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Intelligence Squared
What Can Criminal Psychology Teach Us About Climate Change? With Julia Shaw
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- [00:00]
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- [01:45]
Julia Shaw
You're about to make a trade which you do you listen to. Is it get optioning those options or let's do a little research? Learn more@finra.org TradeSmart welcome to Intelligence Squared.
- [02:02]
Helen Chersky
Where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Can criminal psychology offer us a new way to think about and combat climate change? In this episode, criminal psychologist Julia Shaw sits down with physicist and broadcaster Helen Chersky to offer a compelling new framework to understand environmental crime. While big structural issues often cloud political progress on climate action, Shaw takes a more granular approach in conversation with Czersky. She draws on her new book, Green Crime to illuminate the minds of those behind some of the world's most devastating environmental scandals. Let's join our host, Helen Chersky now with more. Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Helen Chersky and our guest for today is Julia Shaw. She's a criminal psychologist, she's worked as an expert witness, she gives talks all around the world, and she's worked as a lecturer and researcher at various universities. She is a prolific writer. She is the author of three past the Memory, Illusion, Making Evil and bi. But today we are here to talk about her new book, which Is this one Green Crime, which is an investigation into the criminals associated with climate destruction, climate and environment problems, and it's told through a series of real world cases. So this is your real, real crime fiction for the day. Julia, welcome to Intelligence Squared. It's lovely for you to join us. Let's start a little bit with your background, because I think the words criminal psychologist, it sounds, it sounds like you spend your time, you know, I don't know, delving into murder mysteries. But what does a criminal psychologist actually do?
- [03:41]
Julia Shaw
Well, it depends on the criminal psychologist, but in my case, I am an expert on memory. So I'm interested in police investigations, in how, for examp, investigators ask questions of especially vulnerable witnesses. For example, you know, are people asking leading or suggestive questions? Are we accidentally, what's called contaminating people's memories in the way that we are asking questions? And so as an expert witness, I deal with cases, often historic cases, but sometimes contemporary ones. And the question is, is this memory that was elicited in some way, either through a police interview or otherwise, is it reliable as a piece of evidence? And so I can never say a memory is definitely true or is definitely false, but I definitely tie in what we know from the research on memory. I tie it in and I say, here's some red flags in terms of how we can examine this piece of memory evidence. So my version of criminal psychology is mostly looking into people's minds and basically examining reality.
- [04:39]
Helen Chersky
And so that's taken you to the environment and green crime. Just talk to us a little bit about how you came to seeing this topic as, from, from the point of view of the rest of your job, I guess. I mean, lots of us, you know, we're walking around the world, we're concerned about climate and the environment. What was it that really linked the world of crime to the world of the environment?
- [05:03]
Julia Shaw
So the other thing that I do as a criminal psychologist is I look at why people do bad things. And so I'm interested in the psychology of behavior change. I'm interested in the psychology of what makes what I would consider sort of good people do bad things. And all of us, I think, are capable of the worst kinds of atrocities we can imagine, in my view. And so it's important to understand the research on what paths people can take and the cognitive distortions, the ways in which we can think our way into, for example, rationalizing bad behavior. And as someone who is, I don't know, just alive today, I guess I was being bombarded with information about the triple planetary Crisis. And I kept seeing the stuff on my feed going, wow, you know, the rainforest is on fire again. Oh, wow. So there's a toxic waste dump near my house. Oh, so this, you know, you're hearing all of these really catastrophic incidents that are happening around you. And for a long time I felt really hopeless. I was pulled into what psychologists call eco despair and eco grief, these eco and climate related anxieties and feelings that are all a reasonable response to what's going on. But I was having them and I was feeling quite overwhelmed, overwhelmed by them. Until one day I thought, wait, this isn't stuff that's just accidentally happening. These are individuals making decisions to engage often in environmental crimes. And I know stuff about crime, so why can't I try and understand whether we can apply what we know from criminal psychology to environmental issues? And so this book is basically a big experiment in trying to do that and seeing how social scientists and other scientists can get together and try to help to understand what's going on and to prevent it from happening.
