An eco-nazi

I tend to refrain from using terms with “nazi” in them, but sometimes the categorisation is just impossible to resist, as in the case of Polly Higgins. You’ll see why.

Isaac Davidson writes in the NZ Herald:

A visiting author is calling for crimes against nature, or “ecocide”, to be recognised as the fifth crime against humanity.

British environmental lawyer and writer Polly Higgins said current environmental laws are not fit for purpose and corporations which do serious, lasting damage to ecosystems should be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court (ICC), similarly to genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression.

Now you might stop reading at this point, and even have some sympathy for what she advocates. Until you realise she is not advocating that people who break the law should face criminal sanctions, but in fact she wants to jail people for having a different view to herself.

Individuals, such as chief executives and energy ministers, could be charged with unintentional ecocide, ecoslaughter, or ecocide. Their sentences would be equivalent to death caused by dangerous driving, manslaughter and murder.

Okay so she wants ministers and chief executives to face up to life imprisonment for what she calls ecocide.

The definition of ecocide she proposed was the mass “damage, destruction or loss of ecosystems of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished”.

Now note the term the inhabitants. This means that building a mine on the west coast that “diminishes” the peaceful enjoyment of the snails would be ecocide, if the territory it covers is big enough.

The size, duration and impact of ecocide could be measured by the international laws applied during wartime. Ecocide was committed if the size of the affected area exceeded 200km in length, had an impact on ecosystems for more than three months and had a severe impact on human or natural resources.

Higgins suggested lignite mining in Southland and proposed deepwater drilling in the Great South Basin could qualify as New Zealand examples of ecocide because they would create enormous greenhouse gas emissions.

Here is the point at which I concluded she was an eco-nazi.She basically is saying that if a democratically elected Government in NZ decided to lignite mine in Southland, and got elected on a platform of doing so, that the UN should swoop in and arrest some Government Ministers and lock them up for life imprisonment.

Higgins also seems to think that creating greenhouse gas emissions should count as ecocide. So I presume she also advocates that the CEO of Fonterra should be arrested and sent to the Hague for trial and life imprisonment.

Air New Zealand also has a huge carbon footprint. Now putting aside the hypocrisy that Higgins probably flew to New Zealand, will she call for Rob Fyfe to be jailed for 30 years for all the carbon emissions put out by Air New Zealand jets?