Critical Criminology has published PhD student Adam Snitker’s article, “Expanding Wildfire Research with Insights from Green Criminology.”

ABSTRACT

Green criminology examines how human activity harms living entities, including ecosystems, humans, and nonhumans; how those harms are produced; and the roles of state and non-state actors in manufacturing environmental harm. Given these interests, the field provides a framework to interrogate how social structures may produce environmental harm through wildfire events. I emphasize how green criminology challenges three common assumptions characteristic of existing wildfire research: the definition of criminal activity, identification of fire victims, and exclusion of human activity from nature. Based on these challenges, I outline three theoretical traditions found within the green criminology literature, state crime, state-corporate crime, and the Treadmill of Crime, to highlight their ability to better understand the broader context where wildfire occurs. Further, I provide three examples of scholars from a varietythese theories applied to wildfire events to demonstrate how green criminology provides an innovative perspective of wildfire based on analyses of powerful institutions and structures.