Instant Genius - The key role psychologists can play in the fight against ecological crime

Episode Date: October 5, 2025

Chances are that when most of us think about the notion of crime our minds turn to acts committed against an individual – be it theft, fraud or even physical assault. But every day ecological crimes are committed against the planet we all live on that often fly under the radar despite the significant, far-reaching effects they have on all of us. In this episode, we’re joined by criminal psychologist and bestselling author, Dr Julia Shaw to talk about her latest book, Green Crime – Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet, and How to Stop Them. She breaks down the factors that drive individuals and organisations to commit acts that are damaging to the environment and explains how understanding the psychology that underpins these acts can help us to keep our planet healthy for generations to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Chances are that when most of us think about the notion of crime, our minds turn to acts committed against an individual, be it theft, fraud, or even, physical assault. But every day, ecological crimes are committed against the planet we all live on that often fly under the radar, despite the significant, far-reaching effects they have on all of us. In this episode, we're joined by criminal psychologist and best-selling author Dr. Julia Shaw to talk about her latest book, Green Crime, Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet, and How to Stop Them. She breaks down the factors that drive individuals and organizations

to commit acts that are damaging to the environment and explains how understanding the psychology that underpins these acts can help us keep our planet healthy for generations to come. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. Hi. So today we're talking about your latest book, Green Crime, Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet and How to Stop Them.

So that's quite a title. And sorry to start with the sort of too far. But what do you mean by green crime? And what led you to take on this topic? By green crime, I mean environmental crimes. So crimes that are against the forest or the oceans or emissions crimes. And the idea is that as a criminal psychologist, I was looking at why people do bad things. And I do a lot of true crime.

I have or had a podcast for years called Bad People, for example, on the BBC. and in it we always look at why someone has committed a crime, the specific case, tell it in a quite narrative way, and then we dig into the science behind why this might have happened in general. So the kinds of people who do these kinds of things and also what in each of us is going to lead us potentially down this dark kind of path. And so with green crime, I was looking at all of these horrendous crimes against nature, against the environment.

And I was realizing that this is just a lot of. crime at scale. And so I thought, why don't we try and apply social science to understanding the perpetrators of environmental crimes or green crimes? So within the book, there are several case studies. So how did you go about picking those out? I mean, sadly, you must have had quite a lot of options. I did have a lot of options when it comes to environmental crime. And organizations like the United Nations and the Environmental Investigation Agency both have incredible treasure troves online of reports on various kinds of environmental crimes. And that's everything from deforestation

and burning down of various wild spaces to pollution, waste crime is a huge issue. F-gas crimes, so the illegal transportation and disposal of specific gases that we use in, for example, air-conditioning units. Even sand thieves exist. So there's this huge category of crimes of things that can be stolen or taken

or destroyed in nature. And for me, however, what I wanted to do is highlight six of the biggest environmental crimes of our time and six that represent different kinds of nature. So we've got the air, we've got the forests, we've got the oceans, we've got fish and wildlife, we've got mining, and we've got oil and gas. And so the idea was to sort of highlight those six big different areas. But the way that I found them was really through talking to experts who work on environmental crimes. who work on the front lines, both as environmental defenders themselves, so for example, living in the rainforest, or as United Nations reporters, for example, as scientists who are taking these people into courtrooms at times, surprisingly, and holding people accountable. And so through them, I basically

ask them, what's your favorite crime? That's a weird thing to ask someone, but in crime stuff, we do this all the time. And so I just asked them, what's the best case in your opinion that showcases some of these issues and what's the most exciting and what's the one you're proudest of as well. So the wildlife crime one in particular was that was just straight up from one of the undercover agents who works these kinds of crimes saying this by far is our greatest success. And so that's how I sort of snowballed these cases. And it was quite hard to find them because the documentation for them is often lacking. Yeah. So I think that's worth pointing out. And what makes the book sort of in a way unique and so interesting is all of the groundwork that you've put in speaking to,

the people who are actually doing this stuff. Yeah, and that was important to me. Also, on a personal level, to pull myself out of what I was perceiving as this sort of black hole of existential dread, which I'm sure we all occasionally get close to. It's called mortality salience in the social sciences, and there's some research on it about how much we all think about death and how present the thought of death is in our minds. And of course, with the, as it's often referred to, triple planetary crisis. so climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, I think is the third one.