- [06:44]
Helen Chersky
Now, your chapter headings are. I mean, they're very definitely. It's a list of criminals. You've got con men and murderers and traffickers and outlaws and thieves. Why does it make a difference to see environmental issues in terms of crime and to label the perpetrators as criminals? What's that shift in perspective all about?
- [07:06]
Julia Shaw
For one, I think as someone who's presented quite a lot of true crime, I know that people like true crime and people like talking about crimes, understanding why people are capable of things like murder. And so for one, it's trying to capitalize and harness that fascination that we have with crime and applying it to one of the biggest issues of our time. And so I tried to use that true crime storytelling in the book, as I'm sure you, you noticed, to try and make these issues that maybe sometimes can feel depersonalized, nebul, overwhelming and to turn them into a narrative flow that's really quite exciting and crimey. But also I think if we start to think about these individuals who are destroying the planet, especially people who are doing so negligently or recklessly, or they're intentionally, you know, they know that they're destroying the planet and they're committing some sort of crime, if we start seeing it as such, I think that is also a huge shift in our mentality around the environment because again, it's seen as this almost abstract thing, but that's not true. And if we were to put environmental criminals in the same category, say as serial killers, I Think societally, we'd make a huge leap in terms of understanding what's really at stake and trying to really understand the people who are doing these kinds of things.
- [08:26]
Helen Chersky
Right. So I am not a lawyer, and when I was reading your book, it something. It occurred to me there's something I don't know. And you can tell me whether this is a thing or not. And I don't know because I am ignorant of the law, whether breaking a law, whether every time you break the law, that is a crime. Because I was thinking about the way we perceive these things, and I think a lot of people would look at big companies polluting rivers and say they're probably breaking some laws. But is everyone who breaks a law a criminal? I don't know. Can you help me out with that?
- [08:58]
Julia Shaw
That's a good question. And I think the same is true for other kinds of incidents that have nothing to do with the environment. Right. So if you think about maybe I'm not struggling to think of examples that aren't still crimes, but you do small things like speeding, so you're on the motorway and you're driving too fast and you know that you're above the speed limit. Is it a crime? And the answer is, well, it's a misdemeanor. I mean, certainly it's not what we typically think of when we think of a crime. But as soon as you're breaking a. You do move into things that are either civil or criminal law, typically. And so you can either get a fine, you can maybe get a term in prison. But what I'm interested, especially in the environmental space, is things that are obviously crimes, and so things where it's not just sort of passive pollution, it's not just someone who didn't read the rules enough, it's someone who knew what they were doing and did it anyway. And I think that's often what we think about when we think of, say, violent crime as well, you don't think of someone accidentally pushing someone and killing them. You think of someone pushing them on purpose and killing them. And that's where we start to get more interesting aspects. So certainly the boundaries of crime legally are somewhat well defined, but in terms of how it's in the public consciousness, it's a bit more fuzzy where exactly that boundary often is. And so in the book, I also made sure that I only talked about crimes that were really obvious and that we all agree on and that have been convicted in some sort of court. And so that's the other difference is I think when people Talk about environmental issues and maybe even throw in the world environmental crime. What they're often talking about is people doing bad things to the environment, whereas I'm talking about people who are breaking obvious laws in a way that is almost always on purpose.
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Helen Chersky
So the, I mean, and actually the, the. It's interesting because they are. They're doing. They're actually doing two things wrong, but they're being nailed. If they're being. That's the right word for someone who's been caught and, you know, brought to justice, they're actually being nailed for the one that's already in the statute books for something murdering someone. We generally all agree it's a very bad idea, you shouldn't do it, and if you do do it, you should face the legal consequences. But actually it's not just about the murder. It's about this other thing that they're doing. But, but. So these are crimes in the context of environmental crime. But I mean, there's a sort of interesting mixture right there where it's not actually the damage to the environment that is the main crime you're talking about. It's that they're criminal in multiple ways, in a way. But the one that you can get them on is the one that's in the statute books. That's murder or theft or whatever it is.
