"Ecocide" was the term coined to recognize environmental destruction as an act of war.  Britain's Jojo Mehta made headlines in alternative news recently after her speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit in Davos, where she stated that ecocide needs to become a punishable offense and included farming and fishing.

Wait…that's nuts.

This sounded too crazy. Maybe she was speaking off-the-cuff and exaggerated.  So, I went to the Stop Ecocide website, and sure enough, they include a variety of farming and fishing practices in their definition of ecocide.  

The American Professor Arthur W. Galston, who identified the defoliant effects of a chemical that later developed into Agent Orange first used the term "ecocide" in 1970 to describe what the US was doing in Vietnam.  He called for the banning of ecocide, though he was calling for this in the context of war destruction.

Vietnam was the first state to codify ecocide in its domestic law in 1990, and given their history with napalm, this is understandable.  Beginning in the mid-1990s, Russia and many former Soviet states codified ecocide in their domestic laws, too.  Like Vietnam, however, the Soviet Union had a history of true environmental catastrophes.  Kazakhstan has seen the poisoning and destruction of the Aral Sea, as well as many nuclear detonation tests.  Uzbekistan is home to the infamous "black goo" base, where the Soviets dumped chemical weapons and radioactive wastes. These countries view ecocide in a totally different context than Westerners unhappy with certain farming practices.