In that context, there's a lot of us, I think, who can feel quite hopeless quite quickly because all we're seeing in our feeds is the negative. We're seeing things being destroyed. We're seeing the Amazon burning down some more. We're seeing people getting away with crimes. And we're seeing maybe politicians who aren't taking this as seriously as we need them to. And the problem is that that can leave us with something called eco-grief. and eco-anxiety and eco-anger.

There's all of these new green emotions that psychologists are studying, which are functional reactions to this horrible situation that we're facing. But what you want to do is you want to turn those emotions into action. And so for me, I was too close to the eco-depression, the eco-dread, the eco-grief.

And I wanted to pull myself out. And so by speaking to these people, what I found is that there are so many people working on our side. There are so many incredibly intelligent, incredibly talented people who are fighting for a planet every single day in jobs they didn't know existed. And so by talking to them, I found myself surprisingly optimistic by the end of it. So in the book, you kind of break things down into, you call them pillars, sort of motivational pillars, that leads to these crimes being committed. And these are ease, impunity, greed, rationalization, conformity, and desperation.

first off, that's a really great, neat way of doing this, and it made it really easy for me to understand. So let's go through these, and we can weave in some of the case studies and the interviews that we've done. So the first one is ease. So this is really interesting, because, you know, a lot of us in our daily lives, we do tend to take the path of least resistance, you know, and I don't exactly know why that is. I imagine it's because it's evolutionary beneficial to do things to save energy or whatever. Don't take the extra mile if you don't have to. But you talk about these different case studies. So we've got the mines, we've got the fishing, we've got the, and it's all sort of there for the taking in a way.

As in we have these vacuums of enforcement, as I talk about in the book, where you've got these wild spaces all over the place that aren't particularly monitored, both in terms of actual monitoring, so someone watching the space, but also in terms of people enforcing the rights of either nature itself or of the people who own the nature. And so you're right, there are these spaces of what is also sometimes referred to as negative freedom or perceived negative freedom, which is a freedom from laws. So it's the idea that we often hear, it's sometimes really popular within the tech space where people go, we want to strip back regulation, we want to strip back laws because I should be able to do whatever I want. And it's a very individualistic version of

freedom. And I think sometimes it's romanticized and that it's this idea that, well, if I could do anything unencumbered by other people's rules, then I could be great. And I think that is not true. Almost never, I think, is that true. And what's more important to me, at least, is a freedom where we are empowering each other to be free. And it's not just people who happen to already have lots of resources are able to do whatever they want. So in the book I talk about negative freedom and how enforcement vacuums where there is this perception of there's no laws might change our behavior. And so if you think about the high seas, for example, which is where I take us in chapter four, where I speak with the captain of a ship. And so his name is Captain Hammerset, and he's the captain of a ship called the Bob Barker, which is named after the host of the Time is Right in America, which was a long-running, long-running TV show.

And the celebrity actually donated the ship because he was really, it was really important to him to fight whaling at the time, actually. But then it was repurposed to catch illegal fishermen in Antarctica. And in this context, Captain Hammerstead was chasing this ship with his crew through the ice flows. And for 110 days, he was just pursuing this pirate illegal fishing ship. And it was one of the most wanted ships in the world. And it's a really exciting chapter, I think, because you really get. this chase throughout and you get his thoughts and how he's interacting with this, you know, criminal fisherman on the other side, how he's dealing with the other captain, how he's then

