Environmental harm and social harm approaches

Environmental harm is a highly contested concept. This is because much actual harm is perceived to be legitimate and lawful. This is achieved through a combination of embedding harmful practices into everyday activities (such as animal food production and clearfellbased forestry), pervasive propaganda efforts about the value of certain types of environmental and human exploitation (such as income generation and job opportunities), and political manoeuvring around and manipulation of legislation, regulations and rules that allow the destruction and degradation of the environment (such as exceptions that deny animal cruelty provisions being applied to farm animals). This conjunction of forces results in many transgressions against humans, specific biospheres, and animal and plant species to assume the status of simply being ‘the way things are’.

One of the hallmarks of the development of ‘social harm’ as a concept is that it directs writers critically to consider wider social contexts and the limitations of conventional approaches, particularly criminological, to harm (Hillyard and Tombs, 2007; Hillyard et al, 2004; Hillyard et al, 2005). For some, a standard criminological approach to harm is inherently limiting and should be eschewed in favour of an alternative discipline, sometimes referred to as ‘zemiology’ (Hillyard and Tombs, 2007). Others are less convinced that criminology ought to be left behind, highlighting the long tradition within criminology of challenges to legalistic, narrow definitions of crime and harm (Matthews and Kauzlarich, 2007; Friedrichs and Schwartz, 2007). For present purposes, the concern is not to directly address the fraught relationship between criminology and social harm except to acknowledge that a social harm approach lends itself well to the study of environmental harm. This is so for several reasons.

As outlined by Pemberton (forthcoming), the analytical focus on social harm has tended to highlight three important issues. First, social harms are ubiquitous precisely because they stem from and are ingrained in the structures of contemporary societies. Second, social harms are generally not caused by intentional acts as such, but result from the omission to act or societal indifference to suffering and exploitation.