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The Monocle Daily
Germany claims to have arrested members of Hamas. Plus: Rising numbers of Gen-Z protest movements
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- [00:00]
Tessa Shashkovitz
You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first broadcast on the 2nd of October, 2025 on Monaco Radio.
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Andrew Muller
Why would Hamas be targeting Germany? Are protests in Morocco just the latest in a global wave of youthful discontent and outsourcing? The raising of even younger generations to AI? What could possibly go wrong? I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts. FOREIGN welcome to the Monocle Daily, coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Tessa Shashkovitz and Kerry Brown will discuss the day's big stories. And we'll hear from the criminal psychologist Julia Shaw about her new book, looking at how and why people justify crimes against the environment. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
FOREIGN.
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Andrew Muller
This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I'm joined today by Tessa Shishkovitz, UK correspondent for the Austrian weekly magazine Falta and author of Echter Englander Britain and Brexit. And Kerry Brown, director of the Lao China Institute at King's College, London, author, most recently of the Great Reversal. Hello to you both.
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Kerry Brown
Hi.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
Good evening.
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Andrew Muller
Tessa, you have recently been continuing your investigations into British eccentricity. Specifically, you went to the Labour Party conference. How was that?
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Tessa Shashkovitz
Yes, My message is to you all that we shouldn't underestimate this young generation also of very sort of active activists and thinkers who, you know, there are now 300,000 think tanks that have been sprung up in Britain since Brexit.
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Andrew Muller
300,000 think tanks.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
I'm joking, I'm joking. Sorry, but there's a lot of think tanks.
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Andrew Muller
I feel like I'm missing out.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
You used to have like three, four think tanks that you needed to listen to. Now you go to fringe events where young people are sitting, and if it's blue labor or if it's labor growth, there are all these little groups that sort of reign in people who think alike in order to establish something new in terms of progressive or left wing or also moderate centrist policies. And it's quite interesting. I mean, we see the headlines and you think like, oh, what did they do now? But in the end, what really grows in these, you know, behind the headlines and away from conference hall is much more interesting.
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Andrew Muller
So did you find actually something genuinely inspiring and encouraging in it? Because the usual line you get from weary, cynical British journalists who attend party conferences is that they are largely insufferable gatherings of the angry and insane.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
Yeah, but I didn't feel that actually inside these fringe meetings because people are thinking now how can we rebuild the center? How can we build the trust of voters? And there are answers to this because, of course, it has to start at the grassroots level, and it has to start with local community. It has to start with media that is dealing with, you know, communities directly. And I think there are very good ideas behind that. And it's. It's worth listening to it because it's so depressing if you only think how people dis everything that people do nowadays. And you have no chance as a politician to develop anything because immediately somebody attacks you for it. So you feel this breathlessness in Keir Starmer when he sort of runs from one thing to the other. But you do feel that there's a lot of good thinking going on there on a level that we will need also. So it's better to listen a little bit more, I think.
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Andrew Muller
Carrie, you have recently been in Istanbul, which I'm sure is already making listeners much like myself, enraged, really with envy. It's a fabulous city. What were you actually doing there?
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Kerry Brown
Yeah, so I was there talking about China for a German group doing work in the Mercator. Mercator Institute, doing work sort of between Turkey and China. It's great to be in a city that has a European and Asian side. Right. I mean, that's pretty cool, having spent most of my life sort of dealing with. With that very problem, to be able to stand on the kind of, you know, threshold of the two. And I, you know, kind of found it fascinating being there. I'd only been to Ankara before, which is a somewhat sort of boring, you know, kind of city compared to Istanbul. And talking about China is always interesting. You always kind of find new things that you weren't expecting.
