Aside from the human cost of armed conflict, the natural environment is often one of the main ‘victims’ of war. In the categories of legal action, too, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide stand for the impact of war and mass violence on society. Impact of war and mass violence on the environment and ecosystems is often neglected.
One of the first and only attempts at criminal prosecutions for wartime environmental destruction date from the period of the Second World War when Poland listed eleven Germans as war criminals for the destruction of Polish forests. This is the untold story of a legal case filed by Poland against Germany in 1947 as part of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), where Polish prosecutors laid out a novel case against foresters and high-ranking officers of the General Government for the occupied Polish region. The obscure case, no. 1307, often turns up in legal essays on the protection of the natural environment—an idea which is gaining traction with recent efforts to recognise ecocide as a fifth international crime. However, information about the case remained scant until INTERPRT’s research.
Race and forest, an exhibition by INTERPRT commissioned by Biennale Warszawa and first realised at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw at Pańska Street, reconstructed case no. 1307 to look at how forests were used to hide the evidence of mass murder at Chełmno— Nazi Germany’s first extermination camp—using original documents, photographs, diagrams, drawings and text drawn from the archives of the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Polish National Archives with visual and cartographic evidence and digital 3D representations. Not only did our exhibition shed light on a crucial but under-researched case around the birth of international justice, environmental histories of the Second World War, Nazi era in Poland and the Holocaust, it also raised critical questions on the role of legal processes in fighting contemporary environmental destruction and climate change against the backdrop of a progressive eco-political resistance to stop the chainsaws wielded by the Polish state against the Białowieża forest.
In 1991 the writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa—writing from the climate frontlines of Ogoniland, the ancestral land of the Indigenous Ogoni people in the Niger Delta—described the casualties of an ‘unconventional war’ waged by the Nigerian government and multinational oil companies against the Ogoni: ‘oil blow-outs, spillages, oil slick and general pollution accompany the search for oil… Oil companies have flared gas in Nigeria for the past thirty-three years causing acid rain… What used to be the breadbasket of the delta has now become totally infertile. All one sees and feels around is death. environmental degradation has been a lethal weapon in the war against the indigenous Ogoni people.’
Genocide is the term Saro-Wiwa used to describe the crimes against his people. In fact, the quote I just referred to is from a book by Saro-Wiwa whose title is Genocide in Nigeria: the Ogoni tragedy. Today we would be accurate to also call the environmental destruction described by Saro-Wiwa as ecocide. Genocide is derived from the Greek ‘genos’, meaning race or people. The word ecocide combines the Greek ‘oikos’, meaning house/home (understood as ecology). Both words end with ‘cide’, meaning to kill in Latin. While the former refers to a legal category—the genocidaire must have intent to physically destroy a specific population—the latter is the yet internationally unrecognised crime of the destruction of species and ecosystems.
I have no doubt Saro-Wiwa believed the Nigerian state’s intention for the Ogoni who were attacked by government forces in the 1980s and Saro-Wiwa himself, along with eight others were wrongfully executed by a Nigerian court simply because they were speaking up for their cause, but we cannot be certain that what was happening to the Ogoni meets today’s strict legal definition of genocide. As reprehensible as we might find them, polluting corporations do not often set out with an intention to kill a particular group of people. When seen from the standpoint of victims, ecocide speaks more to crimes against the innocent and defenceless. It’s both a crime against people and nature.
Ecocide matters. Here’s three reasons why. First, we need every tool at our disposal in the fight for climate justice, including international criminal law to protect the environment. Second, no other word captures the ecological devastation as a crime of our time as evocatively as ecocide. Third, ecocide inspires all of us to a more ecocentric ideal of justice and care that recognises the natural world.
