Green Crimes

There are innumerable legislations regulating crimes against the environment which are semi-effective, and some are out rightly ineffective. Green crimes are difficult to fit within the definition of traditional crimes, green crimes are opaque, indirect, diffused and temporal in time. The question that needs to be answered is: how do individuals view environmental harms and the laws regulating them? Does this internal visualization affect their behavior and obedience to environmental laws? Penalizing green crimes that are the result of collective individual actions is being attempted through law and regulatory enforcement and is hitting roadblocks. The psychological imprint of the behavior fails to register the magnitude of environmental damage caused as it fails to perceive collective harm. This chapter explains what constitutes green crime, the difficulty of quantifying harm caused by green crime and how human psychology perceives green crimes. The aims are threefold; to understand the relationship between psychology and green crimes; to identify if criminal law is suitable to stemming green crimes and lastly to suggest how environmental legislation can incorporate the psychology of green crime.