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Andrew Muller
And Istanbul is. I can also attest one, it's not just one of the great cities to visit, it's one of the great cities to visit for the first time because it is. It is somewhat overwhelming. And I mean that in a good way. Anyway, we will start tonight's show in Germany, where police have arrested what they claim is a cell of Hamas. Three men, two German citizens, one Lebanese, who were apprehended in Berlin and have appeared before a judge today to face charges of membership of a foreign terrorist organization and preparing acts of violence. Hamas denies everything, but German police believe the trio were procuring firearms and ammunition with a view to employing them in attacks on Israeli and or Jewish institutions in Germany, possibly in connection with Yom Kippur, which falls today, at which it would be remiss not to note that there was a terror attack on a synagogue today in Manchester in which two people were killed and a suspect shot dead by police. But as we go to air, no connection is known of. So, Tessa, let's focus on the German situation about which we know slightly more do we buy. First of all, Hamas somewhat indignant harrumphing that it's nothing to do with them because they wouldn't dream of doing something so ghastly overseas.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
Well, it's interesting that they say it has nothing to do with us because we wouldn't do such a thing. You think like, well, you are sort of also famous for the historical record on October 7, but we do not know if these three men have really links to whatever is left also of Hamas. You know, it has less to do probably with Gaza, which is a little bit cut off from the network outside. It might have something to do with Doha, but these guys are now more interested in negotiating than planning terror attacks on Jewish institutions in Germany. So it could be that they are not directly linked. But what does it mean? So, you know, if you remember the early days of Al Qaeda and how it spread then as a sort of international terror network, we then went through this lone actor period. And now we have possibly everything. And we have to look very carefully. These three men who are in their 30s and 40s and have partly German citizenship and are partly Lebanese and they live in Germany. And one of the guys affiliated with them in one of the apartments that the police raided, he's sitting in Denmark in prison because he tried to smuggle five kilos of wheat into the country. So there are all these sort of loose ends where we don't know if this is a real terrorist network or if this is a group of people who are willing to buy weapons to plan attacks. All of this is, in any case, really bad news.
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Andrew Muller
It is exactly that, Kerry. It would not be surprising, would it, if there was. And this is not obviously to excuse or justify anything, but it would not be surprising if there were another wave of broadly Islamist terrorism across Europe, perhaps similar to what we saw maybe a decade or so ago between this, what appears to have happened in Manchester today. But again, no details have been released about the suspect, although police do say they know who it is, or rather was. But it wouldn't be. Well, it would actually be kind of more surprising if there wasn't, wouldn't it?
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Kerry Brown
Yeah. It's funny, before I knew that you wanted to talk about this today, I have been trying to educate myself about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. And I bought Edward Said's the Question of Palestine. And then a book by a colleague at King's College, Daniela Richterova, who is a Czech scholar but based at King's College, about the kind of spy files in Prague in the 1960s and 70s, which, which are quite open now. They're very, very open. And I didn't expect this, but overwhelmingly these files are about the PLO and their operations in Prague.
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Andrew Muller
There was a big overlap between the PLO and the Red Brigades in Germany in particular.
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Kerry Brown
Most of the things that she writes about are the PLO and their terrorist operations. I mean, the munich attack in 1972, I think. And so I kind of thought that you're right. The assumption that this is just going to be a regional issue. I mean, the history shows this has never just been a regional issue. Right. It's always reached into Europe, it's always reached into other parts of the world. And it would be surprising if it didn't, you know, that there wasn't an international dimension to it. And I guess the thing that I'm coming as an outsider looking at these sort of treatments, you know, it's kind of incredible to read a book like Said's book was written at the end of the 1970s. I mean, it could have been written yesterday. I mean, what's changed? It's an extraordinarily depressing kind of situation that we are where we are today with this issue and it doesn't seem that it's really kind of changed. And as someone who doesn't deal with this on a day to day basis, I find that staggering.
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Andrew Muller
Just coming back before we move on to Germany, Tessa, there are, there is a trial already ongoing in Germany, has been since February of four other men who are accused of being members of the Al Qassam Brigades, that's Hamas's military wing. Is there still an argument in Germany? Because there was, was certainly immediately after September 11, 2001, when it emerged that a lot of the hijackers had kind of coalesced and radicalized in Germany, that Germany has rather tiptoed around this stuff. Have they got more serious about it?