- [11:34]
Julia Shaw
Yeah, or dumping. I mean, some are specific violations of environmental law. So in a lot of these chapters. So for example, the Dieselgate case was emissions regulations that were being broken and the Clean Air act, which is an environmental piece of legislation. For the second chapter, I talked about the murder of environmental defenders in the rainforest. And that's probably the one you're thinking of right now, which is the chapter where two indigenous people who were land rights defenders were murdered in the way that we think about it, not abstract, like actually murdered really brutally in the rainforest. And the hitmen were hired by someone who wanted to clear the land for cattle. And so there it very much goes into the intersection between human rights and environmental rights. And I speak with an environmental lawyer who was trying to bring that case to the icc, the International Criminal Court, to place it alongside human rights abuses, other kinds of human rights abuses. And so there the protagonist, in some ways, because I always speak to someone in each chapter who is really investigating or dealing with this case firsthand. And in that case it's an environmental, international human rights lawyer who is, who's the hero. But in other ones, it's a regulator who's the hero, or a scientist or an undercover agent who's working for the Environment Environmental Investigation Agency. So I think quite often, certainly in this book, the laws that are broken are also environmental laws. But you're absolutely right that when I was speaking to an Interpol agent who was dealing with one of the cases I tackle on illegal phishing, he was talking to me about how when you catch these kinds of perpetrators, often they're cross national. So you need to deal with the international aspect of it, which is quite difficult, which is where Interpol comes in and it sort of brings police forces together and shares information to make sure basically someone takes charge and someone actually does something about it. But also that because environmental laws sometimes don't have the outcomes that we want. Like, I mean, sometimes you might want prison, sometimes you want more severe fines. You want people to stop doing the thing. And so environmental laws are often really defined. And so he said you often need to take all the books off the shelf and throw it at them and then throw the shelf itself, which I think might be a Portuguese expression. But I remember that always that he's like, yeah, we had to throw. And so they were getting them for like creating a shipwreck and sort of all these other things that weren't actually directly related to environmental crime, even though ultimately what they were trying to prosecute them for was environmental crime.
- [14:01]
Helen Chersky
Okay, well, let's have a look at a few of the. You know, I think people should read your book. I don't think we should rehearse all the examples, but I do think there's some quite interesting psychological things that come out of your examples. So let's start with the Dieselgate scandal, which many people will have heard of. That there was, as you described, you know, there was an enormous deliberate sidestepping of the regulations, apparently out of laziness, really. But one of the things that you. And this was a huge corporate thing. There was no, it wasn't one individual. It was a whole system within the company that kind of created the situation. But one of the things you wrote about was that nobody felt guilty about it. None of the people who had taken actions that led to this enormous lie being created and then covered up, none of them felt guilty about it. Where does that come from?
- [14:52]
Julia Shaw
Yeah, in the case of Dieselgate, it was really hard to piece together the case because there's so much misinformation about it. And that's partly because Volkswagen and related companies quite deliberately covered up what was going on and lied repeatedly and then were convicted of lying in various ways, both to consumers and to the regulators. And to the FBI and to. I mean, just the list goes on. And so the lies are really interesting. And there's a point at which I spoke with a New York Times journalist, Jack Ewing, who interviewed people at the time. So people were coming forward and they wanted to talk, but they wanted to talk off the record. And so they were meeting in these really secretive locations and talking to him, and he was trying to just figure out what was going on. And instead, what he got was people half the time explaining to him that they're not really bad people, which I think is a really interesting psychological thing to do, to meet with someone, meet with a journalist sort of in a secret location, and to spend most of the time just being like, no, no, no. But I'm still a good person. I. I didn't. You know, you're really trying to save face in that moment. And I think with the psychological phenomenon of rationalizing it and saying, I am. You know, I had to do this. It had to be me. I. I would have lost my job if I hadn't. Whether that's true or not. And so I think there's. There's that, and then there's the conformity aspect, which is that everyone's doing it. So I think you've got a couple of things going on there psychologically. And ultimately it can lead to people just not really accepting responsibility. And that is something I saw repeatedly, especially in corporate, but also in other kinds of environmental crimes, like even in wildlife crime syndicates. You've got the people who are going out to small towns in the middle of nowhere in parts of Africa saying, you know, can you poach some rhino, elephants, pangolins, whatever for us? And waving some money at them. And when you ask them if they get convicted, there was a study of some of these bosses, they're called, in prisons who were caught. And they asked them, as psychologists went in and asked them, what do you think about your crimes? And they're like, well, I was giving them jobs. Basically, I'm a good person. I was giving them jobs. And that's a really interesting but really common psychological phenomenon, is that we rationalize bad behavior. So the question is, how do we stop people from rationalizing this bad behavior?
