Marx, Lemkin and the genocide–ecocide nexus

A number of studies have shown that ecocide can be a method of genocide if, for example, environmental destruction results in conditions of life that fundamentally threaten a social group’s cultural and/or physical existence.1 With the ever-increasing rise of such cases of ecological destruction brought on by the extractive industries, or indirectly induced by anthropogenic climate change, we argue that the field of genocide studies should draw from the rich scholarly tradition of political ecology and environmental sociology. Indeed, it is the contention of the authors that, given the looming threat of runaway climate change in the twenty-first century, the advent of 2the geological phase classified by geologists and earth scientists as anthropocene and the attendant rapid extinction of species, destruction of habitats, ecological collapse and the self-evident dependency of the human race on our biosphere, ecocide (both ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’) will become a primary driver of genocide.