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Tessa Shashkovitz
Well, if you remember, 9, 11, they were sleepers. So they were just using Germany as a relatively safe space to plan an operation from and then fly off into America and do it there. And I think the Germans, the German police has always thought at that time that they were not the target as Germany because Germany was not so prominent in sort of Middle Eastern politics or imperialist politics like the United States were. So what happens now? And that's a shift that is also uncomfortable, that every Jewish institution now is a target, a potential target. And we have to be so careful and we have to really call out antisemitism when it is anti Semitism and see that Jewish institutions, schools, synagogues are protected better than they are now. And in the wider context, it has something to do with the anger that a lot of people feel about Israel and the war in Gaza. And so we have to also be very careful not to mix everything together, but try to really keep a calm head and see that we protect the Jewish population everywhere. But still also say, like we need to, you know, raise the pressure on the Israeli government to stop the war in Gaza. And that's something in Germany, which is going on as a society debate, which is a good debate to be had. How you separate these things and how you really advocate for civilians not to get harmed in the whole theater that we see right now.
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Andrew Muller
Well, to Morocco now and to what appear to be grimly escalating protests. It is now reported that at least two people have been shot dead by police on the outskirts of Agadir. Police claim they were defending their station from a mob intent on storming it. The largely youth led protests began over the weekend, principally in anger at the government continuing to spend extravagantly on new football stadiums for the 2030 World cup, which Morocco is co hosting with Portugal and Spain. The protests have been organized, at least in part, beneath the banner Gen Z212.212 being Morocco's country code and as such seem part of a pattern given broadly similar recent events in Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines and Madagascar, among other datelines. First of all, Kerry, at the very real risk of undermining the entire premise of this item, is it a bit of a reach to suggest that there is anything yoking together disturbances in North Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Southern Africa. I mean, this is a. I'm not really sure what these demographics have in common beyond their, well, their demographic, their age. But, but are the kids in Nepal angry for the same reasons as the kids in Madagascar?
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Kerry Brown
Well, I suppose the under underlying kind of role of communication, social media and the way that that helps people communicate in a very different way. That, that must be the same. That must be the same everywhere. And that obviously is having a big, big impact. I don't know. I mean, you know, the demographic situation all these places is very, very different cases. It's because younger people feel like, you know, they're being completely done over by an older generation that are going to make them Pay their damn pensions. Right. Whereas I, I imagine, you know, Morocco, that's not the situation. But I, I don't know how you can kind of create a universal sort of language of feeling that you're dealt with unjustly and whether there would be any kind of international kind of movement or resonance between these groups that, that would would sort of matter. I mean, the kind of populations that I most know about, I mean, you know, they're angry about the kind of fact that they can't afford accommodation. They can't afford, you know, to pay, you know, cost of living things. They're often not able to get good jobs. I presume those are universal issues. I mean, people have that problem everywhere.
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Andrew Muller
It's not the first time, obviously, Tessa, the. That it's been noticeable that young generations have, around the world have demonstrated at the same time about broadly overlapping things. I mean, even, you know, there were protests obviously against the Vietnam War in the United states in the 1960s that were largely youth led, but there were variations on that in certainly France, the United Kingdom, Australia, among other places. Is, is this possibly akin to that?
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Tessa Shashkovitz
Well, also, if you take it further, the Arab Spring started as a Facebook protest, basically. So this is the intern. But I think it's not to underestimate the political content of this uprisings of this Gen Z wave at the moment. And I saw that they use the flag from the manga One Piece, which is the sort of bible of all of these guys. It's written by the Japanese author Ichiro Oda at the end of the 1990s. And this is the rallying symbol that all these Gen Z protests are rallying behind. And you know what it's about? It's about a band of pirates who battle against political oppression. So it's a highly political thing. It's not just young people saying, oh, we can't afford our rent. They say like we do not want to be governed by oppressive governments or regimes and so we should take it seriously. The only problem is of course that they say clearly they are non violent and all these nice things. But of course they are demonstrating against governments that don't have the shame to kill them or imprison them. So it's weird. We will see how it continues because if they can not stay nonviolence in response, then we'll have like in the Arab Spring, possibly, you know, huge repercussions on a lot of those people who are now demonstrating.
