Abstract
This chapter explores the ways in which habitat destruction impacts upon the health and well-being of nonhuman animals. It begins by discussing the importance of, and threats to, biodiversity and in particular the negative consequences of deforestation and habitat loss on animal and plant species. The multiple reasons for deforestation are examined, including the introduction of ‘flex crops’ and greater reliance upon genetically modified organisms as part of agribusiness. The next part reviews the significance of pollution as this relates to the degradation of air, land and water habitats. Contamination comes in many forms, one of the most harmful of which is the emergent phenomenon of microplastics, which are now ubiquitous in the planet’s oceans. The third part of the chapter considers debates over preservation and conservation of habitat, and the implications these debates hold for responding to threats to habitat as these pertain to particular species of nonhuman animals.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anderson, E. (2004). Animal rights and the values of nonhuman life. In C. Sustein & M. Nussbaum (Eds.), Animal rights: current debates and new directions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation [ABC] (2015, October 19). Southeast Asia’s haze: find out what is behind the choking smoke covering Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. ABC News.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation [ABC] (2015, October 22). South-East Asian haze strikes the Pacific as fires exceed greenhouse gas output of the US’. ABC News.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation [ABC] (2015, November 2). Borneo’s orang-utans forced out of habitat by haze from Indonesian peat blaze. ABC News.
Beirne, P. (2009). Confronting animal abuse: law, criminology, and human-animal relationships. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Bisschop, L. (2015). Governance of the illegal trade in e-waste and tropical timber: case studies on transnational environmental crime. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.
Boekhout van Solinge, T. (2008a). Crime, conflicts and ecology in Africa. In R. Sullund (Ed.), Global harms: ecological crime and speciesism. New York: Nova Science Publishers.
Boekhout van Solinge, T. (2008b). The land of the orangutan and the bird of paradise under threat. In R. Sullund (Ed.), Global harms: ecological crime and speciesism. New York: Nova Science Publishers.
Boekhout van Solinge, T. (2010a). Equatorial deforestation as a harmful practice and a criminological issue. In R. White (Ed.), Global environmental harm: criminological perspectives. Devon: Willan Publishing.
Boekhout van Solinge, T. (2010b). Deforestation crimes and conflicts in the amazon. Critical Criminology, 18, 263–277.
Boekhout van Solinge, T. & Kuijpers, K. (2013). The amazon rainforest: a green criminological perspective. In N. South & A. Brisman (Eds.), Routledgeinternational handbook of green criminology. New York: Routledge.
Borras Jr., S., Franco, J., & Wang, C. (2013). The challenge of global governance of land grabbing: changing international agricultural context and competing political views and strategies. Globalizations, 10(1), 161–179.
Brisman, A., & South, N. (2013). Resources, wealth, power, crime and conflict. In R. Walters, D. Westerhuis, T. Wyatt (Eds.), Emerging issues in green criminology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Brisman, A., South, N., & White, R. (Eds.) (2015). Environmental crime and social conflict: contemporary and emerging issues. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.
Burrell, A., Gay, S., & Kavallari, A. (2012). The compatibility of EU biofuel policies with global sustainability and the WTO. The World Economy, 35(6), 784–798.
Carrington, K., Hogg, R., & McIntosh, A. (2011). Resource boom underbelly: the criminological impact of mining development. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 44(3), 335–354.
Caughley, J., Bomford, M., & McNee, A. (1996). Use of wildlife by indigenous Australians: issues and concepts. In M. Bomford & J. Caughley (Eds.), Sustainable use of wildlife by aboriginal peoples and Torres strait islanders. Canberra: Bureau of Resource Sciences, Australian Government Publishing Service.
Cazaux, G. (1999). Beauty and the beast: animal abuse from a non-speciesist criminological perspective. Crime, Law and Social Change, 31, 105–126.
Charles, C., Gerasimchuk, I., Birdle, R., Moerenhout, T., Asmelash, E., & Laan, T. (2013). Biofuels—at what cost? A review of costs and benefits of EU biofuels policies. Manitoba: International Institute for Sustainable Development.
Devalle, B., & Sessions, G. (1985). Deep ecology: living as if nature mattered. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith.
Engdahl, F. (2007). Seeds of destruction: the hidden agenda of genetic manipulation. Montreal: Global Research.
Freeland, S. (2015). Addressing the intentional destruction of the environment during warfare under the Rome statute of the international criminal court. Cambridge: Intersentia.
Global Witness (2013). Rubber Barons: how Vietnamese companies and international financiers are driving a land grabbing crisis in Cambodia and Laos. London: Global Witness.
Greenpeace (2014, March 31). What does the IPCC WGII report say on forests?Greenpeace briefing. greenpeace.org.
Hay, D. 1975. Property, authority and the criminal law. In D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, J.G. Rule. E.P. Thompson and C. Winslow, (Eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2013, September 27). Working group I contribution to the IPCC fifth assessment report climate change 2013: the physical science basis: summary for policymakers.