Ecocide reserves a special place in the catalogue of crimes because it alone requires that harm is extended from humans to the natural environment. However, unlike most human rights violations, the cascading effects of environmental damage and climate harms are widespread, long-term, multi-sited and transboundary, and increasingly tethered to the planetary boundaries. The trajectory of pollution spreads out over time and space, air and water. In legal contexts, direct causation between cause and effect or victim or perpetrator must be substantiated. On the other hand, environmental damage related to climate change requires us to broaden the nature of causality from a linear cascade of events into a forcefield operating across multiple scales, times, spaces, histories and involves many actors. We urgently need new imaginaries to bring into probative visibility the yet unrecognised crime of our time, considering the diffused causalities, scales and temporalities of environmental destruction foregrounding harm to nature where the Earth’s topography transforms into a forensic space.
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Making the invisible visible has been a core project across the arts, sciences, humanities and social sciences for decades and even centuries. There are hundreds of books and thousands of articles on this topic. In legal contexts, images and image making also played a crucial role in the pursuit of accountability from the first use of photographs as evidence in courts. One example stands out for me. The prosecution’s screening of British and Soviet documentary films of the horrors of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps was a pivotal moment not only in the Nuremberg trials where the category of crimes against humanity was first tried to give legal expression to Nazi atrocities. The impact of the film was clear, even to Hermann Göring, who said ‘and then they showed that awful film, and it just spoiled everything.’ But also, it was the first time that film footage was used as evidence of international crimes. What will the visual interventions look like that will make the case for the crime of our time?
Today smartphones, social media and the Internet are empowering activists around the world to track and disseminate images of urban violence in real time. To give a contemporary example, torrents of data from social media to satellite imagery has been collected in near real time during the war in Ukraine and used by military intelligence and in media reporting by state and non-state actors on both sides. The International Criminal Court or the ICC has incorporated open-source methods for documenting war crimes. With access to more data than ever before, contemporary human rights practitioners, journalists and research-based practices, are scrutinizing cases and stories using various OSINT tools and media data-driven design research. In some sense there is an overabundance of data. Yet not all conflicts and struggles receive the same coverage and attention.
In forensic science, evidence collected from rocks, soil and plants is used to search, locate, recover and identify human remains and mass graves. This essay proposes that we shift our forensic gaze to focus on sensing environmental destruction as it gets entangled with human rights. In evidentiary terms this requires that we pay close attention to more incremental, fuzzy and slower patterns registered in both the material and social dimensions of environmental change. Drawing from the methodologies we developed in Forensic Architecture, the operative concept of ecocentric investigations might be a useful approach to describe how the convergence of disparate data, user-generated digital evidence, spatial-visual evidentiary techniques and testimonies—that are sensitive and focused on an ecological perspective with its particular spatial, temporal and aesthetic sensibilities—can produce impactful narratives for environmental justice and accountability.
We often represent scale in architecture from small to large: the human scale, architectural scale and the urban scale. In addition, ecocentric investigations must also consider other scales that are infinitesimally small, ever shifting (swarm, herd, collective) and large (territorial, synoptic, even planetary). Environmental destruction is a form of transversal violence. Think about pollution from mining metals such as copper. Some of the largest copper mines in the world are located along the circular axis of the Pacific ring on either side of the Pacific Ocean in Peru, Chile, Indonesia and West Papua. Tailing waste from the mining process which contains harmful chemicals smothers the landscape, physically destroying forests and water bodies downstream. It poisons the local flora and fauna and seeps underground into groundwater. Pollution from large-scale mining might travel far and wide, sometimes hundreds of kilometres. Transversal violence interrupts ecological processes stymying growth, and repair of nature’s labour undermining livelihoods and ways of life. Their chemical traces are marked in trees and written in the blood of animals and insects. Transversal violence is exponential with a cascading effect, accumulating in nature and human bodies, immune to borders, and in turn the response requires working across disciplinary boundaries. Clearly foregrounding transversal violence with the aid of ecocentric investigations is a collaborative effort. No one discipline or practice can claim sole expertise here.
