Ecological Intervention: Prospects and Limits

Abstract

This essay seeks to extend the already controversial debate about humanitarian intervention by exploring the morality, legality, and legitimacy of ecological intervention and its corollary, ecological defense. If the legacy of the Holocaust was acceptance of a new category of “crimes against humanity” and an emerging norm of humanitarian intervention, then should the willful or reckless perpetration of mass extinctions and massive ecosystem destruction be regarded as “crimes against nature” or “ecocide” such as to ground a new norm of ecological intervention or ecological defense? The essay shows that the minimalist argument for ecological intervention—multilateral intervention in the case o..