- [17:13]
Helen Chersky
Well, it comes perhaps back to something that you touched on before, which is that everybody, we are encouraged, I guess, generally to think of the world in terms of heroes and villains. And nobody wants to be a villain, so you must be a hero. And it's that it feels like there's that sort of. Once you've decided you're in that category. You retrofit all the facts to make yourself a hero. And how, I mean this is perhaps a more general psychological thing, but how can, are humans ever going to be able to get away from that? Everybody wants to think of themselves as a hero, right? This is at the root cause of so many things. Is that just hardwired into us? Are we ever going to get rid of that through better education or cultural changes? Or are we just stuck with that, that everybody wants to be a hero?
- [17:57]
Julia Shaw
I think it's good that everyone wants to be a hero. So I think there's the good side of that, which is that we like to think of ourselves as good people also because we know the complexity of our lives. And so one of the things that happens a lot also in rationalization across various sectors of environmental crime, but also crime in general, is that people say things like, no, I'm not doing this because I'm greedy, because I'm selfish, I'm doing this for my family, I'm doing this cutting in line, getting vaccines early, getting my kids, you know, bribery, corruption, theft, all of these things are often justified by people saying, no, I'm not doing it for me, I'm doing it for X. And that is, it's, it has a grain of truth to it as well. Right? So it's not even that that person is just lying to themselves necessarily is that is part of how they've sort of self identified as like a selfless person who's also giving to these other people. So I think that is a really big part that we need to not just pay lip service to because people fundamentally believe this. The bigger question for me is why choose this kind of crime and not other kinds of crime? Because it's not like people are going out and committing all kinds of crime all the time. And these individuals, I think, for example Volkswagen, are not that they wouldn't have committed the same kind of crime if it hadn't been emissions related. I think if it had been say stealing from human beings, stealing from a bank, never mind being violent towards someone to take money, they wouldn't have done it. And so for me the psychological question is what's different about environmental crime that makes people rationalize it more readily? And I think that's where we get to issues of conformity and norms and values. And so in the book I talk about research on biospheric values, which is how much we feel connected to the planet and how much we value the environment and what we need to be doing is increasing those biospheric values. And so we place, much like at the beginning of our conversation, we talked about putting environmental criminals who are burning down the rainforest on purpose in the same category as serial killers, because then we think about it differently and we also think about perpetrating those crimes differently.
- [19:57]
Helen Chersky
But it's part of this, I mean, the problem that we have with a lot of environmental problems is this term that scientists like me like, which is externalities, which is that you do something over here, but the real costs of it are felt somewhere else. And in this case it fills with a lot of environmental, a lot of the environmental crimes that you describe. Part of the problem is that you can't identify one victim. It's all very far away and sort of over there and long term and large scale and something gets gradually worse somewhere else, but it's not necessarily right here, right now. And so it's easier perhaps to make a sort of nebulous nameless thing the subject of a crime because it feels like it's not real. Is that part of the problem here?
