Why Ecocide Should Be a Crime: Planetary Ecocide Explained
Why Ecocide Should Be a Crime, and Why the Word "Criminal" Is Pointing at the Wrong People
Let me start with a scene you already know, because you've seen some version of it on the local news.
A man walks into a gas station at eleven at night. He's hungry, he's broke, and he puts a sandwich and a bag of chips in his coat. The clerk sees him, the police come, and because he's done this before, the prosecutor stacks it up under a habitual offender statute. He goes to prison, and the state pays somewhere north of forty thousand dollars a year to keep him there.
Now hold that image while I give you another one. A company knows its plant is discharging a compound into a watershed. Its own scientists flagged the health effects decades ago. The discharge continues, the aquifer takes it, the town drinks it, and years later the company writes a check that its accountants had already budgeted for. Nobody is arrested. Nobody is charged. The stock goes up the following quarter because the liability is finally "resolved."
I want to talk to you about the gap between those two scenes, because that gap has a name now. It's called ecocide, and there is a serious international effort underway to make it a crime. I think it's one of the most important legal fights of our lifetime, and I don't think most people have heard of it.
What Ecocide Actually Means
The word gets thrown around loosely, so let's use the real definition rather than a vibe.
In June 2021, an independent panel of twelve international lawyers, co-chaired by Philippe Sands and Dior Fall Sow, finished drafting a legal definition of ecocide. They defined it as unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts. That is not activist language. That is drafted to survive a courtroom.
Every word in it is doing work. "Unlawful or wanton" means either you broke a law, or you acted with reckless disregard for damage that was clearly excessive compared to whatever you gained. "Knowledge" means you knew, or the evidence shows you should have. "Severe," "widespread," and "long-term" are borrowed from existing treaty language, and they set the bar high on purpose.
This is not a law against your commute. It is not a law against a farmer using fertilizer or a machine shop with a permit. It is aimed at the decisions made at the top of very large organizations, by people who had the information in front of them and greenlit the harm anyway.
A Short History of a Word Nobody in Power Wanted
Ecocide is not a new idea, and this is where the story gets frustrating.
The term was coined in 1970 by Arthur Galston, a plant biologist at Yale. Galston had done early research on a compound that was later developed into Agent Orange, and he spent the rest of his career horrified by what the military did with it. He watched the United States spray millions of gallons of herbicide over Vietnam, defoliating forests and mangroves that in some places never came back, and he argued that deliberately destroying an ecosystem deserved its own name and its own prohibition.
Two years later, at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme used the word in his opening address. In 1973, the legal scholar Richard Falk drafted a proposed international convention on ecocide. For a moment, it looked like the idea had legs.
Then it got quietly killed. When the International Law Commission drafted its code of crimes in the early 1990s, severe environmental damage was in the text. By 1996 it had been removed. When the Rome Statute created the International Criminal Court in 1998, all that survived was one narrow provision covering environmental destruction during wartime, and only when the damage is clearly excessive relative to military advantage. That provision has never produced a single prosecution.
So for roughly fifty years, the world has had four international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Destroying the living systems that every human being depends on has not been one of them.
What Planetary Ecocide Is
Regular ecocide is a river, a forest, a bay. Planetary ecocide is the same behavior operating at the scale of the whole biosphere, where the damaged system is the climate itself, the chemistry of the ocean, and the web of species that runs through both.
Here is what that looks like in measurements rather than adjectives. The ocean has absorbed roughly a quarter to a third of the carbon dioxide humans have emitted, and surface seawater has gone from a pH of about 8.2 before industrialization to about 8.1 today. That sounds like nothing until you remember the scale is logarithmic, which means the water holds about thirty percent more hydrogen ions than it used to. Researchers who study the deep past believe this is the fastest acidification event in tens of millions of years, and possibly the fastest since the extinction at the end of the Permian.
That comparison should stop you. The end-Permian event, about 252 million years ago, killed the overwhelming majority of marine species, and the leading explanation involves massive volcanic carbon release, ocean acidification, and oxygen loss. We are running a version of that experiment on purpose, with a delivery system called quarterly earnings.
On land the picture matches. Extinction rates are running somewhere between a hundred and a thousand times the background rate found in the fossil record. A 2019 global assessment estimated that about one million species are threatened with extinction. Coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef fell by roughly half between 1995 and 2017, and mass bleaching events that used to be rare now arrive every few years.
Planetary ecocide is not a metaphor. It is the sixth mass extinction, and unlike the previous five, this one has a mailing address, a board of directors, and a public relations department.
The Sentencing Gap Is Not an Accident
Now let's go back to the man with the sandwich, because I want to show you that the disparity I described is not hyperbole.
In 2003, the Supreme Court decided two cases on the same day. Gary Ewing had stolen three golf clubs worth about twelve hundred dollars, and under California's three strikes law he received twenty-five years to life. Leandro Andrade had stolen roughly one hundred and fifty dollars in videotapes from Kmart, and he received fifty years to life. The Court upheld both sentences. A 2013 study by the ACLU documented thousands of people serving life without parole for nonviolent offenses, including a Louisiana man sentenced to die in prison for stealing a jacket worth about one hundred and fifty-nine dollars.
