Ecocide: Should Destruction of the Planet Be a Crime?
To prosecute and imprison political leaders and corporate executives would require a parsing of legal boundaries and a recalibration of criminal accountability.
April 7, 2021
A refugee from Democratic Republic of Congo, collects water for their vegetable crops at a water pan in Kalobeyei settlement for refugees in Turkana County, Kenya on October 2, 2019. Credit: Luis Tato/AFP via Getty Images
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At many moments in history, humanity’s propensity for wanton destruction has demanded legal and moral restraint. One of those times, seared into modern consciousness, came at the close of World War II, when Soviet and Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Dachau. Photographs and newsreels shocked the conscience of the world. Never had so many witnessed evidence of a crime so heinous, and so without precedent, that a new word genocide was needed to describe it, and in short or