Khagram, S. (2004). Dams and development: transnational struggles for water and power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lin, A. (2006). The unifying role of harm in environmental law. Wisconsin Law Review, 3, 898–985.
Lynch, M., Long, M., & Stretesky, P. (2015). Anthropogenic development drives species to be endangered: capitalism and the decline of species. In R. Sollund (Ed.), Green harms and crimes: critical criminology in a changing world. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Macaulay, C. (2016). Species on the move worldwide. The Mercury, Hobart, pp.14–15.
McKenna, K. 2013. Scotland has the most inequitable land ownership in the West. Why? The Guardian, 10 August 2016.
Merchant, C. (2005). Radical ecology: the search for a liveable world. New York: Routledge.
Mitchell, D. (2008, July). A note on rising food prices. World Bank policy research working paper no. 4682. The World Bank, Development Prospects Group.
Mol, H. (2013). ‘A Gift from the Tropics to the World’: power, harm, and palm oil. In R. Walters, D. Westerhuis, T. Wyatt (Eds.), Emergingissues in green criminology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Munro, S. (2012). Rich land, wasteland—how coal is killing Australia. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia.
Naik, A. (2010). Causes of pollution. Buzzle, 22 October 2010. http://www.buzzle.com/articles/causes-of-pollution.html. Accessed 13 January 2012.
Park, A. (2015, November 19). 7 things you need to know about GMO Salmon. Time Magazine.
Pellow, D. (2007). Resisting global toxics: transnational movements for environmental justice. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Plumwood, V. (2004). Gender, eco-feminism and the environment. In R. White (Ed.), Controversies in environmental sociology. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
Reliable Plant (2007, November/December). New study favors tree over corn as biofuel source. Accessed 21 January 2008.
Robin, M.-M. (2010). The world according to monsanto: pollution, corruption and the control of our food supply. New York: The New Press.
Robyn, L. (2002). Indigenous knowledge and technology. American Indian Quarterly, 26(2), 198–220.
Rolston, H. (2010). Wild animals and ethical perspectives. In M. Bekoff (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of animal rights and animal welfare, Volume 2. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press.
Ruggiero, V., & South, N. (2013). Toxic state–corporate crimes, neo-liberalism and green criminology: the hazards and legacies of the oil, chemical and mineral industries. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2(2), 12–26.
Sankoff, P., & White, S. (Eds.) (2009). Animal law in Australasia: a new dialogue. Sydney: The Federation Press.
Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2010). Global biodiversity outlook 3. Montreal: SCBD.
Setiono, B. (2007). Fighting illegal logging and forest-related financial crimes: the anti-money laundering approach. In L. Elliot (Ed.), Transnational environmental crime in the Asia-pacific: a workshop report. Canberra: Australian National University.
Shiva, V. (2000). Stolen harvest: the hijacking of the global food supply. London: Zed Books.
Shiva, V. (2008). Soil not oil: environmental justice in an age of climate crisis. Brooklyn: South End Press.
Sollund, R. (2012). Speciesism as doxic practice versus valuing difference and plurality. In R. Ellefsen, R. Sollund, & G. Larsen (Eds.), Eco-global crimes: contemporary problems and future challenges. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.
Stretesky, P., Long, M., & Lynch, M. (2014). The treadmill of crime: political economy and green criminology. London: Routledge.
Sutherland, W.J., Clout, M., Cote, I., Daszak, P., Depledges, M.H., Fellman, L., et al. (2009). A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2010. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 25(1), 1–7.
Tsing, A. (2005). Friction: an ethnography of global connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
United Nations Environment Programme (2011). UNEP year book: emerging issues in our global environment 2011. Nairobi, Kenya: UNEP.
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (2013). Threats to biodiversity. http://www.unep-wcmc.org/threats-to-biodiversity_52.html. Accessed 4 September 2013.
Varkkey, H. (2013). Oil palm plantations and transboundary haze: patronage networks and land licensing in Indonesia’s peatlands. Wetland, 33, 679–690.
Walters, R. (2005). Crime, bio-agriculture and the exploitation of hunger. British Journal of Criminology, 46(1), 26–45.
Walters, R. (2010). Toxic atmospheres: air pollution, trade and the politics of regulation. Critical Criminology, 18, 307–323.
Walters, R. (2011). Eco crime and genetically modified food. New York: Routledge.
White, R. (2013). Environmental harm: an eco-justice perspective. Bristol: Policy Press.
White, R., & Heckenberg, D. (2014). Green criminology: an introduction to the study of environmental harm. London: Routledge.
World Wide Fund for Nature [WWF] (2014). Living planet report 2014: species and spaces, people and places. (Eds. R. McLellan, L. Iyengar, B. Jeffries, N. Oerlemans). Gland, Switzerland: WWF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
White, R. (2017). Animal Abuse Resulting from Wildlife Habitat Destruction. In: Maher, J., Pierpoint, H., Beirne, P. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Animal Abuse Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43183-7_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43183-7_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-43182-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-43183-7
eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)