
Polly Higgins is a pioneer; since stepping down from her legal practice as a court advocate, she devotes her time to one client – the Earth.
Polly Higgins, 1968-April 21,2019, was a Scottish barrister, author, and environmental lobbyist, and has been described as, ”one of the most inspiring figures in the green movement.” She left her career as a lawyer to focus on environmental advocacy, and unsuccessfully lobbied the United Nations Law Commission to recognize ecocide as an international crime.
Ecocide are crimes against the natural world.
Polly Higgins said, “that climate ecocide is the missing International Crime of our Time”, and called for the criminal law of ecocide to impose a legal duty on governments to protect the public from dangerous industrial practices.
She explained in 2010 that ecocide “leads to resource depletion, and where there is escalation of resource depletion, war comes chasing behind. Where such destruction arises out of the actions of mankind, ecocide can be regarded as a crime against peace.”
Polly Higgins was also the co-founder of Earth Law Alliance (http://earthlawyers.org) and published Eradicating Ecocide in 2012, which exposed the corporate and political practices destroying the planet and proposed laws to eradicate ecocide.
Read the piece Law of Nature, where Polly Higgins’s work is referred to as world-changing by George Monbiot:
https://www.monbiot.com/2019/03/30/law-of-nature/
Watch Polly give the De Balie Freedom lecture in 2017- start at 21.16 and ends at 51.10: https://eradicatingecocide.com/about-polly/
Watch Polly Higgins being interviewed about ecocide: