What if harming the living, nurturing, grieving world were actually a crime?
In many cases it already is. There are wildlife crimes, tree preservation orders, pollution and emission limits… Jersey laws, UK laws, constitutional requirements, EU directives.
Unfortunately, in many cases, the laws are not enforced. People get away with wicked, egregious obliteration all the time. Nobody does anything because there appears to be no victim. Indeed, if you value ‘progress’ — like office blocks, travel, and increased GDP — there appear to be benefits.
But even when people are caught, and prosecutions won, very often the fines are tiny. A few quid, even a few thousand quid, are petty cash when the profits are huge. They get added to the price. The consumer pays, ordinary us, who had no say and little choice, we foot the bill. Never the shareholders, the big bosses or the unseen beneficial owners.
Yet we have the Proceeds of Crime (Jersey) Law 1999, and just about every jurisdiction has its own equivalent law. These laws are usually pulled into use when drug dealers and traffickers are prosecuted. Their ill-gotten fortunes are confiscated, and the proceeds swell the public purse.
I was at the ‘Environmental Crimes and the Common Good’ conference, held in Jersey yesterday and the day before, 31 Oct - 1 Nov 2019. One of the most mindblowing, positive ideas I heard during the two days was that Proceeds of Crime Acts, the world over, can — in theory at least — be applied just as readily to the proceeds of environmental crime as to any other.
Suppose a local householder wanted to extend their ancient, dilapidated building. They could call in a freelance ecology company to do a bat survey, find that there was indeed a thriving maternity roost under the eaves, or deep in the attic. Under cover of darkness, they could get up there with a bucket of cement and some plastic sheet, seal up the roost, sweep up the droppings, and wait a year a two. Then they could call in another, entirely independent, small ecology company, and get a truthful survey saying that no bat activity of any kind was detected.
This second survey allows the work to go ahead unhindered and un-delayed. But suppose they were caught. Suppose that, at the annual ecology freelancers real-ale and apple-dipping night, they blab. The householder gets prosecuted and fined £2,000. But their desirable, converted, late medieval farmhouse, now with four en-suite bedroom suites and panoramic views of potato fields, is now worth £8 million to the right discerning buyer.
Suppose a property developer has to build a double-depth underground car park, under their new gleaming glass tower, in order to meet planning requirements. We know that planning for the future always means planning for more cars, more car ownership, and more nose-to-tail traffic jams, so this is not quite as extraordinary as it sounds. Obviously, there is no climate emergency, and so more cars are definitely the way forward in family-orientated, single-occupancy travel.
Suppose that in order to excavate the massive pit that will one day house hundreds of Porsches and Mercs, the developer has to disturb some ancient, toxic deposits that were hidden there by previous troglodytes who thought that asbestos was the future, and that incinerating batteries and old-fashioned electronics was a neat way of reducing their bulk. Suppose that by disturbing these deposits, the developer knowingly released toxic heavy metals, and goodness knows what else, into precious, pristine marine or freshwater habitats — polluting them drastically for hundreds of years to come.
What if their final development turned out to produce a return on investment for the drug barons — err sorry, I meant property developers, definitely property developers — of scores of millions of offshore, tax-free pounds.
What about if local offshore finance houses were handling money that originated in the perfectly legal expulsion of nomadic tribespeople from their ancient homelands in Kenya? What about if some of that money originated in the perfectly legal destruction of wetlands, habitats and sweet-water watersheds in southern India? What about if shipping companies flouted emissions requirements in 96 countries by sticking close to the other 90-odd, and to international waters? What if their vast profits ended up floating through Jersey’s so-well-regulated revolving doors?
Well, I have high hopes for the Proceeds of Crime Act. Millions here, tens of millions there, the occasional billion. If there really was no profit in breaking environmental laws, then maybe — just maybe — some of the murdering profiteers would take a second breath. Maybe some of them would glance again at the photo of their smiling grandchildren on their polished teak desk, and think about their future, if not ours.
