Ecoviolence and the law (supranational normative foundations of ecocrime).

摘要

After working for about ten years on environmental ethics, particularly on the meaning and the implications of ecological and biological integrity, I became convinced that its converse, ecological disintegrity should be viewed as an attack on life, a form of violence to natural systems' structure and function, hence, to all living things at the macro level, and an assault on human life, and on the natural function of human organisms at the micro level. Ongoing interaction with scientists, ecologists, biologists and epidemiologists informed my conclusions, eventually confirmed by a document produced by the WHO/ECEH Rome Office (Soskolne and Bertollini, 1999). This document, entitled "Ecological Integrity and Sustainable Development: Cornerstones of Public Health," brought into focus the work of several years of research and numerous publications, making explicit the connection between disintegrity including various forms of pollution, and its causes, such as hazardous industrial practices, and in general, the results of overconsumption and of the elimination of natural systems. It also emphasized the resulting fatalities, human morbidity, and the alteration, often irreversible, of natural human functions. In so doing, it was foundational for the argument I propose in this work: breaches of environmental regulations, whether domestic or international, are ultimately to be viewed as breaches of human rights law.; Assaults upon humans, whether perpetrated with bare hands or with other instruments of violence, are crimes. If the deprivation of necessary ecological integrity, either by encroachment and manipulation of the wild, or inquination and pollution of inhabited areas is a present and constant threat to human health and function, ultimately to human life, then that too is an assault, therefore a crime that must be viewed, treated, and punished accordingly. The fact that in present day legal infrastructure it is not so treated represents an additional moral "crime" in itself.