- [20:43]
Julia Shaw
That is part of the problem. So short termism is definitely part of the issue in all environmental conversations, but you can bring the long term into the short term. And this is where there's quite a lot of examples in the book where researchers try and sometimes succeed in getting people to think about externalities, as you call them, and long term decisions where it's really easy to discount. We know temporal discounting is when we discount future outcomes and prefer ones that are closer and more guaranteed. And so the idea that something might or even definitely will happen in the future is sort of discounted and given less weight than this thing I can hold in my hand or my daughter that I can send to the private school that I want to send her to. And so it's this, this phenomenon that we all have of, well, making that calculation and not thinking about future us, even ourselves, not even other people. And so in research studies there have been lots of different attempts to correct this. And one of the ways that I like correcting it is through reading cli fi climate fiction. And that is when you basically are just trying to imagine future worlds and you're living in these future worlds by read climate fiction and you're living them. You're not, it's not this abstract thing that could be maybe something that affects you, but it's something that it feels like you're immersed in. And I think if you read more climate fiction, according to research, at least you start to understand more what is likely to happen, and it brings it into focus. Now similar things are writing a letter from your future self. And so there's really big mega analysis where thousands and thousands of participants were involved from many different countries. And they found that one of the most effective ways to get people to care about the environment and to take action was for them to write a letter from 10 years in the future writing to you now. Who are you? What are you doing? What do you wish you would have done? And you sort of receiving that as you today from the future. And so there's, there's psychological hacks that we can use that can make us bring that, that future to now. And I think that's really important for making better decisions now and also for not committing crimes, for example. I mean, this is a classic thing that we know from violent crime and other kinds of crime as well, is that people have this immediate reaction, this sudden, impulsive decision. And if we can get people to think about things and to picture things, even murder fantasies. So in my second book, I wrote about murder fantasies that most of us have murder fantasies from time to time. And that involves, you know, thinking about maybe pushing someone out the window or stabbing somebody. But those fantasies, those thoughts that we have, which is also called homicidal ideation, is something that we're playing through as a thought experiment in our minds. And probably what that's allowing us to do is to come to the end of that thought and realize, oh, wow, I definitely don't want the outcomes of this. And so it might actually act as a protective force for us not to engage in that behavior. So I think the power of imagination is really important, including in this kind of issue. And so, yeah, I think for tackling the climate crisis, we need to psychologically mobilize our ability to bring the future into the now.
- [23:49]
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Julia Shaw
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- [26:57]
Helen Chersky
One of the things that stood out to me in the book was this sort of very nebulous line between individual responsibility and societal responsibility because you provide examples where the external, the sort of big you know, the regulations and the rules and whatever actually provide not only incentives to do something, but they Provide cover. So the example that stuck out to me was you talk about a ship that was that I think Greenpeace were chasing called the Thunder and it was blacklisted. It's a ship that's not going to be there. You know, it's illegal in all kinds of ways. And yet it has insurance. Somebody, some company has insured this ship. And actually when it comes to the captain deciding what he's going to do in the situation he's stuck in, that insurance is a critical part of the puzzle. And so. But that's a sort of system failing, right? I mean there's. How does that work?
- [27:48]
Julia Shaw
Is the system failing? I feel like it's still not. It's still an individual. It's still the person making the decision to ensure that ship. Right. So it's not like you sort of plug it into a system and the system just pumps it out. It is usually a person who is like, yes, we've run the risk calculation on this and we think that this is a good investment. Basically the system failure is almost one higher right is the allowing red listed or purple. It ships with a purple notice, as it's called by Interpol, to be insured. So that should just be illegal, I think, or unlawful.
- [28:18]
Helen Chersky
Right. That's the bit I'm talking about is that sort of. The system allows that to happen. It's not an illegal act to ensure an illegal ship, that sort of thing. I mean that's a problem.
- [28:30]
Julia Shaw
It is a problem and it is interesting. So it was Sea shepherd that was chasing the thunder, but they were founded by the co founder of Greenpeace. So I could see how you got to Greenpeace. But yeah, the Sea shepherd case I think is a really good example of. You're right. Of sort of also these enforcement vacuums where you've got. Maybe you do have laws of the seas, you do have laws that say this ship should be stopped and we've got this notice out and we've got this international arrest warrant for this ship and yet who is going to take charge? And so I almost think it's less of a legal thing often than it is a responsibility in someone actually doing it then. And so this is what I kept seeing in the book is that I think people often argue for more laws or say that sort of the system failure. And there is a system failure, the system failure is often at international scale because the problem in a globalized world is that you can also shop around for the least regulated or easiest country to for example, register or insure your ship. And you can do things like flying false flags, and you can go to specific places that will give you a flag of their country. And they don't do any checks on board to make sure you're not perpetrating human rights abuses, for example. And that's a huge issue, but in some ways, and the other piece of that issue is that then when they go into other people's waters, into other countries waters, people are just not taking charge, they're not taking the responsibility. They're basically going, well, that's not one of our ships, so it's not our problem. And that's, I think, actually what needs to change. And I guess that's where you could say that that's the system failure. And there are people working really hard to try and address that gap, including at the United nations, some of whom I spoke to, and including lawyers in various parts of the world. But it is a work in progress to make sure that we can actually tackle this issue.
