Ecocide
History
A Short History of Ecocide
Femke Wijdekop:
"Though the concept of ecocide may seem novel to some, it has been a part of environmental discourse for over four decades. The term was coined in 1970 by the American biologist Arthur Galston at the Conference on War and National Responsibility. In the 1950s, he had worked in a laboratory helping to develop a chemical component of the defoliant Agent Orange, infamously used in the Vietnam War to destroy vegetation and poison communities on a massive scale. Appalled by the use of his creation, Galston became an antiwar activist and the first person to label the massive damage and destruction of ecosystems as ecocide. The word derives from the Greek oikos, meaning “house or home,” and the Latin caedere, meaning “to demolish or kill.” Ecocide thus literally translates to “killing our home.”
In 1972, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme explicitly referred to the Vietnam War as ecocide in his opening speech for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. “The immense destruction brought about by indiscriminate bombing, by large scale use of bulldozers and herbicides is an outrage sometimes described as ecocide, which requires urgent international attention,” he expounded. The conference adopted the Stockholm Declaration, the first international legal document to explicitly recognize the right to a healthy environment. At the People’s Forum, an unofficial event running parallel to the UN Conference, thousands of people took to the streets, demanding that ecocide be declared a crime.
The 1970s and 1980s saw extensive study and debate within the UN about expanding the 1948 Genocide Convention, with several countries advocating the inclusion of ecocide. In 1985, the official Whitaker Report recommended the inclusion of ecocide in the draft Code of Offences Against the Peace and Security of Mankind, the precursor to the 1998 Rome Statute. The following year, ecocide was defined in the draft Code as “a serious breach of an international obligation of essential importance for the safeguarding and preservation of the human environment,” language that was broadly supported by most members of the UN’s International Law Commission. The 1991 version of the Code included draft Article 26: “An individual who willfully causes or orders the causing of widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment shall, on conviction thereof, be sentenced.” In 1995, however, such language was withdrawn from the draft code through a unilateral decision by the commission chairman, likely under pressure from a few states and the nuclear lobby. Whatever the reason, ecocide was never included in the Rome Statute of the ICC.
The idea of codifying ecocide as an international crime has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. In 2010, Scottish lawyer Polly Higgins proposed to the International Law Commission that the Rome Statute be amended to include ecocide, defining it as “the extensive damage to, destruction of, or 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 or will be severely diminished.” Notably, she speaks of the “inhabitants” of a territory instead of its “human population,” aiming to protect not only humans, but also all other members of the animal kingdom.
Since 2010, Higgins has been seeking support for her ecocide amendment from heads of state, lawyers, business leaders, civil society, and the international community.6 This year, she has focused in particular on the officials of Small Island Developing States, whose countries are under severe threat from intensifying storm activity and rising sea levels induced by climate change. Higgins’s goal is to create a legal duty of care compelling the international community to provide assistance to these and other territories that suffer from such human-induced ecocide.
An emerging social movement, notably End Ecocide on Earth, has complemented this work. An international team of lawyers (French, American, and Togan) have drafted End Ecocide on Earth’s own ecocide amendment to the Rome Statute, which focuses on protecting ecosystem services and the global commons (including the atmosphere, the oceans and seas beyond territorial waters, the Arctic, Antarctic, and migratory species). The team defines ecocide as “an extensive damage or destruction which would have for consequence a significant and durable alteration of the global commons or ecosystem services upon which rely a group or subgroup of a human population” within the framework of known planetary boundaries.7 The protective space for the global commons and ecosystem services they propose aims to stop the exploitation of these resources resulting from national sovereignty and unbridled capitalism. The movement has been gaining momentum in political, academic, and legal circles. At the climate conference in Paris this past December, the Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, with the support of Bolivia and Venezuela, called for the creation of an international court of environmental justice to punish crimes against nature and for the adoption of an international declaration of nature’s rights. Argentinian Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights activist Adolfo Pérez Esquivel has been advocating since 2009 on behalf of the International Academy of Environmental Sciences for the establishment of an international tribunal for crimes against the environment. Various legal scholars have also put forth detailed blueprints for making environmental destruction a crime under international law." (http://www.greattransition.org/publication/against-ecocide)