Abstract
In the decades since the emergence and subsequent rise of green criminology, the climate crisis—or, really, public and social knowledge of the scope of the crisis—has risen more or less alongside it. Supplanting its forebears—nuclear destruction, ozone damage, “pollution”, and so on—in the public imagination as the existential threat of the day, climate change is, clearly, the most immediately salient threat to global social, political, economic, and ecological order. Green criminology has mostly responded and reacted as expected, with climate change claiming territory in just about every research agenda, article, chapter, and syllabus. More traditional criminological thinking is also increasingly grappling with the effects, either speculative or realized, of climate change on crime and crime rates. With the ongoing rise in public knowledge of the extent of the climate crisis and the increased visibility of sociocultural responses to the crisis like Extinction Rebellion and other activist-led “climate justice” movements, it is inevitable that climate change will continue to reign as the dominant issue in criminological conversations surrounding environmental harm.
As is so often the case, though, the published canon finds itself lagging behind the issues as they are known and lived on the ground. This is a particularly frustrating problem for those of us teaching at the intersection of climate change and criminology who often struggle to find suitable readings to build a syllabus around (much less a single volume such as Climate Change Criminology that can, more or less, serve as the sole or primary text for an undergraduate course). Enter Rob White, whose contributions to green criminology and the criminology of climate change cannot be overstated, and whose own agenda has for many years worked to focus the criminological gaze on issues of climate change, climate justice, and harms to the climate driven by powerful industrial, economic, and political interests and actors. In his newest book, Climate Change Criminology, White offers a clear path for criminological engagement with climate change, along the way arguing that such engagement is necessary and noting the moments in which it has already been undertaken. Across the book’s eight chapters—which reflect the author’s characteristic ability to craft the complex and complicated into the clear and concise—White tells us where we have been, where we might go next, and why it is so essential that we continue.
With the book’s opening chapter, “Climate change and criminology”, White describes and sketches the “four key thematic considerations” (p. 10) of climate change criminology. Here, White makes it immediately clear that his titular “climate change criminology” is meant, in some part, to be a call for an orientation, a disciplinary flag planting (more on this shortly), and that this orientation will keep power, social and political relations, justice, and ecological connectedness at the center of its analysis. Moreover, White makes it clear here that this orientation will adopt for itself an epistemic foundation built not on formal academic insights alone, but also on those insights flowing from the often-marginalized voices of the dispossessed. From the start, then, White’s climate change criminology—both the book and the orientation, I suppose—carries on in the critical path carved by green criminology since the 1990s.
Each of the rest of the eight chapters continues in this general direction. Organizing the book around concepts, questions, and issues including the relationship between climate, weather, and crime; the victimological perspectives coalescing around climate change; the ways in which climate change experiences are conditioned by social forces and factors; and the ways in which criminology and criminal justice might respond (or already have responded), White provides a wonderfully succinct but comprehensive overview of the issues. Here, surveying the breadth and readability of the book, its real and formidable utility as a teaching tool becomes clear, and it is for that purpose that the book will likely be most useful: this is, in my estimation, the only existing criminological volume on climate change suitable for use as a core course text for undergraduate classes or as a topical overview for a postgraduate course.
If there is an immediately noticeable omission in the book, it is that culture is left largely unaddressed. Some readers might find themselves wondering how a force as formidable as culture—which, of course, is implicated at every point in the crisis and our responses to it—escapes scrutiny here. A fair criticism, no doubt: the book, like much of the rest of green criminology, only considers culture when it is absolutely and obviously necessary, allowing important cultural forces and dynamics affecting the climate crisis to skate by uninterrogated by White’s analysis. So, while it is otherwise uniquely suited for students at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels alike, the book is probably less useful for informing more established or advanced research agendas that are likely to seek out more complex, contemporary, and critical texts.
There are also concepts and ideas at the core of the book and White’s analysis that are somewhat outmoded in contemporary theoretical analyses of the crisis and the conditions which produced it and which it is producing. While in some ways this is more an issue of the pace of global knowledge production and publishing than it is an issue of any elemental deficiencies in White’s work, his use of concepts and frameworks like “the Anthropocene” and the “slow crisis” of climate change nevertheless escape without critical engagement, despite being taken up much more critically in other contemporary climate literatures outside of criminology (see, generally, Büscher and Fletcher, 2020; Hartley, 2016; Moore, 2016, 2017). Here it also seems worth noting that in both of the above examples—the Anthropocene and the “slow crisis”—critical challenges to the climate lexicon have come, largely, out of the rigorous analysis of the cultural dimensions of climate change and broader challenges to the nature–culture dualism that has long frustrated and conditioned analyses of human–environment relations. It is easy to assume, then, that were White to engage more substantively with the climate–culture nexus that the book would offer a somewhat more cutting-edge vision of a climate change criminology.
This also raises another—and more elemental—issue of critical importance, less a critique of White’s book than of our discipline writ large: can criminology contribute positively to thought and action at the center of the crisis, or is criminology too locked into its historic position as a science that regularly serves to produce and maintain inequality and state violence? Consider that one of the key questions to which White responds is that of criminalization (and, indeed, this is a question that has long haunted green and other critical criminologies) and the potential of a climate change criminology to help transform environmental harm into environmental crime. While we can assert in a unified voice that the climate crisis is constituted by a network of harms that will only deepen and intensify inequality and the suffering of marginalized lives, criminalization presents an immediate analytical hurdle for more critical or radical abolitionist tendencies, or other more foundationally skeptical analyses of state power. Like so much critical criminology before it, climate change criminology begins to feel immediately saddled with the historical baggage always implied when any criminology comes knocking.
While, then, I am not certain that there is a real need to lay claim to a field of study called “climate change criminology” and while I am somewhat skeptical of the utility of any criminology as an analytical intervention in the climate crisis, it is nevertheless abundantly clear that Climate Change Criminology the book is remarkably well suited for the contemporary classroom. The book’s readability, its comprehensive scope, its masterful use of plain language, and its efforts at connecting issues and perspectives make it an indispensable tool for instructors and students alike.