- [30:18]
Helen Chersky
So to come back to the sort of individual psychology, you identify these six pillars of sort of the psychological, the sort of slides that people slide down in order to turn themselves into criminals effectively just very quickly run us down those six, because it seems as though a lot of, you know, you can cover almost everything with those six. And then the next question is, what do we do about it? But let's get to that in a minute. So just tell us about the six pillars first.
- [30:46]
Julia Shaw
As I was going through these cases, and I have to say, as much as 2 of the cases are almost really obvious where one is the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill that probably lots of people paid attention to about 10 years ago. And the other is the Dieselgate emissions case, the Volkswagen emissions case, which was also almost exactly 10 years ago. Those two cases are quite famous, but actually getting all the documents was quite difficult. And for the other four, I snowballed it by talking to people who are experts in these different areas to try and figure out how and what should I cover, and trying to make sure that I'm covering the air, so emissions and forests and oceans and animals, and trying to make sure that I'm hitting those really big categories of environmental issues so that I could also shoehorn in the various kinds of laws and the protections and the history of the ideas around protection for those different things. And by doing that and by learning about these cases, many of which I had no idea about, as a criminal psychologist, I usually deal with violence and memory issues. I don't deal with huge environmental crimes. And so I was also meeting the people who are doing these jobs that I also didn't know existed. And as I was going through it, I kept thinking there has to be some sort of pattern. So all I wanted to do was to create sort of a profile for people who are capable of engaging in environmental crime. And that's what eventually led me to these, these six pillars is that I kept seeing repeatedly the ease creep in. So people were doing things because it was easier than doing it the right way. So dumping is a really big category. Waste, crime, really big category where people just do it because it's cheaper and easier to not do it properly. If you made it cheaper and easier to do properly, we wouldn't be in this situation. The second one is impunity. And that can be perceived or actual impunity. And that's where what you were talking about, some of the system failures come in. Where you have countries like Brazil, for example, where the murder of environmental defenders often goes unpunished. And so what happens in that context is that people continue to murder environmental defenders because they know they can get away with it. And so the other piece of that is perceived impunity, which is where there are laws actually in some ways, even Brazil, there are laws against murder, of course, but if they're not being enforced and you know that you're probably not going to get caught, then it's that perceived, well, I'm going to get away with this anyway. And so you get that, that element. Then there's greed, which we all know of, which is being happy with the fact that you're going to profit and other people are going to lose out. And that's where you also get into selfishness a bit, and you get into sort of common goods experiments where the question is, you know, if we all had the shared resource, would you exploit it or would you protect it it? And we know from research at least, that people often do learn how to take advantage to maximize their own success and their own benefits from a situation compared to others, but not always. And so that's where other things come in. So rationalization is when you basically say, I'm not that bad, it's okay. Conformity is the fifth factor or the fifth pillar, where people are doing it because other people around them are doing it. And sometimes they'll say things like, well, if I don't do this, I'm a fool. Especially when we get into issues of things like corruption. You get people around you who are reinforcing and possibly even pushing you into that. And then the last one, which I don't think I would have come up with had I not been living in South Africa at the time, is desperation. And so desperation is absolutely core to basically every environmental crime. And usually that involves people who are desperately poor, who end up being the fishermen on these ships, who end up being the poachers, who end up being recruited into illegal mining. And that poverty is really taken advantage of. But sometimes it can also be feeling desperate, so feeling like you have to meet some sort of business target, for example, and thinking there's no way out. So those are the six.
- [34:38]
Helen Chersky
It's a really interesting way of looking at it, especially because as you show that they do come up again and again. And I guess what we want really in general is not to have any crime, right? To have people not do these things. So once you look at it in that way, once you've identified these common factors that underlie these environmental crimes, what do we do about that? If we want to have a healthier climate and therefore not have people committing environmental crimes, what is it that we have to do to use this information to actually change the future?
