Michael J. Lynch

Michael J. Lynch is an American criminologist credited with introducing the term green criminology in a 1990 article that called for criminology to extend its attention to environmental harms and crimes against the natural world, a field that had previously received little sustained study within mainstream criminology. Lynch approached environmental harm from a political economy perspective, arguing that the scale and distribution of environmental crime, including illegal pollution and other corporate environmental violations, is shaped by economic structures and the pursuit of profit in ways closely paralleling his broader work on radical and Marxist criminology. His coining of the term is widely credited as the founding moment of green criminology as a distinct area of study, one that has since grown to include research on wildlife crime, environmental justice and corporate environmental regulation.