Abstract

In recent years environmental crime perpetrated by corporate actors against human and non-human animals has received increasing attention both from the public and from academic commentators. High profile disaster-events like the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster of 2011 and the on-going extraction of the Athabasca bituminous oil sands have contributed to a heightened awareness of the role (and culpability) of multinational corporations in environmental degradation. Many commentators within the field of green criminology have focused attention on the role of capitalism in the fostering of such harms. Whilst not contradicting such ideas, this paper will take a different approach to environmental crime, and wider environmental harm, by exploring the issue in terms of victimisation. Further, the paper will look to radical victimology to expose the role of the state itself in facilitating environmental harms. Drawing on notions of state victimisation and abuse of power, I will argue that victimology offers us a route to combining radical arguments concerning the role of the nation state as facilitator, and sometimes agitator, of environmental harms with growing calls for environmental justice and the recognition of environmental rights.