Ecocide, Genocide and Blued Trees
Iconic Nick Ut's photo of Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam
August 26, 2023, we will debut a premiere of the Blued Trees opera about ecocide at the Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.
The consequences of ecocide have been discussed for decades, particularly in the work of the late Polly Higgins.
What are the appropriate consequences for ecocide/ environmental crimes? It seems to me to hinge on how seriously one takes the conflation of genocide and ecocide articulated when Arthur Galston first made it legal category that could go to the Hague. This is a good discussion of the issues: ‘The Benefits, Challenges, and Limitations of Criminalizing Ecocide’.
The libretto for Blued Trees is about the story behind the story of charging executives with ecocide. It is based on the successful suit to protect The Blued Trees Symphony in a mock trial produced by A Blade of Grass. The legal theory challenged ideas about ownership and policy. But what is ecocide?
The concept of ecocide evolved from genocide. Both are about war and accountability for war criminals. The premise is that just as genocide is a war crime so is ecocide and a perpetrator of ecocide faces identical parity for consequences as a perpetrator of genocide. And in fact, they are inseparable as some recent court cases are asserting. The legal failure of the concept of ecocide so far has manifested as zero accountability, at best, a slap on the wrist and scolding. This is not for lack of trying.
Reparations alone are insufficient.
Just as perpetrators of ecocide face reparations, prison and even execution, so would any environmental war criminal. The goal is the Hague, a Nuremburg for ecocide. Obviously we would be required to bypass the US Supreme Court, which has become a rubber stamp proxy for white supremacists and corporate hegemonies, as William M. Duggar has described.
The international cases for accountability for ecocide inches forward. I want more than money. I want them all tried at the Hague under laws comparable to those imposed on war criminals guilty of genocide.
If ecocide is on a par with genocide, Fossil fuel executives are as liable as any other war criminal to face prison at the very least, possibly death and certainly reparations, An executive's entire family would also be destroyed by the repercussions. This all goes back to the original legal ideas that created the term ecocide in 1970 because of Agent Orange.
The whole point of my Blued Trees project is to take this premise seriously. And just as genocide evolves from interpersonal expressions of white supremacy, etc., ecocide evolves from extractive relationships between people and in relationship to the environment (which I consider an ecofeminist idea). The problem doesn't start or stop at cutting down trees.
If genocide means death for both victims and perpetrators, so does ecocide. NO ONE has made that demand before or made the explicit connections between personal failure and ecosystem failure. Those are the unique concepts embedded in the whole project.