially discriminatory nature of environmental justice. Here it is suggested that the closure of production plants due to carbon emissions disproportionately affects poorer localities and lower classes. The direction for the new research agenda may be a more sustainable approach ‘consistent with the broader sustainable development principles of meeting all people’s needs within environmental limits’ (Friends of the Earth, 2011: 25).

The aluminium plant at Lynemouth has closed. The power plant on which it depended for energy is still open but, along with other ‘dirty’ power stations in Europe, its future remains unclear. At the time of writing, Britain has just closed three giant coal power plants, Kingsnorth in Kent, Cockenzie in Scotland and Didcot A in Oxfordshire (Gosden, 2013). The closure of major industrial plants and of our ‘dirty’ power stations is a success story for green environmental policies. This success comes at a very high price to those in already impoverished communities who have been abandoned by major employers. As noted earlier, within green criminology there is acknowledgement that some people and communities are more likely to be disadvantaged by environmental problems than others. The inhabitants of Didcot and its environs are likely to differ profoundly in terms of social structural demographics from those in Lynemouth, and closure there is less likely to have such a disruptive deleterious impact. In the more affluent area of Oxfordshire the inhabitants and community are less likely to be disadvantaged in the immediate and longer term. The conflict between green gains and social justice is more obvious in poorer communities like Lynemouth than in more affluent communities like Didcot. In broader social policy terms, the case study lends weight to the arguments of Lynch and colleagues who suggest there is an inherent contradiction and conflict between the structures of capitalism and nature where ‘pollution is a cost of production in the contemporary system of capitalism’ (Lynch et al., 2013: 1006). Following this view the national green success is a global green wash. Insights from victimology and from sociologists’ studies of previously affected communities offer gloomy prospects regarding the impacts on social networks, the consequences for the younger generation in particular and the rebuilding of communities. The regressive impact of increased social inequality and poverty in the north-east of England is not likely to feel like sustainable development to the people and families who have lost their livelihoods in and around Lynemouth and Ashington.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Pamela Ann Davies is Programme Director and Principal Lecturer in Criminology in the Department of Social Sciences and Languages, at Northumbria University. She is currently conducting research on justice and vulnerability and recent publications focus on gender, crime and victimization.

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