Abstract
Criminal law and environmental law share a central question: How should the state respond to harm? Despite their common concern, these fields approach state power in sharply divergent ways. Criminal law scholars increasingly question the legitimacy of policing and punishment, while environmental law scholars and activists often embrace expanded enforcement and call for harsher penalties against environmental offenders in the name of ecological protection.
This Article challenges the prevailing assumption that protecting the environment requires more aggressive state intervention. Excavating the oftenoverlooked history of resistance to environmental criminalization, it uncovers a persistent—if latent—skepticism toward policing and punishment in environmental discourse. It places environmental law and criminal law into conversation around abolitionist theory, offering a novel framework for evaluating legal and non-legal reforms across both domains. Abolitionist thought, though rarely applied to environmental regulation, offers powerful tools for reimagining environmental law: not as a choice between enforcement and deregulation, but as an opportunity to confront the deeper carceral logics that underlie both environmental harm and environmental governance.
At the same time, environmental law presents a distinct challenge for abolitionist theory by exposing the practical tensions between abolition of policing and punishment and the state’s protective functions. Examining these tensions enriches abolitionist scholarship while offering new pathways for addressing ecological crises without compounding social injustice. Ultimately, this Article calls for a more reciprocal and critical engagement between environmental law and criminal law—one that is essential for developing a more balanced and just approach to state intervention in the face of ongoing social and environmental harms.