Our approach to designing ecocentric investigations stands on practices involving sensing for the traces left—sometimes years or decades ago—by environmental destruction from pixels to particles, tracing and cross referencing their trajectories across and onto documents, photographs, videos and 3D models, as well as listening to people—activists, land defenders, organizers—with ears on the ground. Over the years we have developed, borrowed and interpreted a range of methodologies to make them particularly well-suited for better understanding and visually intervening into environmental destruction.
Pixel trajectory—a term used in computationally intense remote sensing algorithms—refers to the analysis of a given image pixel of a satellite image and its changing value represented as colour to detect change such as degradation of trees. Tracer studies deal with reconstructing or simulating the behaviour of pollution or radiation particles spreading through the air or water where weather patterns and ocean currents act as transports of transversal violence. We understand territorial witnessing as privileging the perspectives of those whose labour is mixed with nature’s labour, with deep and ancestral knowledge of their land and territory. If the first two approaches rely on tremendous amounts of data and computation, the latter shifts the dialectic from pixels to particles to lived experiences and the sacred. While there are practices and literature on the use of modelling software for narrative design such as game engines to communicate Indigenous knowledge, our approach is to explore territorial witnessing in legal contexts.
We need every tool at our disposal in the fight for climate justice, for which ecocide is a timely expression. All around the world, from Norway to Nepal, Poland to the Philippines, civil society is turning to courts and human rights mechanisms to demand climate action. We are bringing these methodologies and practices in conversation at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art in the forthcoming Climate Rights project. Our primary objective will be to develop evidentiary techniques needed to create forensic representation of environmental damage and climate harm within and beyond the courtroom. Climate change is an example par excellence of transversal violence. ‘Attribution science’ is a rapidly emerging field that is developing probabilistic models that show how corporate responsibility for climate disruption can in fact be established at a global scale. Attribution in art has an altogether different purpose to do with establishing the authorship of a work. In contrast the arts of attribution might open a doorway for engaging with the distinct narrative, representational and evidentiary challenges of dealing with the worst violations against the environment.
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We’d be wrong to think digital sleuthing, spatial forensics (from architecture and critical spatial practice to geospatial science and their presentational techniques) and the latest scientific findings about climate change amounts to all there is in ecocentric investigations. Ecocentrism finds value in all of nature, a point of view that might seem abstract to many of us, but is in practice fostered by many Indigenous peoples. What matters the most, perhaps above all else when conceptualising ecocentric investigations, is foregrounding the stories, beliefs and lived experiences of the most impacted communities, whose testimonies are always situated in a place, in a land with ancestral ties and livelihoods. It is they who speak up for nature. In other words, their lives depend on their lands and territories that are under increasing threat from state-sanctioned land grabs, corporate capture and associated violent crimes. According to the 2022 global analysis of the situation facing human rights defenders at risk around the world, defenders of land, Indigenous peoples and environmental activists were most frequently targeted at 48% of total killings.
Often perpetrators face little or no consequences. In a recent investigation prepared as part of a legal submission to the International Criminal Court, we reconstructed the massacre of ten landless workers in the state of Pará in Brazil. The investigation into the masterminds behind the massacre was considered inconclusive. The police officers who committed the crimes continue to work in Brazil’s police force. Understood narrowly, impunity denotes a mere incidental failure of punishment; but in its broader sense, it describes a systemic lack of accountability and the absence of justice.
How can past injustices be reconciled with the ongoing structures of colonialism here in Europe? Just consider the February 2023 protests in Oslo, where young Sámi protesters had to barricade government buildings to get the Norwegian state to listen to their demands for the enforcement of a Supreme Court ruling 500 days after they found the construction of industrial wind farms in Fosen illegal. As part of our commission for the Helsinki Biennial we asked exactly this question. We interviewed and met with Sámi activists, archaeologists, historians, journalists and researchers and examined cartographic evidence, photographs and other archival sources to counter map the Nordic truth commission processes about reconciling past injustices committed against the Sámi. It is while working on the research for this project that we became part of a legal action between Sámi herders of the Jillen-Njaarke reindeer herding district and Øyfjellet wind farm in Norway. We conducted a series of participatory workshops with herders and collected environmental data combined with the herders’ own videos to create a 3D environment of the disputed site, towards counter mapping the colonial present in Sápmi, the ancestral territories of the Sami people.