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Andrew Muller
Kerry, you mentioned the way that these demonstrations also have a parallel life online and they are increasingly organized, obviously they're organized online. Nobody is handing out flyers at the supermarket anymore. What would be the point? But does that. Does that means of organizing, catalyzing, potentially make them more volatile? Because a lot of the information on which these protests are being. Well, the information from which these protests are being rung is it's. It's social media information. A lot of it is not going to be accurate. A lot of it might be outright imaginary. I'm reasonably confident that in this day and age, you could probably, if you were really determined to, you scare up a crowd of a couple of hundred people to protest against literally anything you can think of, whether it's actually happening or not.
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Kerry Brown
I mean, I can see there's the protest of being discontented and. Yeah, I mean, maybe some political aims. I suppose the thing that would be different now is that where's the model you aspire to? I mean, for people of my generation, I can remember, you know, you talk about when Germany was reunified, when the Berlin Wall came down, of which you own a little brick in your collect. I do. I guess then there was a sort of positive idea of the west representing something political West. And I wonder whether these protests would find any kind of attraction in that at all. Now. I mean, I know what they're protesting against, but I don't know what people are protesting for, if you see what I mean. I mean, what is the sort of ideal. And I guess people are kind of very angry and disaffected all over the place for different reasons, but there's no easy model for them to say we want to be like that. I mean, these are nasty governments, maybe sometimes, but I don't think that the way that America and Europe behave is kind of particularly attractive. So I guess that's the sort of new dimension that I haven't really captured. Why people. What are people kind of wanting once they get rid of what they've already got?
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Tessa Shashkovitz
Which.
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Andrew Muller
Just a final point on this one, Tessa, is what I do, and it goes to what Kerry was saying about there being a lack of. There's a lot in these protests of, you know, here is what we're against and rather less of here is what we are. But is this perhaps the reason, And I'm trying not to sound like I'm being horrifically patronizing, that protest is most often an expression of youth, because. And certainly I think I was probably much the same. You have not yet kind of arrived at the point of realizing or understanding that utopia is not an option.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
Yeah, but that is actually a bit Patronizing, I have to say. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. You know, it's, it's. The thing is if you, you can read what these guys are writing on discord in these groups if you want to sort of really indulge into it and you know, I think to have a little bit less anxiety that you lose your middle class home and the school money for the children, that is actually inspiring political change more. And it's a good thing that young people don't have these anxieties that we have because we have seen already so many political movements fail. And if you think that 50% of these young people are often unemployed in countries like Morocco, so there really needs to be a fundamental change of system. So now of course, we don't have Angela Merkel anymore to look up to in Europe.
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Andrew Muller
I'm not sure she was that big with the kids either.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
Well, I think she had sort of quite an appeal to people to come to Germany, for example. But of course, and it's a very good point by Carrie to say that nowadays the west is also something where you don't know if you want to aspire to anymore. So we will see how this develops. But I think in principle to think about political change for the better, for the people on the streets and who are not in a situation that can choose who they elect because the governments are managed and the democracy is not free. And the right to express yourself in many of these countries where these movements are happening now is really, really limited. And that has to change.
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Andrew Muller
Well, to China now and to humankind's remorseless and apparently accelerating march to some hideous screen mediated dystopia. The Chinese Communist Party are all in on AI, it says here. And with the CCP's encouragement, Chinese tech companies are making a special hey with anxious parents willing to spend big to augment their children's education and in so doing enhance their prospects, even if it means, and this is a genuine example, belting out the equivalent of €1,000 on a rowboat dog which will teach their kid English and feign enjoyment of their hapless ham fisted strummings on the guitar or whichever other instrument with which they are tormenting the neighbours. Carrie, I think we can, we can let the listeners in on a secret that pretty much of all of us gathered here today are of a certain age. When you reflect on your own childhood, are you, are you sorry you missed this? Are you sorry that you didn't have a robot dog telling you you were on course to become the next Jimmy Page, now that I' said it like that, I kind of am sorry. I didn't have any anyway.
