State and green crimes related to water pollution and ecological disorganization: water pollution from publicly owned treatment works (POTW) facilities across US states

Green criminologists often refer to water pollution as an example of a green crime, but have yet to produce much research on this subject. The current article addresses the need for green criminological analyses of water pollution problems, and draws attention to an overlooked issue: water pollution emissions from state owned public water treatment facilities or POTWs. Legally, POTWs may emit certain quantities and kinds of pollutants to waterways following treatment. This does not mean, however, that those emissions have no adverse ecological or public health impacts, or that those emissions cannot also be employed as examples of green crimes or green-state crimes. Indeed, from the perspective of environmental sociology and ecological Marxism, those emissions generate ecological disorganization. Moreover, POTW emissions contain numerous pollutants that generate different forms of ecological disorganization. The current study uses POTW emissions data drawn from the US EPA’s Discharge Monitoring Report system for 2014 to illustrate the extent of pollution emitted by POTWs in and across US states as one dimension of ecological disorganization. To contextualize the meaning of those data, we review US water pollution regulations, review the health and ecological impacts of chemicals emitted by POTWs, and situate those emissions within green criminological discussions of green crime and green-state crimes

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Questions concerning (nonhuman) animal rights have been increasingly addressed within the criminological literature due to growing interest in green criminology. Often within criminology, animal rights issues have been primarily addressed from philosophical standpoints, which omit how animal rights are addressed in more concrete terms through the legal system. This philosophical orientation toward animal rights, while important, has led to a neglect of the ways in which animal rights might be promoted through legal means. This article addresses that latter point by exploring the use of writs of habeas corpus for animals promoted by Steven Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) in the US. Much of the NhRP’s efforts have been devoted to nonhuman primates, and consistent with that approach, this assessment focuses attention on legal efforts to protect nonhuman primates’ rights. In addition to NhRP efforts, other possibilities for using the law to obtain rights for animals in the US are examined. While this article focuses on circumstances in the US, several nations employ such writs or similar legal mechanisms

Cooperating in Video Games? Impossible! Undecidability of Team Multiplayer Games

We show the undecidability of whether a team has a forced win in a number of well known video games including: Team Fortress 2, Super Smash Brothers: Brawl, and Mario Kart.To do so, we give a simplification of the Team Computation Game [Hearn and Demaine, 2009] and use that to give an undecidable abstract game on graphs. This graph game framework better captures the geometry and common constraints in many games and is thus a powerful tool for showing their computational complexity

On the Geometry of Speciesist Policing: The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Animal Cruelty Data

This article contests the animal cruelty statistics newly collected and publicized in the US by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In what follows, we (1) outline the inclusion of animal cruelty in the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), 2016–2020; (2) analyze trends in animal cruelty cases reported in NIBRS; (3) identify key data validity, methodological and theoretical problems in NIBRS, especially with the FBI’s attempt to generate knowledge of the link between animal cruelty and interpersonal violence; and (4) juxtapose the FBI’s circumscribed concept of animal cruelty with the much more inclusive circle of compassion advanced by nonspeciesist and green criminology. We challenge illusions that the criminalization of animal cruelty is driven by a logic of benign inevitability, and ponder how the extension of compassion to a few favored species coexists with and even engenders de-civilizing countertrends, such as the immense abuse that occurs worldwide in the animal industrial complex. Therefore, we issue a call for the development of a nonspeciesist research program, both monocultural and cross-cultural, into the dynamics of the policing and surveillance of animal cruelty and animal abuse in a broad range of societies

The Treadmill of Production and the Treadmill of Law: Propositions for Analyzing Law, Ecological Disorganization and Crime

Treadmill of production (ToP) arguments have significant implications for the study of environmental crime. A current limitation of those arguments involves their application to environmental law and its enforcement. We argue that a treadmill of law (ToL) shapes and maintains production through lawmaking and enforcement practices, issues that have yet to receive significant attention in the ToP literature. To illustrate the connection between the ToL and ToP and to facilitate political economic analysis of this connection, we make and discuss three propositions. In particular, we suggest that the ToL will (1) oppose the enhancement of environmental regulation through acts of state corporate crime, if necessary; (2) fail to enforce criminal laws in ways that would alter production practices; and (3) define intense opposition to ToP interests and actors as criminal

Adaptive evolution of molecular phenotypes

Molecular phenotypes link genomic information with organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Quantitative traits are complex phenotypes that depend on multiple genomic loci. In this paper, we study the adaptive evolution of a quantitative trait under time-dependent selection, which arises from environmental changes or through fitness interactions with other co-evolving phenotypes. We analyze a model of trait evolution under mutations and genetic drift in a single-peak fitness seascape. The fitness peak performs a constrained random walk in the trait amplitude, which determines the time-dependent trait optimum in a given population. We derive analytical expressions for the distribution of the time-dependent trait divergence between populations and of the trait diversity within populations. Based on this solution, we develop a method to infer adaptive evolution of quantitative traits. Specifically, we show that the ratio of the average trait divergence and the diversity is a universal function of evolutionary time, which predicts the stabilizing strength and the driving rate of the fitness seascape. From an information-theoretic point of view, this function measures the macro-evolutionary entropy in a population ensemble, which determines the predictability of the evolutionary process. Our solution also quantifies two key characteristics of adapting populations: the cumulative fitness flux, which measures the total amount of adaptation, and the adaptive load, which is the fitness cost due to a population's lag behind the fitness peak.Comment: Figures are not optimally displayed in Firefo

How Teaching About Therapeutic Jurisprudence Can Be a Tool of Social Justice, and Lead Law Students to Personally and Socially Rewarding Careers: Sexuality and Disability as a Case Example

Therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) asks us to look at law as it actually impacts people’s lives and focuses on the law’s influence on emotional life and psychological well-being. It suggests that law should value psychological health, should strive to avoid imposing anti-therapeutic consequences whenever possible, and — when consistent with other values served by law — should attempt to bring about healing and wellness. The ultimate aim of TJ is to determine whether legal rules and procedures or lawyer roles can or should be reshaped to enhance their therapeutic potential while not subordinating due process principles. An inquiry into therapeutic outcomes does not mean that therapeutic concerns ‘trump’ civil rights and civil liberties. TJ’s aim is to use the law to empower individuals, enhance rights, and promote well-being, And one of TJ’s central principles is a commitment to dignity. We know that, in many cases, law students’ desire to engage in pressing social issues fades as they become both disillusioned and passive over the course of their law school experience, and this disillusionment is often abetted by the attitudes of their professors and the way that law school is traditionally taught. We believe that the adoption of TJ principles is a way to end this disillusionment and help return students to a focus on social justice, as a way of better insuring more personally enriching and rewarding careers. In this paper, we consider this issue through the prism of teaching (and learning about) the intersection between sexuality and disability. In other articles, the authors have argued that the way society both (often simultaneously) demonizes and infantilizes persons with disability when questions of sexuality are raised reflects the level of sanism and pretextuality that permeates all of mental disability law. In these articles, we have argued further that a therapeutic jurisprudence perspective can best insure that the persons in question have voice, and are treated with dignity. In this paper, we discuss these issues, as well as examine the ways in which intersectionality — expanding our view to include factors such as race, sex, gender and sexual orientation — can compound the difficulty of discussing this topic. We seek to lay out a blueprint for other faculty members — senior, junior and future — to employ in teaching about marginalized populations, especially in substantive areas (such as this) that often evoke wildly negative reactions, even among classically “left/progressive” faculty and students