No, Putin Should Not Be Charged With the “Crime” of “Ecocide”

Vladimir Putin is a war criminal of the worst order for his atrocities against Ukraine. He is responsible for human carnage, the deaths and terrible woundings of hundreds of thousands of people — from soldiers to civilians and even children killed in hospitals where they were receiving medical treatment.

Under his orders, the Russian army has destroyed property, ruined infrastructure, and caused unquantifiable misery. Nothing can mitigate the harm he has caused, and he should be made to pay the highest price in a courtroom and in history.

But . . . should he ever be called to so face the music, he should not be charged with “ecocide” because Russian forces allegedly blew up a dam causing ruinous damage. But that is precisely what some Ukrainians and environmentalists are advocating. From the New Lines Magazine story:

Before the dam explosion, residents of the Kherson region in southeastern Ukraine referred to the local reservoir simply as the “sea.”

Now, just one year after the June 6, 2023, attack on the Kakhovka Dam, they call it the “dead sea.” Once vast, its water irrigated farms and kept hundreds of thousands of people hydrated. It was replete with fish that had provided sustenance to the local population for generations.

The attack, which was carried out by Russian occupying forces, sent contaminated floodwaters measuring trillions of gallons into the Black Sea. It was the worst blow to the environment in a war that has ravaged Ukraine’s ecology and is considered one of the worst human-caused natural disasters of all time.

Since October, a Ukrainian team of prosecutors, ecologists and scientists has been regularly testing the area as part of efforts to build a case against Russia and charge its aggressor with ecocide. Kyiv wants this added to the list of international crimes recognized by the International Criminal Court (ICC), along with genocide, crimes against humanity, aggression and war crimes.

Whatever existing crimes the bombing of a dam incorporates should be charged. But not ecocide, which is not (yet) a “crime against peace,” and shouldn’t so become.

Ecocide has had several definitions over the years. I think this is the latest one:

For the purpose of this Statute, “ecocide” means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.

And therein lies the rub. Making ecocide a crime against peace elevates causing widespread environmental damage to the equivalent of the worst crimes that can be committed against humanity. Indeed, I warrant that the destruction of the dam clearly qualifies as a crime against humanity based on the terrible harm caused to people and their property:

The water that Kakhovka kept was about half the amount in Lake Mead in the United States, the reservoir formed by the Hoover Dam. A forest has since taken its place, a remarkable testament to nature’s ability to heal. But the damage is immense: According to the Wilson Center, a U.S. research institute, the attack on the dam rendered unusable more than 3,800 square miles of land in Ukraine’s southern regions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk for the next few years because of the lack of water supply. Whole villages disappeared under water, flooding an area of what was home to more than 100,000 people.

Moreover — and this is important to understand — the would-be crime of ecocide is not primarily aimed at punishing acts of war. Rather, the primary point is to criminalize large-scale peaceful exploitation of natural resources, particularly by large corporations.

Indeed, several years ago, a mock trial was held in the English Supreme Court chambers against two hypothetical oil company CEOs for the “crime” of “ecocide.” Their heinous acts? Extracting oil from the Alberta tar sands. (It is worth noting here that tar-sand-extraction contracts require remediation of the environment when the project terminates and require companies to pay into a trust fund to pay for it.) Other actions that ecocide activists have insisted should be criminalized are some deep-sea-mining projects, major oil spills, and arctic drilling.

Turning ecocide into a crime against peace would be subversive on several levels. First, equating resource extraction and/or pollution with genocide trivializes true evils such as the slaughter in Rwanda, the killing fields of Cambodia, the gulags, and the death camps — while elevating undefined environmental systems to the moral status of human populations. Even more elementary is the fact that ecocide’s promoters want to destroy prosperity by criminalizing necessary and productive economic activities.

Finally, there is something of an irony here. Environmental radicals plan for the crime of ecocide to be the spear of the nature-rights movement, criminalizing activities that bring tremendous prosperity to the world. One aspect of nature rights is known as “river rights.” Meaning? Some environmentalists might charge that the destroyed dam was itself a violation of the river’s putative “right to flow.”