I take great pleasure in questioning why we take things for granted. I almost find it impossible not to question what is normal. In a very psychology undergraduate way we talk about normal a lot. But who or what is normal, and accordingly, who or what is abnormal?
The same human instinct we use to make quick assumptions also shapes how we think about crime and punishment. In the UK (and many other places), we assume that sending people to prison is the correct and fair response to crime. We also assume love must fit strict gender categories. But many people’s real lives show that love and attraction can be much more fluid than that.
So why do we make these assumptions? Sometimes it’s fear. But there is also a resistance to explore beyond what you’ve experienced so far and what you think is normal, because you’re worried about what that might mean in terms of changing your life. More often than not, it’s that people haven’t thought to ask.
It’s more important to ask the right question even than it is to get the answer
And I think this is what’s great about science: science is all about asking questions. In some ways, it’s more important to ask the right question even than it is to get the answer, so that you can even start to go in the right direction. That’s why I’ve been drawn to science. It’s a bit like: lots of us have a coffee machine at home, but we’ve never taken one apart. It’s because we don’t think to do that. It’s not even an option until somebody says, actually, how does your coffee machine work? And even then, you need a sense of curiosity to actually want to find out.
Society and our own worlds are structured in such a way to optimise and streamline thinking so that we don’t constantly have to second guess everything. We just want to live our lives and minimise the amount of decisions we’re making every single day. We want things to be easy on an individual and societal level, and so I think those two things interact.
People who are really clever can talk themselves out of guilt very easily
I fundamentally think people are constantly trying to be good. Good to our partners, be good people to our friends, our mothers, family, maybe to a slightly extended workplace, maybe even to a nation, hopefully to the world – but that is a big leap for most people’s brains. I have yet to be proven that that’s not true.
The question that grabbed me in environmental crime wasn’t “why do uninformed people destroy the planet?” That is sort of obvious. The question is: why do clever people destroy the planet? Why do clever privileged people who don’t have to do it, do it? These people have families. Do they not worry for the future of their children?
Well, the idea that we are creating a world or preserving a world for future generations is interestingly tied up with assumptions about nuclear families; this idea that if you have kids or expect to have grandkids, you are going to be more invested. I have yet to see my friends with children be more invested in the climate than me. I don’t have kids, and I don’t plan on it. Because I’m not invested in a nuclear family, I’m able to dedicate myself to books and things in a way that perhaps others with children can’t because they’re busy, frankly. Most of these men in positions of power – and it is almost always men – are fathers, and they will be grandfathers, yet that has not stopped them from destroying the planet.
One case that really twists my brain is Dieselgate. These are clever emissions engineers who could be doing other jobs. They have chosen to go into car manufacturing. Some of them probably did go into emissions engineering to lower the emissions of the cars – they went in idealistic – and yet quite possibly some of those same engineers then got tangled up in this web of lies that Volkswagen crafted around the use of this defeat device, which cheated the emissions that were being produced by their cars by cheating the testing situations.
When the cars hit the roads, the emissions were 10 to 40 times the legal limits of nitrous oxides, which is a super pollutant. And the thing that blows my mind is that the same people who are making these cars are living in the city where these cars are driving. So they are literally breathing in their own crimes, which is fascinating psychologically.
When I spoke with people like the New York Times journalist who was speaking with whistleblowers at the time it initially broke, which was about 10 years ago, he said quite a lot of them felt like they were just sort of part of this whole system. And it wasn’t really them. They were good people. It was other people who were doing bad things. That kind of rationalisation – “I could be doing something worse,” or “I’m just part of this,” this conformity, “I couldn’t really get out of it” – that’s a really classic way in which people become part of these environmental crimes, especially large ones.
People who are really clever can talk themselves out of guilt very easily. There are so many people across the different crimes I cover that say things like, “I’m creating jobs.” And so because I’m creating jobs or supporting the economy, I am inherently a good person. And even if I am ultimately causing environmental destruction in the short term, I am giving people jobs, and that is a good thing to do.
The other thing that we often hear is: “if I don’t do it, other people will.” We hear that at a national level and we hear it at an individual level. At the individual level it’s also one of the key motivations of corruptibility. One of the things that makes people corruptible is the assumption that everyone else is doing it too. Everyone else is accepting bribes, so I’d be an idiot not to, even if I disagree with taking bribes. I’m not going to stop the system, right? Everyone else is flying in their private jets, so I’d be an idiot not to. Every other country is burning coal, so I’d be an idiot to go green. It’s wild, and it’s wrong, and it is a really basic and obvious psychological gymnastics. But our intelligence also makes us really good at talking ourselves out of guilt.
How do we convince people who don’t care about the planet to care about the planet?
So there is still this myth that I encounter every single time I do a talk: the assumption is, how do we convince people who don’t care about the planet to care about the planet? That is not the conversation we’re having. The conversation we should be having is that most people care about the planet. How do we get them to care about the things that actually will elicit positive change, or just stop committing crime if they’re committing crimes – to stop rationalising, to stop conformity, to stop doing because it’s easier.
The connection between large scale environmental crimes – like the Deepwater Horizon case, where there was a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and oil leaking out for months – can feel like it’s this thing, if you don’t live there, that is far away and has nothing to do with you. And that is wrong.