later perceiving the people on board. So the people actually catching the fish, he basically says, yeah, well, it's not really not really their fault. I mean, they're these really poor people who are sort of recruited onto these ships. And then they're instructed when they're already out there usually to start doing things illegally. Like, what are they going to do? And so he very much blames the people who are the captains of the ship and then the owner of the ship, which is a theme we see a lot, is that you have to be careful not to blame people who are just desperate for environmental crime, just because they happen to be holding what you might call the murder weapons, Earth's murder weapons in their hands. And so in that context, though, there's a lot

of conversation about freedom and this idea that, well, if you're on the seas, nobody's watching and it doesn't matter, and you can do anything. And that's a little bit true in that you can probably get away with more on the high seas than in many places. But there are the laws of the seas, which I talk about. There is no such thing as an actually lawless place on earth anymore. And there are people paying attention. And so if you've got these vigilantes in this case, you've got these NGOs who are pursuing people on the high seas, trying to make sure that there's somebody watching and somebody holding people account, they then drag people to local or to a country who then, if they are able and desire to, they can prosecute these people. So for me,

the psychology of it is interesting of what would you do if no one was watching? How does that affect your likelihood of committing crime, including environmental crime? And in that as well, how can we make it so that people choose the right option even when no one's watching? It's not like all of us are committing crimes all the time when no one's watching. And so that's the thing that I think is always important to understand. Yeah, so you sort of touched on it. But running through the book is this notion of desperation, which perhaps you could say makes people act in ways. Perhaps they wouldn't otherwise. But they end up sort of digging themselves deeper and deeper into these holes.

So you talk about the diesel gate scandal, the horrible murder in Brazil, elephant poaching for ivory sales. And it's really interesting thing because do these all stem from poverty? Well, they all leverage poverty for crime. So this is what I learned as a criminal psychologist is that I do a lot of commentary and I talk a lot about violent crimes basically, where there is an individual against usually one other individual, maybe a couple, and it is a moment or a couple of moments. And it is people acting on their own. And so in these contexts, the motivations are usually like impulse control. I mean, if you could call that a moment, or lack of impulse control, if you could call that a motivation. And motivations are things like anger and, you know, frustration. And maybe if you dig a bit deeper, you can get to things like systemic inequalities. You get to things like toxic masculinity. But really what we're talking about in environmental crimes is various versions of organized crime.

And this is closer to how we think about, I'm not going to use the word gangs. I always want to call them gangs, but I had a long conversation with the UN researcher who was one of the authors of the World Wildlife Crime Report, which is the biggest report on, as you might guess, trafficking in endangered species. And it's really interesting as a read, if you're interested in any of this stuff. And it comes out every four years.

And he was like, they're not gangs. They're syndicates. And I was like, what's the difference? And you think I'd know the difference because I am, you know, I'm at least like organized crime adjacent in terms of my research. And he's like, no, because gangs have an identity.

Gangs, there's a social element. there's a piece of it which is who you are and not just what you're doing. Whereas with syndicates and organized crime more generally, it's more about just what you're doing. And so I don't use the word gang because he told me not to. But there's syndicates that traffic in endangered species and without desperation, without incredibly poor people to exploit, most of these environmental crimes would go away. And that's something I hadn't quite realized to that extent, is that you really do rely on all of the levels of the various crimes. And the various crimes always always

the most money at the top. And then you've got the sort of bosses, and then you've got the middle managers who are recruiting the people at the bottom, and then you've got the people at the bottom. And in between, you've got lawyers, you've got people managing illicit financial flows, you've got accountants,

you've got people all the way through. You've got insurance companies that are still insuring illegal fishing vessels, which is something that comes up in the book that this most wanted fishing vessel in the world was insured. And who's insuring this ship is one of the things that Captain Hammerstead said to me when he got a call from the insurance agency or from actually an investigator investigating the insurance of it. But anyway, it was fascinating to learn and depressing to learn how much poor people are exploited in order to trash our planet.

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listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So let's move on to the idea of impunity. So I think this is really, really super interesting. And it goes across all sort of strata's. So you've got, you talk about the diesel gate issue, which is kind of, I don't know what I would say, sort of safety and numbers argument, perhaps. Correct me if I'm wrong. The perpetrators, yeah. Yeah. And then you've got the murders, unfortunately, in Brazil, where there's a sort of lack of the robust policing system, I suppose you could say.

