Environmental Crimes
What is an Environmental Crime?
Environmental crime is generally defined as crime which is committed against the environment in which some sanction or punishment can be proscribed. The US EPA for instance, define environmental crime as cases that involve negligent, knowing or wilful violations of environmental laws. Generally speaking, environmental crimes are acts or behaviours that are deliberate and not the product of accident or mistake. In most cases knowledge of the specific laws, statutes or regulations that prohibit the wrongful conduct is not required. When a violator is aware that the wrongful conduct is prohibited by law, the violation is said to be "wilful." Most law enforcement agencies now break these crimes down into categories. For example, pollution or depending on the environmental laws of a country, breaches of permits that allow companies or individuals to emit pollutants into the environment under strict guides, illegal resource extraction (i.e. taking of protected timbers) and threats to endangered species.
Growing awareness of environmental issues led to a renewed focus by law enforcement agencies on environmental crime in many nations during the twentieth century, and major law enforcement agencies now take environmental crime very seriously. Not only does it harm the environment, but it often has an impact on the economy and on general quality of life as well.
To understand the types of environmental crimes that now have been deemed by governments and law enforcement agencies as serious warranting the expenditure of considerable resources to bring the perpetrators to justice, are now set out in the following pages. However, we also have to be aware that there is a blurring of boundaries between what defined traditional street, white collar or corporate crimes and environmental crimes.
one of the first questions we need to address is how do we define Environmental Harm and how does this crimes compare with other traditional crimes.
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