Guest Editor’s Introduction to the Special Issue on Green Criminology

• DOI: 10.1177/0306624X20979431
• Date: 01 March 2022
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Subject Matter: Editorial

https://doi.org/10.1177/0306624X20979431

International Journal of

Offender Therapy and

Comparative Criminology

2022, Vol. 66(4) 291 –295

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0306624X20979431

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Editorial

Guest Editor’s Introduction

to the Special Issue on

Green Criminology

In early 2020, during the first days of what would go on to be the novel coronavirus

SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the rapid spread of the virus fought for headlines against,

among other stories and problems that now seem impossibly distant in our collective

memory of this long year, the dramatic and deadly Australian bushfire season. The

fires in 2019 and 2020 were not the sorts of annual fires anticipated in the climatic

social imagination of Australians, or for that matter, the world. From June of 2019 to

May of 2020, over 45 million acres of land were burned and nearly 10,000 built struc-

tures were lost in the blazes. Researchers estimate that over 3 billion nonhuman ani-

mals were harmed or killed by the fires, and as a result several previously stable

species are now endangered or facing extinction. A total of 34 people lost their lives

directly to the fires, hundreds more from the long-term effects of smoke inhalation.

Just as the bushfires in the Southern Hemisphere abated in May, wildfires in the North

began to catch and spread, and by July California was in the midst of the most intense

and widely distributed wildfire season in its modern history, with other Western states

like Oregon and Washington also battling historic blazes. By November of 2020, 9

million acres had burned across California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, with

human casualties and effects to wildlife similar to those connected to the fires in

Australia.

It seems odd, here at the last months of a year that’s included not only the devastat-

ing fires in Australia and California and the COVID-19 crisis, but also the political

turmoil felt around the world as the result of various social and political crises and

realignments, from Hong Kong to Houston, London to La Paz, to think or act nar-

rowly, restricting our analysis to the confines of criminology. Clearly, the forces acting

most powerfully on our world today transcend the conceptual and definitional bound-

aries of traditional criminologies. Each of these issues also, though, has an obvious

ecological dimension or implication: the COVID-19 pandemic appears to find its

most evident origins in the agricultural markets of Wuhan, China, where rare, wild,

and trafficked wildlife are sold for human consumption, although as evolutionary

epidemiologist Rob Wallace (2020) notes, it is somewhat “beside the point” if the

virus emerged from there or from some other circuit in a network of capital which

Corresponding Author:

Bill McClanahan, School of Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY 40475, USA.

Email: Bill.Mcclanahan@eku.edu

979431IJOXXX10.1177/0306624X20979431International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative CriminologyMcClanahan

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