And then you've got the, you know, the ocean's a big old place and you've got the illegal fisher people. It's difficult to police, you know. So this gives people a kind of notion that they can be a bit naughty and get away with things. Yeah, and that's why in the Six Pillars model, I. found impunity to be a really important part of it. And that can be actual impunity, so people actually getting away with it and seeing other people getting away with crimes. So if you see other people, for example, in the car industry, getting away with emissions crimes. And there's been this long history of car companies, various car companies, being prosecuted or held accountable

or fined for various kinds of emissions fraud. So that is basically since there have been regulators, there have been people trying to cheat them. And I think when you see that happening and when you know that that's a thing that people have done, if then also people start getting away with it again, you might go, hmm, is this something that is now an option for us? If we find ourselves in a situation where we're struggling to meet emissions targets or even just we're trying to take shortcuts. And so that's where in the Dieselgate chapter on the Volkswagen dieselgate scandal,

the emissions scandal where Volkswagen was found to be emitting 40 times the legal limits of nitrous oxides in the United States when they were, trying to pass the more stringent Californian carb regulations around emissions. And so they were wanting to break into this American market. And instead of changing their cars, they implemented something called a defeat device, which they installed. And this is something that people don't understand about the diesel gate case. So those who are familiar with it often are like, well, they were kind of like fudging their data.

And it's like, yeah. But they literally installed specific software into their cars to cheat these tests. This isn't like accidental. This is very deliberate. Like you have to go out of your way to install this. And then they went out of their way to hide it further in the code. And so I think with the Dieselgate case, it wasn't so much that that was a hard case to find.

Right? That's one of the most probably well-covered environmental crimes in history. But it was really hard to find what really happened because there was so much misinformation, so much lying by Volkswagen, which they later got convicted of in various ways, that it was just really hard to piece together what actually happened and who was to blame. And to this day, a lot of people sort of shrug it off

who were involved and who've been convicted going, yeah, but it wasn't really me, was it? And I go, wow, as a society, yes, I think we really need to learn how to accept responsibility and to say we're sorry. And yeah, I did do the thing. And I don't want to, you know, it's important to me that we don't do this again, rather than pretending that you had nothing to do with it. And that's where I think sometimes people are cowards and we need to make sure that people have a way to also express and to whistleblow and to say, I did a bad thing, now I want to help undo it rather than trapping them into a situation or them feeling trapped in a situation of their own design where they think they can't get out of it because they've been lying so long that they have to keep

lying. But with impunity, the reason I thought it was really important is that we know it matters. So from research more generally on crime, we know that people who feel that they can get away with things are more likely to try and get away with things. It doesn't mean they will. It doesn't mean that they will act badly, but it means that they're more likely to try. And it's the perception sometimes more than the reality as well. So it doesn't have to be actual impunity. It could even be that there's like the death penalty for a crime. People in Texas know that they can be sentenced to death row if they murder somebody.

But people still get murdered in Texas. And so this is where even if you have incredibly high sanctions and it's arguably not impunity, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to take that into account because if you perceive that the enforcement of that is really low and that you're not going to get caught, then you're still going to do the thing. That's where it's perceived or actual impunity. So moving on from that, another of your pillars is rationalization. This is another one that I found absolutely fascinating because, you know, I kind of framed it in my, in my, my mind is a notion of guilt. So you think, well, you know, I'm not as bad as the next guy.

