An emergent 'blue criminology'? Review of a new critical criminology book on water
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An emergent ’blue criminology’? Review of a new critical criminology book on water Avi Brisman, Bill McClanahan, Nigel South, and Reece Walters: Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century, Palgrave Macmillan, London, United Kingdom, 2018, 236 pp, ISBN #978-1-137-52985-5 Nels Paulson1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Water is essential to life on earth. Unfortunately, the task of protecting water as a human right is ambitious, to say the least. It starts with evaluating the extent to which water is not protected. To help anyone working to protect water, that evaluation must be both thorough and accessible. Brisman, McClanahan, South, and Walters’s review of the state of water in the twenty-first century could end up being a model for such balance. This book consolidates critical criminology and green criminology literatures on water, but it also gives students and career academics alike a relatively quick primer for improving our water quality on local and global scales. The book is divided into evaluating the ways in which water in this world is too polluted, too inaccessible, too threatened, too costly, and/or too erratically under-protected. It concludes with lessons learned from resistance to water quality threats, with an eye towards reducing harm to human populations and diminishing the extreme inequities of such harm. Indeed, one might even think of this book as suggesting a new ‘blue’ criminology (my term, not theirs) that may be an entirely more effective category for inquiry than what is otherwise typically utilized in water scholarship. Early in the book, the authors discuss water pollution, highlighting some obvious recent examples from the U.S., such as in Flint, Michigan, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, while noting other important, less-publicized instances of water contamination, such as the case of Barrick Gold in Papua New Guinea, identified by Kippenberg and Cohen (2013). Ultimately, they suggest that the disregard for those ‘downstream’ from productive activities ‘upstream’ (that is, ‘productive’ by proponents of neoliberalism) is not much different from decisions made by those in Chicago, Illinois, when the city shipped its water pollution literally downstream to St. Louis, Missouri, in the early twentieth century. This chapter takes on issues ranging from corporate neglect to outright intentional avoidance of regulation, but it also addresses matters of environmental racism and structural violence. The authors push the reader to understand that problems of water pollution, whether from old water pipes or underregulated mining tailings, are not merely issues of criminal behavior and * Nels Paulson [email protected] 1
University of Wisconsin-Stout, Menomonie, WI, USA
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individual or corporate law-breakers. These problems are also cultural, where dominant actors refuse to acknowledge how they prioritize the concerns of white, Western communities—and thus the establishment of self-serving laws—instead of new regulations o
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