Last week, Dirceu Kruger, a Brazilian cattle rancher, was ordered to pay $50 million for destroying part of the Amazon. He destroyed 5,600 hectares of land in the Amazonian municipalities of Boca do Acre and Lábrea over the years.
He used chainsaws to clear vegetation first, then set fires to clear the land. Finally, he planted grass to establish pastures for raising cattle. This is a typical story of cattle ranching and forest exploitation in the Brazilian Amazon. Loggers cut down valuable timber, and ranchers follow, planting grass and putting cattle to pasture. They cut more trees. Trucks, with no licence plates, stacked high with freshly cut hardwood. All illegal. Abandoned pastures everywhere. Without the native flora, the once-rich soil dries quickly and loses nutrients. So ranchers move on. The Brazilian ranchers, the world’s biggest exporters of beef, push deeper into the Amazon each year.
Dirceu Kruger was one of them. He not only has to pay $50 million now but is banned from receiving government finance or tax benefits in the future. He is also forbidden from selling cattle and agricultural products, as well as buying machinery such as chainsaws and tractors. On top of all this, he will have to restore the land he degraded so it can become a valuable carbon sink again.
It all sounds good, doesn’t it? Do you feel a sense of justice? I do.
What is Ecocide?
During the Vietnam War, the US military used defoliants (chemicals that caused leaves to fall off trees) as a weapon to prevent Viet Cong guerrillas from hiding. It is estimated that up to 76 million litres of herbicides and defoliants were dropped on Vietnamese soil, including the highly harmful Agent Orange, causing an ecological catastrophe that will take years to reverse.
At the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Environment in Stockholm, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme became the first head of state to use the word “ecocide” to refer to the massive destruction of the natural environment in Vietnam.
Ecocide is the destruction of large areas of the natural environment as a consequence of human activity. It’s a word that defines the crimes committed against the planet.
What Are The Types of Ecocide?
Ecocide can take many forms. It includes damage to the oceans from industrial overfishing, oil spills, and plastic pollution. It also involves deforestation caused by intensive livestock farming, agriculture, arson, and mining. Water and soil pollution from chemical spills, mining activities, and fracking are other types of ecocide. Air pollution from large industries, nuclear disasters, and radioactive releases is part of ecocide.
Have you ever thought why killing someone is a crime but fracking is not?
Right now there are four main types of crimes under International Law. These are Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes, and Crimes of Aggression. Ecocide is not one of them yet.
In 2021, France made ecocide a civil offence, and Belgium decided to recognise it as a crime both nationally and internationally. The European Union also updated its rules to punish severe environmental damage with stricter penalties. In Latin America, Chile added ecocide to its Penal Code in August 2023. In Brazil, the left-wing political party PSOL proposed an ecocide law in June, and Mexico did the same in August.
Things are moving in the right direction but it needs to speed up. Making ecocide a crime will fill a legal gap in environmental protection. At the moment, the law focuses on damage to people or property. This approach is not effective when dealing with polluters who cause widespread environmental harm. Like Shell or ExxonMobil.
At the beginning of the 1990s, oil giants like Chevron, Shell, and BP spent millions on public relations campaigns to confuse the press, the public, and policymakers about the dangers caused by burning fossil fuels. But they all knew at the time. They all knew that manmade global warming was real. They all knew that they were destroying the Earth. And they all chose to lie about it. Now we know that they all knew. So shouldn’t we hold them accountable for it?
It’s time for these oil companies to be prosecuted. They should be ordered to pay billions, and the money should go to climate crisis funds all around the world. Not only pay the money but they should also be legally forced to restore the damage they’ve caused. And it shouldn’t end there. The executives in charge of these oil companies should be taken to court too. And the propagandists they’ve employed as well. And the politicians they’ve funded. All of them. They should all be prosecuted.
Damaging the planet is not a victimless act. When forests burn and oceans rise, humans are suffering around the world. The perpetrators of these acts are the ones to blame. Criminalising ecocide is a way to call time on the destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems and those who live in them. Harming the environment is a crime and no one should go unpunished for destroying the natural world.
Now hands up, who would like to see Jair Bolsonaro taken to international court for his destruction of environmental policies and violations of Indigenous rights?
Or who would like to see ExxonMobil taken to court for contributing significantly to climate change through extensive fossil fuel extraction and environmental pollution?
Or BP, for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which caused massive damage to marine and coastal ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico?
But not just take them to court, also make sure they pay the price and are legally forced to restore the mass damage and destruction they caused to the ecosystem.
That I would love to see.
It’s time to change the rules and activate a law to protect the Earth.