Harm to knowledge: criminalising environmental movements speaking up against megaprojects

This chapter starts by reviewing the concept of environmental harm from a green criminological perspective, and the recent green criminological literature that—often using innovative methodologies— captured environmental harms as perceived, experienced, represented, and expressed by the affected individuals and communities. After providing background information on the two megaprojects and the struggles against them, the chapter briefly discusses the authors’ previous studies which inform this piece. In its central part, it explores some forms of environmental harms connected to the two megaprojects as emerging from activists’ voices—voices which we collected through interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and social media research. Through on-the-ground and virtual ethnographies we were also able to collect activists’ artistic expressions such as songs, vignettes, videos, and street art pieces, which we also included in our analysis. We conclude this chapter by analysing environmental harms through the concept of ‘harm to knowledge’ and by arguing for the need to expand the scope of environmental restorative justice (ERJ) to include the resolution of present and future conflicts.