Topic: Making Ecocide a Crime

Presenter(s): Richard Falk

In 1973 Professor Falk drafted an Ecocide Convention, explicitly recognizing at the outset “that man has consciously and unconsciously inflicted irreparable damage to the environment in times of war and peace.” In 2021 he served as a judge for the International Rights of Nature Tribunal, seeking accountability for damage to aquatic ecosystems in Europe. (Check out this June, 2021, legal definition of “ecocide.”)

Richard Falk is a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University where he was a member of the faculty for 40 years. He currently is a Professor of Global Law, Queen Mary University London. Falk has been nominated annually for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009. He is the Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and between 2008-2014 served as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine.

Of the 20 books he has authored and another 20 he has edited, friends of John Cobb may remember Falk’s editing with David Ray Griffin of Postmodern Politics for a Planet in Crisis: Policy, Process, and Presidential Vision (SUNY, series in Constructive Postmodern Thought, 1993), and his more recent co-authorship with Griffin, John B. Cobb, and Catherine Keller of The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God: A Political, Economic, Religious Statement (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006).

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