It’s wrong because, for one, we share one air and one Earth in terms of nature. What happens in one part of the world very quickly has an impact around the world. If we have biodiversity loss in a big body of water like the Gulf of Mexico, that can mean that what’s called a carbon sink is being jeopardised. We always think about forests as the lungs of the planet, like the Amazon, but it’s actually oceans that suck out most of the carbon. If we kill the little plankton and the other things in the ocean that are responsible for processing the carbon, they no longer do that. And carbon affects all of us in terms of heat and in terms of our changing climate.
Then there’s air quality. Like in Dieselgate, if someone is creating cars that are emitting more super pollutants than is allowed, that is directly responsible for asthma, for premature death, for worsening of flus and colds. Nitrous oxides are dangerous at any level. And one of the reasons kids are disproportionately affected is partly because they have smaller bodies, but also partly because at the height of emissions – that tailpipe height – they are literally breathing in poison.
Sometimes I think about it as: if we all pictured the Earth more like our own flat or house. Someone burning down the Amazon is like someone coming in and setting your couch on fire. Someone polluting your water, and you turn on the tap and it’s poisoned. Someone releasing a bunch of gas into your house, and you can’t breathe properly anymore. It’s the same – it’s just happening at scale. And when I picture it that way, I get very angry.
I think we need to treat environmental crimes more like murder, because the impact that these crimes have is existential, and it is also a risk to life. It is the only way in which I think we are going to mentally understand the importance of these crimes.
And also potentially into the same consequential category. Right now, we’re only starting to have prison sentences for people who commit environmental crimes at this level, and we should have more, especially higher up in environmental crime hierarchies. It’s easier for someone who commits a crime as part of an organisation to have the organisation absorb the fines and the consequences, in which case you basically feel like you have little or nothing at stake for yourself. And that is a problem.
I’m not a fan of prisons, but I am a fan of equalising punishments. There is the European Commission environmental crime directive directing EU member states – and I’m hoping the UK follows suit – to bring in more sanctions against people who commit environmental crimes, including people at higher levels and businesses who, at this point, can still say, “well, I didn’t know.” They’re saying: it’s your company. You can’t not know. If you were haemorrhaging money, you can’t just be like, “well, I didn’t know.” It’s the same with environmental damage: you should be across it, and you should check, go ask, go check. If you haven’t checked, that negligence is no longer an excuse.
We need to treat environmental crimes more like murder
We also need more judgement by others to say that is unacceptable, because we are social creatures, and what people around us think of us is really important to us and makes a really big impact on how we behave. In the cases I covered — whether international wildlife crime syndicates trafficking ivory, illegal mining, or illegal fishing — there was this idea that it wasn’t a real crime. They would literally say things like, “well, I’m not trafficking people”, or “I’m not selling weapons to criminals” Slow clap. Well done. That’s the rationalisation: I could be doing something worse. Well, you could also be doing something better. Think of all the ways you can make money.
So what can we do? There’s three things. One is to change the conversation around how we talk about environmental crimes. Start talking about them, because they happen and they are interesting. And the idea that no one’s doing anything is really harmful. We do need to fund regulators more, fund police more, make sure we invest in the structures that catch and punish environmental criminals. But there are lots of environmental criminals who get caught, and we need to share those stories. We need to overcome what’s called the illusion of unique invulnerability, where people think, “if I commit a crime, I’m going to get away with it because I’m really clever and I’m really smart.” If people around us are constantly talking about how people get caught for these crimes, that’s harder to think.
The second thing we can do is to talk more about the things that we are doing that are green. Be micro-influencers in your own network. People are worried about being seen as performative. On a corporate level: can we still talk about our green credentials or will people accuse us of greenwashing? On an individual level: are my friends going to roll their eyes because I want a vegan meal? The reality is that most people around the world – according to the latest UN climate survey – think about climate change every day or every week. Most of the people in your circumference are probably thinking about it every day or every week. Sometimes all it takes is you to say that you want something that’s green or ethical for them to go, “me too.” I see it as a contagion in my friend group – charity shops, vegan foods – and don’t underestimate how actually you can have those small positive changes in your whole network.
The third thing is to recognise moments of outsized leverage. There are moments where you can do more good than average. One vegan meal is the classic example, or if you’re organising a conference, you can have a dinner for 300 people that is vegan, maybe even without telling them. You can make one choice and actually it’s like a year of going vegan. There are moments like that in workplaces, and at home. Look out for them, recognise them as such, and go: now I really need to make the green choice, because I’m going to have outsized leverage.
And the thing people always assume – both about the book and about me – until they’ve met me – is that I’m probably going to be very upset and disillusioned. If you engage with all these environmental crimes, and you realise the extent to which people are burning down natural resources, polluting air and waterways, you might think I’d be really sad and desperate. But actually, I’ve never been more hopeful about Earth’s future.
That’s how I start the book: I’ve never been more hopeful about Earth’s future than after looking into some of the world’s worst environmental crimes. I say that on purpose. To me, it’s really important to realise that it’s when you understand how these crimes are happening that they also seem much more solvable, because what we fear often is that which we don’t understand. If you just work through an example of a case, you go: oh, we have the tools, we have the laws, we have the regulators, we have the police, we have the judges. All we need to do is apply them.
