Inside the Growing Movement to Make Ecocide an International Crime
By Trevor Bach Reporter, Audubon Magazine
June 17, 2021
Lawyers will take a major step this month toward putting environmental destruction on the same level as war crimes and genocide.
Over roughly a decade starting in the early 1960s, the United States military sprayed an estimated 19 million gallons of herbicides, including the notorious Agent Orange, in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The resulting devastation to the environment was so severe that scientists and activists began to use a new word to describe it: ecocide.
More recently the term has gained popularity as a way to describe the most egregious cases of environmental destruction. And now a movement to establish ecocide as an official international crime is also building global momentum. Already the European Parliament and political leaders in numerous countries, including France, Belgium, Finland, Spain and Canada, have expressed varying levels of support for the idea...