Description
Killing Time: Environmental Crimes and the Restoration of the Future
Randall Amster (Professor & Co-Director of the Justice & Peace Studies and Environmental Studies programmes at Georgetown University, USA)
From climate change and resource degradation to ocean acidification and loss of biodiversity, mounting environmental crises driven by patterns of militarism and consumerism have been steadily destabilising the life-sustaining capacities of the habitat.
In the process, critical questions of environmental justice have risen to the fore, as the inequitable distribution of ecological burdens and benefits increasingly stratifies along lines of race, class, gender, and other factors.
This article fosters an expanded view of ‘environmental crime’ to include a broader array of contemporary actors and actions, with an eye towards cultivating restorative and sustainable alternatives. The aim is not to widen the net of punitive responses, but rather to suggest that complicity with forces of environmental destruction can also yield potent forms of empowerment if consciously cultivated.