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Kerry Brown
Not particularly, no. I, I, you know, the last time I was in China, about a year ago in August, I was served coffee by a, a robot. And, and it was terrible coffee. And also about three waiters had to stand around this robot clearing up the mess it made. So I'm not totally sort of sold on, on, on the kind of gr. Great future we're going to have with AI. I work in a university, and I don't think we know what we're going to do about AI because, you know, you can use it in so many different ways. China is doing an enormous amount, obviously, and it would be attractive. Chinese people do value education and, you know, anything that gives, it's a very competitive system. Anything that gives kids an advantage, the parents will support it. But, I mean, I don't think China is naive too. I mean, they were part of the Bletchley part discussion about AI, you know, a couple of years ago, and they're not as scary as Elon Musk, you know, who obviously believes that humans are a pesky thing that need to be got out of the way for AI to basically take over everything. I think they do understand the massive challenges in the book about the future. Toby Ord wrote of the sort of, you know, big existential challenges, nuclear, you know, kind of proliferation, climate change, and A.I. he said A.I. was, was the big one. Right. And I mean, it's imminent. And China created this incredible deep sea because it can do scale. And so this is going to be a big, big thing. China doesn't have any idea how to deal with this any more than we do. So I guess the optimism for me is that at least on this issue, despite all our differences, we do have a common reason to talk to China because we're all kind of slightly freaked out by the implications of what this means.
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Andrew Muller
Well, let me freak everybody out a bit more, Tessa. Another example from real life. There is a Chinese company which develops AI therapy booths for anxious students. So rather than actually discuss their concerns or try to fashion excuses about their late essays with actual human beings, they shut themselves in a sort of enclosed space and talk to a machine.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
I don't think people claim that these robots or anxiety boosters are better than human therapists.
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Andrew Muller
Well, the kids seem to prefer it.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
Well, well, because it might have a soothing effect on them. And it might also be an easier way maybe to deal with your anxieties if you not have to talk Again, to an authority kind of teacher person. And I know that when my youngest son had panic attacks in school, they said he can sit down and listen to a meditation app. You know, this was the early version of this 10 years ago. And I think there's a lot of this that can help. I wouldn't. Destiny. Definitely not rejected out of hand. It's the same with tutors and the money that you spend on tutors, which can be now replaced to a certain extent by tablets that can teach you how to get through your workload without being flattened by the anxiety that you cannot succeed in solving these mathematical problems and all these kind of things. So I think we should be a little bit, as you said, Kerry, we can sort of bring in AI, we can bring in robots, we can bring in tablets to a certain extent, if you have the chance as a parent, you know, you have a lot of one child families and two parents with it. So if they have time to spend actual quality time with their child and help them with, you know, managing the 21st century in China, that's definitely the best option.
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Andrew Muller
The risk of sounding old fashioned, Kerry, is that not something that would be better done by the actual human parents rather than a robot dog?
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Kerry Brown
Well, it depends on the parents, doesn't it?
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Andrew Muller
Fair point, actually.
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Kerry Brown
Very fair point. But I think you're right. I mean, obviously it's better to have humans. I, I have to say that we're at Kings. I believe we're going to be interviewing people by AI from next year. So. Yeah, so we'll see how that goes.
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Andrew Muller
Genuine follow up question. Why on earth time?
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Kerry Brown
Just because so many people. It's consistent, it's no prejudice, you know, human interviewers. Yeah.
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Andrew Muller
Are you not, are you not concerned that they might also reply by AI?
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Kerry Brown
I think it's not so far away from having AI generated essays being marked by AI. I mean, that's possible and quite soon probably.
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Andrew Muller
Isn't that just a total waste of everybody's time?
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Kerry Brown
Well, I mean, that would be saying, wouldn't it?
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Andrew Muller
Tessa, do you entertain any kind of hopes, dreams, fantasies that this may all turn out to be a bit overblown and what we are currently looking at is 2025's equivalent of the metaverse or NFTs?
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Tessa Shashkovitz
No, I don't think so. I think teaching education will be profoundly affected by AI and as will we. You know, we are two journalists, Andrew. We're sitting here, our jobs will profoundly and have already changed. So, you know, I know that my articles can be written by AI. I think they don't sound like me. They don't sound like the weekly AI work for. They don't maybe have original thoughts in them that haven't been already written by, you know, the news agencies or something. But it's a tough call now, and I think we have to be very, very smart to find ways how we also, you know, renovate our thinking about what education should look like, or journalism or writing or art, and it will definitely change really, really, really deeply.