I haven't done anything wrong. Right. And rationalization, if we stick with the Dieselgate case for a second, there I thought was really interesting in that these are clever engineers. So for me, there's different questions in this book that keep coming up. There's why are people exploiting nature or destroying nature? Also, why are they doing it instead of, say, other kinds of crime? So this is where I think sometimes we think, well, you know, it's sort of like, in quotation marks, good people who aren't doing any crime versus environmental crime. And it's like, no, like there's also other crime that you could be committing. And my question is also, why are you trafficking wild animals and not people? Not that you should be doing either, of course, but there's still calculation there as well. And I'm interested in that question, in addition to the question between being law abiding and not law abiding. But with rationalization, what we saw in the Dieselgate case, case. I spoke with the New York Times journalist who was interviewing people at the time that the Volkswagen scandal broke, which was almost exactly 10 years ago. And he was speaking with people who were coming forward at the time going, I want to talk to someone. And they're not quite

whistleblowers, but they're sort of secret informants at this point who are wanting to share some of what happened. But he said one of the things that struck him as he was trying to piece together what actually happened was that everyone he talked to spent quite a lot of the time speaking with him in these secret locations where, you know, in the middle of the night, as you sort of expect almost like spy dramas, sort of going into these, you know, diners in the middle of nowhere being like, don't record this, don't, you know, just don't tell anyone. They're sort of got, I'm picturing a cap over their heads, sort of looking down, making sure that nobody can recognize them talking to this journalist. But in these moments, they would spend quite a lot of time trying to convince him

that they're not bad people. And the rationalization specifically was saying, well, but I did this for my family. And this is a classic that I hear in all industries, is that we think people are doing things out of greed, because that's what it looks like to us, because we go, well, you're doing this because you have a job, or you're getting paid, or you're getting some sort of obvious benefit that is, you know, to the detriment of other people, which is why it's greed and not just taking things. And yet what people themselves think is that they are acting not selfishly but self-lessly. And so they rationalize it by saying things like, well, if I hadn't done it, other people had, or I'm actually a good person because I'm giving these desperate people jobs that's in poaching, for example.

You see that a lot, where people go to these really desperate communities in the middle of South Africa, for example, and they go, I'm bringing jobs. I'm bringing money to these people. I'm going to pay to poach wildlife. And so I'm good. Or I'm doing this for my family, and I can send my daughter to private school, so I'm doing this for her.

And so it's never in your mind just because you're greedy and you want more. It's because you want to give it to somebody else. And there isn't a piece of truth to that that we need to acknowledge, I think. And I think it's important also to help us use that to break through this idea that it's just greed and sort of people sitting on their piles of money as the world burns,

because that's not really what's happening, at least not in their minds. And so rationalization, I think, is a really important psychological element to understanding how environmental crimes happen. Because if you can't rationalize the behavior, you're more likely to question your ethics and the behavior, and hopefully you're not going to do it. Yeah, like I sort of, like personally speaking, I've never studied psychology. So correct me if I'm going down the wrong alley here. But it strikes me that there's a huge sense of remove from somebody committing a crime to somebody one-on-one,

as opposed to a large sort of nebulous group of people that they've never met. They think, well, that's fine. It's not going to affect me. Does that play a role? Sometimes. But rationalisation also plays a role in violent crime quite heavily, especially when we're talking about things that aren't murder, which is most violent crime, right? And so if you talk about things like horrible cases of, well, even any cases of intimate partner violence, for example, if you talk about cases of neglect or if you talk about psychological violence, when you get into those kinds of places, you get a lot of people rationalizing their actions as well. And there they're rationalizing it by saying things like she deserves this, she needs this, someone needs to be put in her place, they need to be taught a lesson. And it's different language, but it is also rationalizing bad behavior. And it's, It's sort of saying, well, this is necessary or good because.

And so rationalisation is a key component to lots of crimes, especially repeat crimes. So you touched on there earlier, greed. So personally speaking, when I looked at the book, you know, green crime, I thought, oh, there's going to be a lot about greed in here. A lot of it seems, well, perhaps naively, I don't know, seemed to me to come down to a blunt matter of just of economics. You know, that's why, say, I'm working for Volkswagen, and I'm part of a huge company.

