Ecocide - definition

The humanitarian crisis of the Second World War required the word ‘genocide’ to describe the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. So it is in 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity, that the current environmental crisis calls for new language to describe the extensive damage and loss of ecosystems of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes. That word is ecocide.

DEFINITION

ecocide: the extensive damage to and loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished.

Non-ascertainable ecocide describes the outcome, or potential outcome, where there is damage and loss to the territory per se, but without specific identification of the cause by human agency.

Ascertainable ecocide describes the outcome, or potential outcome, where there is damage and loss to the territory, and determination can be made of the instigator(s) of cause (or omission) of action directly or indirectly resulting in ecocide. In such cases, ascertainable ecocide applies to strict/absolute, reckless and vicarious liability.

Non-ascertainable ecocide

Where ecocide is established but causation is in doubt or the perpetrators are not determinable (for instance, due to a naturally occurring event such as an earthquake), this need not prevent application of immediate remedy. The threatened/damaged territory must be afforded emergency remedy for the ecosystems and species (including human) therein.

Examples of non-specific ecocide territories:
  • the threatened existence of the low lying Maldives due to rising sea levels;
  • the shrinking of the Greenland ice sheet;
  • the melting of the Himalayan Glaciers;
  • the pacific gyre, the ‘island of garbage twice the size of Texas’, slowly spinning in the ocean.

Ascertainable ecocide

Cause is due to identifiable human related activity (or the failure to act). Prosecution of the legal person(s), with whom responsibility lies for the causing of the resultant damage is thus possible.

Human agency liability can be deliberate, reckless or absolute. The destruction of large areas of the environment and ecosystems can be caused directly or indirectly by various activities, such as nuclear testing, exploitation of resources, extractive practices, dumping of harmful chemicals, use of defoliants, emission of pollutants or war. Criminal prosecution of ecocide does not preclude the immediate application of emergency remedy.

Examples of ascertainable ecocide territories:
  • deforestation of the Amazonian rainforest;
  • the proposed expansion of the Athabasca Oil Sands, Peace River and Cold Lake deposits reservoirs located in northeastern Alberta, Canada, which will culminate in destruction of boreal forest and muskeg (peat bogs) covering an area the size of England;
  • the Bingham Canyon Mine, an open-pit mine extraction of copper deposit southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, in the Oquirrh Mountains;
  • coal mining in Appalachia.

Extract: P. Higgins, ‘Towards a Garden of Eden’ in Wild Law: A Reader in Earth Jurisprudence, ed P. Burdon, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2010.