Our team members Alison Hutchinson, Rosaleen Duffy, George Iordachescu and Teresa Lappe-Osthege developed an idea of bringing together debates on harms from green criminology with political ecology concerns about justice. The aim was to develop a fresh approach to understanding the wildlife trade (both legal and illegal) to highlight the multiple harms in the trade.
The paper is published in Journal of Political Ecology, its open access and you can read it here
Duffy, R. , A. Hutchinson, G. Iordachescu and T. Lappe-Osthege (2025) A harms-based political ecology: Understanding harms through the wildlife trade. Journal of Political Ecology
Abstract
In this article, we examine how political ecology can benefit from greater engagement with green criminology’s focus on harms. We do so by developing a harms-based political ecology, which is a useful lens through which to analyze global environmental change. It is essential to understand how harms are produced and sustained, and what impacts they have on people and wildlife. This article examines the wildlife trade in Europe focusing on brown bears, European eels and songbirds. In particular, the article analyzes how harms are produced in the context of global capitalism, unequal power relations and interconnected global crises. Through this analysis the article develops the field of political ecology by encouraging approaches that fully address harms to non-human animals. This harms-based approach builds on current justice perspectives within green criminology that emphasize anthropocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric concepts of justice to expand concepts of victimhood and harm.
Keywords: harms, wildlife trade, green criminology, anthropocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism, political ecology