And I want my salary. I want my promotion. And so does everyone else, you know. And so you think, well, maybe we will sneak this under the carpet and it won't do any harm. Yeah, greed is the thing that comes to mind in most people's minds. And I was tempted to call this book, It's Not Just Greed. That was my alternative subtitle, Green Crime. It's Not Just Greed by Julia Shaw.

That was because I, it's actually one of the reasons I wrote this book is that I got so frustrated with people going, well, it's obviously greed. And I'm like, in what ways it obviously greed? I mean, yeah, money is involved, but money is involved in basically all organized crime. And we don't look at gangs and go, well, you know, it's just for the money. There's obviously more going on. And so I think it's really important both to break through the idea that it's just greed and that it is something that is nebulous and done by a system. This is the other thing that I kept getting really frustrated by is that when people think about environmental crime,

they always think about corporations, which I do list there are two corporate cases of environmental crime that I dig into, because yes, those are one category of environmental crime. But even there, it's not, in quotation marks, the company or the corporation that perpetrated a crime. I mean, ultimately they can, in fact, get convicted because they're illegal entity, blah, blah, blah, sure. But it's people, it's individuals in those systems, in those companies, who are deciding we're going to do this.

We are going to harm the planet. We are going to harm people. we are going to threaten our future on purpose. And this is where especially, especially at the higher levels, when we're talking about engineers, we're talking about people who are well-versed with the fishing industry. We're talking about people who are well-versed with the degradation of the Amazon. Like these aren't people who, these are people with degrees

who are experts in these areas often. And they're deciding, they're deciding either to turn a blind eye when they realize that bad things are happening, or to explicitly engage in them. And so this isn't ignorance, and it's not just greed either, because rarely is it the case that individuals sort of get a cash full of hand every time they do something bad. Sometimes they don't get any money, as far as we can tell, but they're still getting some sort of benefit. So greed is involved, which is what's, it's still one of the six pillars. It's just only one of them, not all of them. And the way that it's involved in my view is more that you do typically need this view that you are entitled to and should enrich yourself at the expense to others.

And that that is something that is okay to do and or you're going to just go ahead and do it. And money is always involved in these kinds of crimes. But it is not the only or even key motivator, I would say. Again, there's other ways to make money. There's also other illegal ways to make money. The question to me, again, is why cut down a rainforest and not smuggle drugs then? Like if you're just after money, there's other ways. Why not just sell some shady stuff that doesn't actually work on the internet?

Why not just sell some fake medicine? Why not? There's lots of things you could be doing that are also making money in shady borderline illegal ways or just straight up illegal ways. Why choose this? Is that due to a sort of moral question, though? So I'm doing something that's harming the planet. I'm logging, for example. I'm fishing illegally.

At least I'm not dealing drugs. There's definitely that. And we saw that in the rationalization and conformity, which is one of the other pillars, around the illegal fishermen, is that they would go home, especially the captains of these illegal fishing ships, would go home to their families,

and their families would know what they were doing. And they'd sort of be like, yeah, well, they're fishermen. Like, obviously they're out there. And I say fishermen, because in fact every single person I encountered in this book who was on the seas was a man. In fact, there's a lot of homo social environments in general that much like crime in general is disproportionately committed by men. So is environmental crime. I actually really struggled to find female perpetrators at all, which there's a whole other subplot to that. And I think that might be

more about who is out and about in the world and who owns things than it is about sort of inherent gender biases, but that's what I was finding, and it's quite hard to find people who are not men who are committing these crimes at all the levels. But these illegal fishing captains, they would go home, tell their families, and their families will go, you know, thanks for bringing home some money. And great, you're a fisherman. This is what we do. We've been doing this for hundreds of years, potentially, as a family. And so, of course, you're out there. And, yeah, it's hard to fish close to home now. And, oh, it's hard to fish legally for Patagonian toothfish or as we call it Chilean sea bass.

And so, of course, you're going to go to these other waters where you can still get some fish, even though it's illegal. And so there's that normalization also of the people around you. And that is something that I think definitely plays a huge role in environmental crime. So waste crime as well. If we throw things out illegally, if we fly-tip and we ditch our fridge down a ravine somewhere, people aren't going to inherently necessarily, even if we tell our friends, They're not going to say, wow, that's a really awful thing to do.