Now the other column. In 2020, Pacific Gas and Electric pleaded guilty to eighty-four counts of involuntary manslaughter for the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history. The company paid the maximum fine the statute allowed, which came to roughly three and a half million dollars. That is about forty thousand dollars per human being killed. No executive went to prison.
After the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine disaster killed twenty-nine miners in West Virginia, Massey Energy's chief executive was convicted of a misdemeanor conspiracy to violate mine safety standards and served one year. After Deepwater Horizon killed eleven workers and put millions of barrels into the Gulf, BP paid billions in criminal penalties and settlements, and not one senior executive served meaningful prison time. When the Supreme Court reviewed the punitive damages from the Exxon Valdez spill, it cut the award from five billion dollars to about five hundred and seven million.
You can steal a jacket and die in a cell. You can preside over eighty-four deaths and file an insurance claim.
A Fine Is Not a Punishment, It's a Price
There's an old line attributed to an English lord chancellor named Thurlow, who complained that a corporation has no soul to damn and no body to kick. He meant it as a joke about legal theory. Two hundred and fifty years later it's the operating principle of environmental enforcement.
When you fine a company, you are not punishing anyone. You are setting a price, and the company runs the same calculation it runs on every other input cost. If the expected fine multiplied by the probability of getting caught is less than the profit from the conduct, the conduct continues. That is not cynicism, it's arithmetic, and any competent chief financial officer would be failing at their job if they didn't do the math.
Criminal liability breaks that math, because prison is not a line item. You cannot amortize eighteen months. You cannot pass a felony conviction through to consumers. The moment a specific human being at the top of the decision chain faces the same category of consequence as the man with the sandwich, the incentive structure inverts, and the people best positioned to prevent the harm suddenly have a personal reason to prevent it.
Meanwhile, the enforcement capacity we do have has been hollowed out. The Pollution Prosecution Act of 1990 requires the EPA to maintain at least two hundred criminal investigators, and actual staffing has spent years below that floor while annual criminal case openings have fallen to a fraction of their late-1990s peak. We didn't just fail to write the law. We defunded the referee for the game we were already playing.
They Knew, and We Can Prove It
The knowledge element in the ecocide definition matters, so let me show you that the receipts exist.
ExxonMobil's own scientists modeled global warming between 1977 and 2003. A 2023 analysis published in Science reviewed those internal projections and found that most of them accurately predicted the warming that followed, while the company's public messaging emphasized doubt and uncertainty. That is not a company that was confused. That is a company that had a good model and made a communications decision.
The same pattern shows up everywhere you look. Internal research on the toxicity of a fluorinated compound used in nonstick manufacturing dated back decades before the communities downstream found out. The health effects of tetraethyl lead in gasoline were argued about for half a century while the industry funded the reassuring side of the science, and the United Nations estimates the global phase-out now prevents on the order of a million premature deaths a year. Air pollution overall is associated with roughly seven million premature deaths annually by World Health Organization estimates, and a 2021 study attributed several million of those specifically to fine particulate matter from fossil fuel combustion.
Millions of preventable deaths, decades of internal documentation, zero prosecutions of the decision-makers. Hold that next to the fifty-years-to-life for the videotapes and tell me the system is measuring harm.
"Criminal" Is Something a Society Decides
Here is where my sociology training won't let me leave it alone.
Crime is not a natural category. There is no molecule of criminality. Émile Durkheim argued that an act becomes criminal when it offends the strong and defined collective sentiments of a society, which means the definition moves when the sentiment moves. In 1939, Edwin Sutherland coined the term white-collar crime precisely to point out that we had built an entire criminology around poor people while ignoring far larger harms committed in offices. Howard Becker went further in the 1960s and argued that deviance isn't a quality of the act at all, but the result of somebody successfully applying a rule to it.
Follow that logic and something uncomfortable falls out. The reason stealing food is a crime and poisoning a watershed is a compliance matter is not that one is worse. It's that one group of people had the power to write the rules and the other didn't.
We also have direct proof that the category can expand, because it has. Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944, and there was no such crime until the Genocide Convention in 1948. At Nuremberg, industrialists were tried and convicted for their role in the machinery of the war, which established that running a company does not put you outside criminal law. Slavery was legal property law, and then it wasn't. Every single one of those categories was invented by people who decided the existing law was failing to describe reality.
So when I ask who fits the description of a criminal, I'm not being rhetorical. If the definition is knowingly causing severe, widespread, and long-term harm to other people for personal gain, the man with the sandwich isn't in the running. The people running planetary ecocide are the only candidates on the board.
The Dynasty Problem
This is the part that keeps me up, and it's the part I think gets discussed the least.
In April 2025, researchers at Dartmouth published a framework in Nature for connecting individual fossil fuel producers to specific economic damages from extreme heat. Their estimate put the losses from 1991 to 2020 at around twenty-eight trillion dollars, with roughly a third of that traceable to five companies. Their central figure for Chevron alone was close to two trillion dollars. Earlier work had already established that a relatively small number of entities account for the majority of industrial carbon emissions since the industrial revolution.