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Andrew Muller
Well, to San Francisco, where it seems that some among the locals have decided that the city has been perhaps rather become too dog friendly. Yes, there's a back leash. Is that anything? A slight spike has been reported in calls to the Parks Department complaining about the behaviour of dogs, or really the behaviour of dog owners. The problem usually not being at the collar end of the lead. It is speculated. It says here that this is a remnant of COVID lockdowns during which a certain proportion of people perhaps lost sight of the fact that their mutts were not, in fact, fact, human. Tessa, first of all, have you noticed any such thing? Have you noticed yourself here in London or anywhere else? You've been a decline in the. The manners of dog owners.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
Okay, so San Francisco is a very special case because everyone has a dog. Yes, in many respects, but also because everyone has a dog and there are no children, basically, in the inner city, where I spend now two weeks in March, and I thought, like, okay, this is really a special thing that you have all these young startup people in their 20s and 30s, and in order to make a baby, you have to sort of really compromise on your lifestyle. A dog fits better into sort of coming along for a run on the beach when you come back from office. And the baby would need a bit more quality time maybe with the parents.
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Andrew Muller
And people get really upset with you when you get bored with a baby and put an ad in the paper offering to give it away.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
Exactly. I mean, the dogs I have to.
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Andrew Muller
My parents caught hell over that.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
But I think that a lot of dog owners really worship their dogs and maybe some have to, you know, educate them better. But I do think that, you know, that's really a question to, you know, these dogs I saw in San Francisco, they're absolutely lovely. They're sort of luxury dogs and they are sort of also quite fun to be with. They're not totally terrible dogs, what I saw. And the same here in London. We have a dog, of course, as everyone has a dog. And it's, it's.
- [29:11]
Andrew Muller
It.
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Tessa Shashkovitz
You know, dogs are great companions. I wouldn't I'm not anti. You can't, you know, get me into dog. Anti dog mood here.
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Andrew Muller
No, I'm not anti anti dogs at all. I would not wish anybody to take that away from this program. I would characterize myself as very much pro dog. We regularly have them. We regularly have them, Kerry visiting the office. And they are, they are impeccably behaved. But what do you think? Have, have a certain class of people because for one reason or another, sort of lost sight of the fact that their dogs are, in fact, dogs and need to be, I guess, regulated accordingly.
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Kerry Brown
I suspect of all the things we've talked about today, this is the most sensitive issue. So I'm going to play this very, very safe. First of all, I lived in Sydney for about three and a half years. In my next life, I want to be a dog in Sydney. I mean, they have the most comfortable life.
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Andrew Muller
I have had dogs in Sydney. And yes, they had it pretty good.
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Kerry Brown
They have it pretty good. The other thing is in Taiwan, there was a cat party, you know, like one of these small parties. And their kind of slogan was, whoever doesn't vote for the cat party are dogs.
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Andrew Muller
Did they literally stand cats for public office, or were these humans advocating for the interests of cats?
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Kerry Brown
Well, who knows? I think they were humans. But in Taiwan, anything is possible. So maybe they were cats.
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Andrew Muller
Kerry Brown and Terry and Tessa Shishkovitz, thank you both very much for joining us. Finally, on today's show, the term environmental crime may bring to mind actions like littering, but the reality is more serious, so serious, in fact, that activists are lobbying for ecocide to be added to the list of international crimes alongside genocide and other crimes against humanity. But what is behind the behavior of individuals and companies who knowingly contribute to the devastation of the environment? Well, earlier Monocle's Daniella Brauer Smith spoke with the criminal psychologist Julia Shaw, whose new book, Green Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet and how to Stop Them, examines the psychological basis of eco crimes like the Deepwater Horizon spill and Dieselgate.
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Danielle Brauer Smith
You're a criminal psychologist, but you're writing about environmental issues, natural disasters. What due to these issues and what unique expertise do you bring?
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Julia Shaw
Well, as a criminal psychologist, I'm interested in why people do bad things. And you could argue that one of the biggest issues of our time is people doing bad things to the environment and how that's threatening our collective resources now, but also our future. And so I was interested in whether or not we can use social sciences, specifically psychology, to understand the minds of the Perpetrators. Because I think there's this tendency when we talk about environmental issues to blame the system. But who or what is the system? And so I wanted to unpack that and to look at six of the biggest environmental crimes of our time and to understand the perpetrators behind them.
