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I dedicate half of the book to establishing the theoretical basis of a Southern green criminology as a science that contests ecological discrimination. My political premise for such a theoretical design is that a Southern green criminology must seek to scientifically uncover the harmful practices that make the South victim to ecological discrimination. I use another five chapters to analyse the culturist and speciesist practices that create ecological discrimination against the diverse components of the earth system. In this concluding chapter, inspired by the interactions I have had with members of more than 20 Colombian Indigenous communities and my students, I formulate an everyday Southern green criminology practice for countering ecological discrimination – a critical pedagogy through Southern green criminology seedbeds.

In this chapter, I present the historical pillar on which a Southern green criminology can build new knowledge. Employing a genealogy of Southern green criminology, I show how the Global South was producing Southern and green criminological knowledge long before they became foci of academic research. Based on my historical account, I argue that the tradition of the Global South in producing knowledge useful for the prevention of ecological discrimination demonstrates that Southern green criminology is a potent and feasible project. But, I also warn of the threat posed by the dynamics that made Southern and green criminologies disappear in the past and that still exist today.

Humans are a key component of the earth system. Through our interactions with nature, we have irreversibly altered and damaged all components of the system, ourselves included. Usually, fields other than green criminology focus on human exploitation and trafficking; but, in this chapter, I show how environmental discourses and practices are used to justify the exploitation and monopolisation of humans. I examine the dynamics by which Southern communities are monopolised by Northern corporations. I also explore Southern forms of resistance to ecological discrimination such as land grabs, biopiracy and animal abuse. I finish the chapter with an analysis of the threat posed by culturism to Southern resistance.

In this second part of the book, I transition from the theoretical to the applied, or from thinking Southern green criminology to doing Southern green criminology. In this chapter, I apply the theoretical bases I presented in the first part of the book to the most encompassing environmental issue of our times: climate change. I show how a Southern green approach to climate change can contribute in important ways to understanding the ecological discrimination that is part of climate change in Colombia. A Southern green criminology can also help expand the repertoire of responses to climate change. I use my research of the Colombian Río Negro Basin to exemplify how the South confronts heightened risks of climate change that are the result of ecologically discriminatory practices. Inspired by the practices of the rural inhabitants of the Río Negro Basin region, I propose going back to traditional Southern practices to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

This chapter defines and provides examples of activist criminology methods (ACM). Although many examples of ACM studies are provided, to date, no publications use this identification. The authors begin by questioning not only the feasibility but also the desirability of the ‘neutral scientist’. The authors then summarise the predecessors and contributors to ACM: ‘activist research’, participatory action research, and public criminology. The components of ACM are (1) including the public; (2) using reflexivity; and (3) ensuring the findings are relayed to the public and ideally, used to create change. Including the public has two subsections, the victims/survivors and the activists resisting the injustice studied. The authors discuss some of the challenges in conducting ACM, including academic marginalisation of this scholarship (and thus the difficulty of pursuing it, particularly if untenured), securing collaboration with activists and/or survivors, reflexivity on the power differences when collaborating with marginalised communities, and the near impossibility of achieving all the goals of ACM in one study. Although unnamed until now, ACM, as we describe them, has been conducted for hundreds of years around the world. The growing number of scholars historically kept out of academia due to race, gender, sexuality, class, and criminal history is no doubt related to the vastly increasing frequency of studies employing ACMs, as well as discussions and advancement of these methods.