Now think about what happens to the money on the other side of that ledger. It doesn't evaporate. It becomes stock, then trusts, then foundations, then inheritances that pass through a tax code with a step-up in basis that wipes out the unrealized gain at death. The harm compounds in the atmosphere for centuries. The gain compounds in the family office for generations.
That's the outcome I want you to picture clearly. Absent criminal liability, the people who made these decisions are not merely unpunished. They are rewarded with dynastic wealth, and their grandchildren will live like the aristocracy of a hotter, harsher, poorer planet that their family helped manufacture. They will do it behind seawalls, in air-conditioned houses, on land bought high and dry, while everyone else absorbs the bill.
And the bill is real. Global sea level has already risen roughly eight inches since 1900, and South Florida sits on porous limestone that lets seawater come up from underneath, which is why seawalls don't solve it there. Hurricane Sandy put a fourteen-foot surge into lower Manhattan in 2012 and caused around nineteen billion dollars in damage to New York City alone. Anthropogenic warming has been estimated to have roughly doubled the cumulative forest area burned in the western United States over a thirty-year period, and Canada's 2023 fire season burned about eighteen and a half million hectares and pushed smoke into cities two thousand miles away.
The Nations That Are Going First
The people with the least responsibility and the most to lose are the ones leading this fight, which tells you something.
Tuvalu signed a treaty with Australia in 2023 creating a migration pathway for a few hundred of its citizens per year, an agreement that quietly assumes the country may not be habitable indefinitely. Kiribati bought land in Fiji years ago for the same reason. The World Bank has projected that internal climate migration could reach the low hundreds of millions of people by 2050 across the regions it studied.
On the legal front, Vanuatu became the first country to formally call for ecocide at the International Criminal Court in 2019. On September 9, 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa formally submitted a proposed amendment to the Rome Statute to add ecocide as a fifth international crime. It now has to move through the amendment process and clear a two-thirds vote of member states, which is a long road, but it is a real road.
Domestic law is moving faster than most people realize. Belgium passed a new criminal code in February 2024 that includes a standalone crime of ecocide, taking effect in 2026, with prison terms of fifteen to twenty years for individuals in senior decision-making positions. The European Union's revised Environmental Crime Directive, which member states were required to transpose into national law by May 2026, includes a category of qualified offences explicitly described as conduct comparable to ecocide. France created a domestic ecocide offence in 2021, and a number of countries including Ukraine have had ecocide provisions in their penal codes for years. A 2024 survey found that around seventy-two percent of people across the G20 support criminalizing actions that seriously damage nature.
Here in the United States, the action is at the state level for now. Vermont passed a Climate Superfund Act in 2024, and New York followed with its own version that seeks tens of billions from major fossil fuel producers over a twenty-five year period. Both are being litigated. Both are civil rather than criminal. But they establish the principle that the costs can be sent back to the parties that generated them.
The Honest Objections
I'm not going to pretend this is simple. Proving criminal causation for climate harm is genuinely hard. Attribution science has advanced enormously, but a criminal court demands more than a probability distribution, and defense counsel will attack every link in the chain. Jurisdiction is a real obstacle, since the ICC's reach depends on which states have ratified the statute, and several of the largest emitters have not. Criminal law also can't be applied retroactively, which means an ecocide crime adopted tomorrow reaches conduct from tomorrow forward.
There's a fairness objection too, and it deserves a straight answer. Poorer nations argue that strict environmental criminal law could be used to block the development that wealthier countries already enjoyed. The drafted definition tries to handle this with the wantonness standard, which requires the damage to be clearly excessive relative to the benefits expected. It is aimed at the reckless and the knowing, not at a country trying to electrify.
The clearest thing an ecocide law does is not solve climate change. It changes who is in the room when the decision gets made, and what that person is personally risking. That alone is worth the fight.
What I Actually Want You to Take From This
I'm not asking you to be angry. Anger burns off in about a day and leaves nothing behind.
I'm asking you to notice that "criminal" is a word we assign, that we have historically assigned it downward, and that we have the collective authority to assign it accurately. Genocide was not a crime until people decided it should be. Neither was slavery. Neither was a war of aggression. Somebody had to be the first generation to say the existing categories no longer described the harm in front of them.
That's the work. Support the ecocide amendment. Pay attention to your state's climate cost-recovery legislation, because that fight is happening in statehouses right now and almost nobody is watching. Push back when someone tells you a fine was accountability, because a fine is a receipt, not a sentence. And keep the two scenes side by side in your head, the sandwich and the watershed, until the absurdity of the arrangement becomes intolerable enough to change.
The planet is not a waste sink. It is capital, it is the only capital that cannot be reissued, and the people liquidating it should face the same law as everyone else who takes what isn't theirs.
Keep Going
If this argument connected with you, it's the spine of my book, Nouveau Economics: Where King Left Off | Nonviolent Resistance, Natural Capital, and Ecological Justice. It picks up the economic argument Dr. King was making at the end of his life and carries it into the ecological question he never got the chance to finish: what happens to an economy that treats the living world as free, and what a system looks like when we finally put natural capital on the books.
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