PROJECT NARRATIVE:
The Ecocide: Exploring Etiological, Social, Political, Legal, Environmental and Climatic Perspectives project brought together scholars and participants from different countries and academic backgrounds to explore the issue of ecocide and its broader environmental and sociopolitical implications. During the spring, the project successfully organized three virtual encounters in 2026: on April 22 (Earth Day), May 20, and June 17. Each encounter featured four speakers from different countries and academic backgrounds, as well as 30-50 participants, creating opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange and discussion. The encounters demonstrated significant interest in ecocide as an emerging area of academic and sociopolitical inquiry. Feedback following the events indicated that the issue of ecocide draws attention and generates important questions from multiple academic and sociopolitical perspectives. The project team is currently working to systematize these experiences, develop analyses and conclusions from the encounters, and consider possibilities for future initiatives related to ecocide and broader questions of environmental harm.
PROJECT LEADS:
Guido D. Giordano (he/him) is an Argentinian and American lawyer, a Specialist in Environmental Management and a Master of Arts in Criminal Justice. His work experiences include working for courts; for the DA’s office; with NGOs as a workshop leader and as an international consultant; and in academia (mostly in Argentina and the United States, but also in other American countries). His work and fields of interest encompass criminal law, criminology and victimology; international law and human rights; environmental crime in general and wildlife crime in particular; environmental justice and sustainability; urbanism and urban sociology; amongst others. His research experiences have focused on legal and illegal whaling; human-jaguar conflicts; human-tiger conflicts; on the International Criminal Court; and on ecocide; amongst other fields of interest linked to this project.
Garcia Lozano (they/any pronoun) is an interdisciplinary social scientist and environmental anthropologist whose work focuses on human-environment relations and on the politics of natural resources. Some of their areas of expertise include small-scale fisheries, collective action, social organization in fishing, labor in seafood production, and the politics of environmental governance including climate change adaptation and ecological restoration. Before coming to John Jay, Dr. Garcia Lozano was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Center, affiliated with Arizona State University and Conservation International, where they led a collaborative multi-institutional research project on the challenges for decent work in fishing. Prior to that, Dr. Garcia Lozano conducted doctoral research examining the history and politics of fishing cooperatives in Mexico, as well as master’s research on the involvement of multiple actors in the co-management of small-scale fisheries in Costa Rica. Dr. Garcia Lozano’s current research examines the efforts of different collectives in NYC to restore and protect urban nature, to shape development and climate-related interventions in the city, and to reclaim urban coastal spaces as public and as commons.
