The rupture of a major dam in southern Ukraine has displaced the Dnipro River, killed an unknown number of people, and left many Ukrainians homeless. Who destroyed the dam and why is still not fully clear, although growing evidence points to deliberate Russian action. As the shockwaves of Tuesday’s Nova Kakhovka explosion wane, Ukraine is left reckoning with the damage—and trying to find words for the crime.
“Brutal ecocide,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted on Tuesday in reference to the explosion, also calling it an act of “Russian aggression,” a “war crime,” and “an act of terrorism.” Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office has launched an ecocide probe into the effects of the dam’s destruction, and climate activist Greta Thunberg is using the same term to describe the event. This is not the first time Ukrainians have used the term to describe Russian actions: Ecocide gained traction earlier this year when Ukraine hosted a panel on “prosecuting environmental war crimes” at the United for Justice conference in March.
But what does ecocide mean? A combination of “ecology” and “genocide,” the term packs a punch. By using it to call attention to wartime environmental devastation, Ukrainians are reviving a rhetorical strategy that was birthed in opposition to the Vietnam War. It has, however, no widely accepted legal meaning—although some advocates aspire to make it otherwise.
American bioethicist Arthur Galston coined the term in a 1970 plea to end the use of Agent Orange, an herbicide used by U.S. troops in Vietnam to eliminate forest cover and crops, on the grounds that it was causing widespread environmental destruction—or ecocide. In 1971, Foreign Affairs ran a piece under the title “Ecocide and the Geneva Protocol” weighing the strategic advantages of Agent Orange against its devastating environmental impact, framed as a contribution to the debate on whether the United States should ratify measures banning biochemical weapons.
“Ecocide is the willful destruction of ecology—of the environment—as a weapon of war,” said David Zierler, a historian of science and author of The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think About the Environment (University of Georgia Press, 2011).
Ukrainians Are Accusing Russia of Ecocide. What Does That Mean?