4.
We often hear about political short-termism—where politicians approach policy change in relation to the length of their terms in office, without considering long-term consequences. Recently the concept of deep time has entered contemporary thought. Earth’s geological time, the time it took the earth to form and from where life sprang, is set in relation to the Anthropocene—the human age—permanently marked by human activity on our planet such as the changes wrought from the rise of capitalism or the presence of nuclear dust left from the early atomic bomb tests. What traces does time leave on landscapes if we are to be attuned to the vastly different timescales of the rise and fall of empires and continents, social change and sedimentation, wars and erosion? Deep time is neither easy to grasp nor to represent. While it may be a useful concept to help us make sense of a term like the Anthropocene, it often ends up an academic exercise with no teeth.
We need to better understand longer time spans of landscape and environmental change for approaching ecocentric investigations as well. As many have argued, the timescale of environmental damage, destruction or ecocrimes is often much longer than those of conventional conflicts. Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producing nation. Over five decades thousands of oil spills caused by Shell and other oil companies, some large and others small but all working towards the same goal—utter destruction that resembles a state of ecocide—in the Niger Delta have smothered and destroyed vast mangrove forests, polluted rivers, creeks, lagoons and other waterways, weakening the local ecosystems and putting the health and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people at risk.
Since 2022 INTERPRT has been working to assist Ogale and Bille, two communities in the Niger delta, in a high-profile legal case against Shell, one of the largest oil companies in the world. It is a true battle between David and Goliath. However, in 2014 in a rare but significant win, another Ogoni community in nearby Bodo defeated Shell in UK courts. The lawyers in both cases are Leigh Day who have a long track record in seeking social justice through the courts. In our line of work, it is important to acknowledge how we get involved in places and environmental struggles near and far. In this instance we approached Leigh Day through Lazarus Tamana, the leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, who is a long-term collaborator.
Our investigation in the Bille community has involved producing a detailed analysis of the extent of mangrove degradation over a ten-year period from 2005 to 2016. It is not possible to go into the results of our investigation because of confidentiality surrounding the legal case. For this essay, it is worth pointing out some aspects of our methodology concerned with tracking landscape change over time using satellite imagery and making maps and visualizations with them. To better understand mangrove degradation resulting from repeated oil spills in a large area over a long time, we use publicly available high resolution spatial datasets and peer-reviewed change detection analysis tools for multi-temporal remote sensing (RS) combined with mapping tools. All results from the satellite study, as well as boundaries of community land and villages, the location of oil infrastructure and coordinates of spills, were georeferenced and incorporated in the open-source geographic information system application (QGIS) and exported as a series of annotated maps to visualise mangrove degradation resulting from oil spills.
Most of us have heard of deforestation in the Amazon or oil pollution in the Athabasca tar sands and the Niger delta. These are well-known places that appear in mainstream media—the plight of the Amazon was often in the news during the disastrous presidency of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Yet beyond the superficial, what do we really know about these places and the fight for justice led by impacted communities? The artist and writer Subhankar Banerjee has called the sustained efforts of Indigenous peoples to protect their land and water, often over generations, ‘long environmentalism’. In the case of the Niger delta, as in so many other sites of struggle, the Ogoni people’s long environmentalism intersects with another kind of time, legal time, the often many years involved in legal proceedings and litigation in the fightback for Earth’s ecosystem.
If at the root of human rights abuses and environmental destruction lies unfettered profit from extractive forces which impact the rights of marginalized communities, among them Indigenous peoples who risk everything while defending their land, then it is imperative that it is they who deserve protection. To integrate and consider an ecological perspective—sustaining life as coproduction of humans, nonhuman actors and natural forces in the broadest sense—designing investigations and reporting is not about making a moral argument about anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. It is about, in the words of Lenin, ‘the concrete analysis of the concrete situation.’
