Criminal Anthroposcenes

Book excerpt: This book compares and contrasts traditional crime scenes with scenes of climate crisis to offer a more expansive definition of crime which includes environmental harm. The authors reconsider what crime scenes have always included and might come to include in the age of the Anthropocene – a new geological era where humans have made enough significant alterations to the global environment to warrant a fundamental rethinking of human-nonhuman relations. In each of the chapters, the authors reframe enduringly popular Arctic scenes, such as iceberg hunting, cruising and polar bear watching, as specific criminal anthroposcenes. By reading climate scenes in this way, the authors aim to productively deploy the representation of crime to make these scenes more engaging to policymakers and ordinary viewers. Criminal Anthroposcenes brings together insights from criminology, climate change communication, and tourism studies in order to study the production and consumption of media representations of Arctic climate change in the hope of to mobilizing more urgent public and policy responses to climate change.