- [35:13]
Julia Shaw
The first thing we need to do is we need to stop talking about environmental crimes as a greed motivated category of things. So we often simplify and dehumanize people by stripping them back to one factor. And I think that is really harmful to us as a society to say this is always just greed. And that's what I was tempted to call Green Crime as a subtitle instead of Inside the minds of the people destroying the planet. How to Stop Them. The alt title was It's Not Just Greed. Because I think that is the first thing that comes to people's minds and that is just such an oversimplified way of thinking about the human mind for anything, never mind for this huge kind of crime. So I think step one is stop pretending it's just greed. It's not. And if you pretend it's just greed, you're not going to understand the real drivers of environmental crime. Second, any of these six factors ease impunity, greed, desperation, rationalization and conformity. If you intervene at any of them, you are likely to stop these crimes. So you don't need to tackle all of them at once. You can do a crackdown on environmental crime and just make sure every single time companies, let's say dairy companies, dump waste into rivers and they know that they're doing it unlawfully, they get an ever bigger fine and eventually they'll stop doing it because they can't Afford it, you can do it. There's lots of ways in making sure that you are cracking down, which doesn't involve people putting everybody in prison, but does involve completely changing that cost benefit analysis so that people choose to do the right thing. And then the other thing is understanding that there's all of these professions, especially people like regulators, who we need to be championing, because I think we see some things that are meant to and essential to protecting the planet as red tape, when really they are the only people who are able to pay attention and to really get into corporations and to infiltrate, potentially also organize crime rings and to break them apart. And so I think we need to, I don't know, we need to pay more attention to these unlikely heroes who are often overshadowed by activists who, I mean, lots of activists are making understandably and importantly noise and drawing attention to these really important issues. But ultimately they're often not the ones on the front lines who are really changing and getting things done. It's the lawyers, it's the regulators, it's the scientists, it's the. It's other people, and there's lots of them. And what I found in this book and writing it is that it's really encouraging also when you meet these people and you realize that there's so many people fighting on our sides that we have a chance and there's so much being done and all of us can join in.
- [37:48]
Helen Chersky
I also find a lot of optimism in that. And I have always thought that there's a lot of just hard work in making the world a better place. And it's not the sexy stuff.
- [37:58]
Julia Shaw
Right.
- [37:59]
Helen Chersky
And it's not necessarily the visible stuff, but it does make an enormous difference. And I do feel that in general, just if we want to live in a healthier world, we have to, as you say, recognize the stuff that that is never going to make the headlines. But unless the nuts and bolts underneath it are all working, you're not going to have a working system. So I really like that emphasis. One of the things that also I took away at the end was that you said that these six pillars, they matter at different levels. So the ones that are most likely to get to, the ones that are most likely to apply to the CEO of a company, for example, are not the ones that are most likely to apply to, you know, the fisherman who's going out on an industrial illegal fishing fleet because it's the only choice you've got. Just tell us a little bit about that.
- [38:44]
Julia Shaw
Yeah, at the different levels, you've got different factors that are going to be more important. And so at the higher levels, you've got, well, greed, as you might expect, especially when we're talking about the financial motivations behind big environmental crimes. And in my book, I'm only focusing on big environmental crimes. And then I sort of. I drop in other kinds of smaller crimes. But the cases themselves that I'm covering are these really big ones. And so they almost inherently have multiple levels because you've got someone at the top usually with the most amount of money, and they are financing the whole thing. And so whether that is the CEO of a company or the board or the boss of an international syndicate. I like calling them gangs. But I had a long conversation with someone at the UN who studied drug cartels for a long time, and then he moved into environmental crime. He now writes the International World Wildlife Crime Reports. And Ted Leggett and I was speaking with him, and we had a long conversation about how these are not gangs, because gangs have a sense of identity that's woven in with their crimes as well. Anyway, these international poaching syndicates there as well, you've got people at the top who are able to bankroll the whole thing. And you've got these structures where you've got greed at the top. You've got but this desire to take advantage of flaws in the system that they've either perceived or they've slipped into, and no one stopped them from continuing down. So, for example, if you start smuggling, maybe things that are illegal, but they're not high value, then maybe someone goes, well, I see you're smuggling glass eels. Would you like some rhino horn? And so you sort of get seduced into it also, potentially, where people start offering you other things to take across borders, and you start going, yeah, okay, I'll do that as well. And suddenly you're in this. You're the head of the biggest international ivory smuggling ring in the world. And I don't say that as in, like suddenly, as in passively, and they have no responsibility. I mean that as in it's