How could you do such a thing? They might go, it's a bit naughty, isn't it? I mean, sometimes I may even go, oh, yeah, I've done that too. And so that's where you get into real problems of also people not getting what's at stake and allowing themselves to see these kinds of behaviors as okay. So let's sort of sum up. You talk about solutions, and you call them watchers, investigators, and enforcers. So can you briefly run us through what you mean by that, please?

At the end of the book, what I do is I summarize the kinds of jobs and the kinds of roles that people have had throughout the book. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to show that, yes, these are six really big cases that they cover in the book. I also cover the science. So I also speak with a scientist for each one of them. And by that I mean a more classic scientist. So like someone who's an oceanographer or someone who is a NOx, Nitrous Oxides Researcher, Emissions Researcher. they explain why these things matter and the basic science behind the kind of crime that's happening and the pollution or other that we need to understand. So for me as well, it was important

to speak to experts who know what they're talking about and who research emissions, for example, all the time so that we fully and truly understand the issues. But the people I mostly talk about here is in the conclusion is I talk about these watchers, these investigators, and these enforcers. And by watchers, I mean people who are like the scientists, who track damage to nature, who publish findings that reveal what we're actually doing to the planet, whether or not it might be also risking their own careers at times. And so sometimes there's real pushback, of course, against especially environmental sciences and people who are monitoring the environment in some way. Then there's environmental defenders who are seeing

the land being stripped. So in chapter two, I talk about. about the murder of two environmental defenders in the Amazon and the case of the people who were caught, who had hired the hitmen who murdered these environmental defenders. It's one of the most famous cases of environmental defenders being killed in Brazil. And so they would also count as watchers. They would also potentially be enforcers if they're fighting back. But at the very least, they are able to see on the front lines what's going on and what's being lost. Then you've got journalists who are jumping on ships and documenting illegal fishing. Then you've got the investigators, which I see is a separate category, which are the people who are identifying green crimes collect in the evidence. So one of the people I spoke with for this book, he is an Interpol agent. And so he was going on to making sure that these people are being interviewed appropriately, that the case doesn't fall apart by organizing both local and other police officers to make sure that they're taking on this case. because a lot of these things happen in international spaces. And so there's always a question of jurisdiction. Who should be taking on, especially for things that are on the high seas.

But even things like wildlife crime where you've got things crossing lots of borders, the question is who should be prosecuting, who should be taking on the burden of this case. And so Interpol agents are the investigators, people who are undercover agents. I mean, I didn't know that there were undercover agents who infiltrate organized crime and wildlife syndicates. I didn't know that. And so there was a lot of discovery throughout this book for me of jobs I didn't know existed that are really quite cool and being able to talk to them and get their stories. Then there's the enforcers and that's police officers customs agents. That's a whole category we often forget.

People who raid apartments, people who like the police officers and security specialists and federal agents. And so in some of these cases, the FBI or similar agencies were involved. and there, of course, much like in other crime cases, sifting through all the evidence. And with these crimes, because they're so big and complex often and international, sometimes it takes years or even a decade to finish the prosecution. So for me, there's these big categories where I think we all need to hear these stories more. They are uplifting, they're intriguing, they're exciting, I thought. and I think highlighting the individuals who are also fighting back the heroes, if you will, of this fight,

learning about them, meeting them, hearing their stories, hearing what they're actually doing is really, I mean, inspiration is also a good word for it. But for me, it was really comforting to know that there's all these people out there fighting on our side. And hopefully by the time you finish this book, that's how you feel. You feel like you've learned about these worlds that you didn't know existed. You've met all of these incredible people and you no longer feel alone. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr. Julia Shaw. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book, Green Crime,

Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet and How to Stop Them. If you liked what you just heard, then please consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then please do also check out our YouTube channel at ScienceFocus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com.

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