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Danielle Brauer Smith
Yes. And you've chosen these six. Ease, impunity, greed, rationalization, conformity and desperation. How did you come to pick those six specifically?
- [32:12]
Julia Shaw
So those aren't the chapters. Those are the six pillars. And the six pillars are the psychological foundations that I found to underpin basically every large environmental crime that I came across. So if you think of environmental crimes, you should be thinking things like poaching, wildlife, crime syndicates. So gangs who are trafficking in endangered species across different countries and borders. And endangered species aren't just animals. They can also be trees, they can also be fish. Then there's illegal fishing, then there is illegal mining. So thinking about exploitation of taking things out of the earth and poisoning the earth in the process and burning down the Amazon sort of classically, and the murder of environmental defenders, that goes along with that often. So there's. When you look at environmental crimes, you're looking at often these hierarchies where you have people at different levels who are responsible for a different aspect of the crime. And at the top you usually have the money. And the money accordingly is also most often motivated by greed and rationalization. So rationalization is saying things like, it's not so bad, or at least I don't do X. Insert worse polluting or damaging industry into the sentence. And so there's the psychological hypocrisy that people have to overcome, and they manage to do that, especially at the higher levels. But then if you go down, you get conformity. You get people saying things like, well, you know, everyone in our industry does this, and I feel like I can't speak about up. And then at the bottom, you get most often desperation, which is people who are being exploited, who are incredibly poor, who are the ones who end up often sort of easiest to blame. It's kind of like with a drugs gang where it's easiest to catch the person on the corner of the street selling drugs because they are literally holding the contraband. But that is not going to stop the flow of drugs into a city. So I think that parallel between organized crime and environmental crime is really important to understand.
- [34:10]
Danielle Brauer Smith
Absolutely. And can you take us through some of the ways that environmental crime has been punished and what methods are more or less effective? You talk about in the book how prison isn't Necessarily the most effective method because it's so rare for the top executive to even land in a prison jail.
- [34:28]
Julia Shaw
Yeah. And it's not the top executives you necessarily need. You just need to make sure you don't just get the foot soldiers. That's the main thing. Any level above the foot soldiers is, is going to be better. But there is the question of a how do we catch environmental criminals? And throughout the book, I speak with Interpol agents, I speak with undercover investigators from the Environmental Investigation Agency. I speak with lawyers and researchers and regulators who are the ones who are firsthand investigating these really big crimes. And to me, it's really important to keep highlighting and to push back against this narrative that we're often fed that nobody is doing anything and we're all doomed. And that's called doomism. And we know that it's psychologically counterproductive. It's also wrong. And so telling these stories through the eyes of the investigators, I think is really important. And each investigator will obviously have. Have a different answer to the question you just asked, which is, what should we do when we catch them? And of course, the other part of it is how do we catch them? So in terms of what we should do, I think prison is an option. And certainly Susan Smith, who I spoke with in the United States, who is an environmental lawyer there, she said that especially for white collar criminals, like you were just saying, they're going to pay attention if you say prison is on the table and it's not just you getting a fine or your company getting a fine, it's depriving you as an individual of your freedom. And so it can send the message that we're taking these environmental crimes as seriously as other kinds of crime. But I think prison is rarely the answer in and of itself. And what we should also be focusing on is consistency. So making sure we're actually actively and consistently enforcing the laws we already have, because otherwise people have this sense of impunity. One of the six pillars of environmental crime, and making sure that we change how people think about it. So the social acceptability and just seriousness. Even now when I say, I wrote a book on environmental crimes, people sort of go, oh, it's like air, things like emissions, carbon, and it's this really abstract thing. It's like, no, people are perpetrating actual crimes that are like they're breaking laws just like other criminals break laws.
- [36:57]
Andrew Muller
That was the criminal psychologist Julia Shaw speaking with Monocle's Danielle Lebro Smith at Midori House. Julia's new book, Green Crime is available now. That is all for this edition of the Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Tessa Shishkovitz and Kerry Brown. The show was produced by Monica Lillis and researched by Danielle Abroad Smith. Our sound engineer was Steph Chungu. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening this night, Sam.