step by step. And it's not just a sudden decision that people go, I'm gonna have this huge wildlife crime smuggling organization. They step by step get there. But, yeah, you've got greed at the top. Then in the middle, you usually have rationalization and conformity and sometimes whispers of desperation. And then at the bottom especially, you have desperation. So desperation is usually those poor people who are on the ground. And as I write in chapter five, where it's all about Zama, Zama Miners in South Africa. And I spoke with a clinical sociologist who does research on the people who go into these. These mines illegally, called Zama Zamas. And there's this war on illegal mining in South Africa as it's been declared and it's ongoing right now. And I was sh. By it because it is a real hijacking of the narrative for the fight for our planet, where it's pointing the finger at these people who are in these mines for months at a time sometimes. They have these underground economies where they are getting food smuggled in for them, where they know they can get crushed by these derelict mines at any point. The water and air is oppressive and dangerous, and they're getting paid a tiny amount of money and the government is going. They're the problem. And I think we need to be careful in how we talk about environmental crimes. And we don't just point the finger at the people who are holding the murder weapon, if you want to put it that way, of the. Like the murder weapon of the earth, where it's these people who actually have, you know, the pecs in their hands or the. The bulldozers or whatever. It's. They're usually not the people who are financing it. And if you stop them, there will be more. But if you stop the people, even one level above, especially two levels above, this whole industry can exist. And so I think for me, what also became clear is because there's these multiple interpersonal interactions as well, and these reliances between the people with money and the people without money, you can intervene in financial flows, you can intervene at insurance, you can intervene at the point of borders, you can intervene. There's so many different spots, spots. And every single one of these spots.
- [42:52]
Helen Chersky
Can break the chain, which is optimistic because having more places to break the chain rather than fewer is always going to be a good thing. So it feels very much as though some of this book was written out of frustration with the current state of the environment. When you. Having written it, when you now read the news, when you see stories coming in, there's a constant deluge, as we know, of things that are not going well and things that, you know, problems in the world. Has it changed your perspective on how, you know, just how well we're doing with treating our environment? Do you look at the state of our environment and those stories differently as a result of having written this book?
- [43:32]
Julia Shaw
Definitely. I came in and years ago I was sad and eco depressed, if you will, and eco anxious. And now I have a huge amount of hope. I look at reporting. And I think, why is there so much doom being reported as well? Because I think that is massively underselling the people who are working hard to fight for our planet. And it's often wrong. I get really frustrated, as I'm sure lots of people who do any kind of environmental or natural sciences also think at the oversimplification and the wrong reporting of some of this. And I, on the other hand, am optimistic because I know that. But even if they're not being talked about, all of these people exist. And you've got conferences happening just to talk about where nations meet, to talk about how they're going to deal with the tiniest parts of this issue. I went to the CITES conference, which is the conference on the international trade and endangered species of wild fauna. And that's basically where nations get together, or member states, as they're called, get together and they discuss which animals can be traded and how much and which animals are endangered and can't be traded. And so even there, I mean, they were talking about like individual animals, like parrots, you know, how do we deal with parrots? And I think when you understand the granularity of these discussions, again, to me that's really helpful because it's not just that people are dealing with this on a bigger issue, but they're dealing with the very specific aspects of it and people, they're on it. And most people now, according to the UN Climate Survey, think that climate change is man made, that we need to do more about it. And most people think about it every single day. And that is a huge shift from where we were even five years ago, I think. And that to me is incredibly helpful.
- [45:22]
Helen Chersky
Brilliant. Well, that is a great place to finish. Thank you so much for joining us, Julia. That was Julia Shaw, author of Green Crime, which is available now both online and in physical bookshops. I recommend it. Hello, everyone. I'm Helen Chersky. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared and thank you for joining us. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts.
- [46:00]
Julia Shaw
Morning, Zoe. Got donuts?
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Helen Chersky
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Julia Shaw
Well, I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T Mobile commercial like you teach me. So, Dana.
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Julia Shaw
I couldn't possibly AT T Mobile get.
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Julia Shaw
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Julia Shaw
You heard them. T Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible traded in any condition. So what are we having for lunch?
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Helen Chersky
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Julia Shaw
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