While exploring climate justice through science fiction, I imagine artificial intelligence enforcing environmental justice by completely erasing the digital identity of those who commit crimes against Earth’s biosphere.

Environmental justice or climate justice most often refers to fairness or equitable treatment for low-income people or minorities living near polluting industries. But what if these concepts of justice extended to the climate as a whole? What if crimes against the planet’s biosphere had the same weight as crimes against humanity? In the case of serious damage, what if the punishment–executed by artificial intelligence–fit the crime?

In my novel Carbon Run, the second book of my climate science fiction series Tales From a Warming Planet, the wanton destruction of Earth’s ecological balance by an industrialist named Martin Scribb is punished by “disidentification,” the complete erasure of someone’s identify from everywhere, public and private. This is environmental justice in the next century. After his “dissing,” he exists in corporeal reality, but any record of his existence is destroyed. He was never born, no one noted his life in any way, and when he dies, no one will mark his passing. As a dissed person, he is a non-person.

A new kind of shunning

I took inspiration for this idea from the old practice of “shunning”. When someone committed a serious crime against a village or town, or perhaps a group of people sharing a common identity, people would turn their backs on the miscreant, figuratively and literally. He or she would be cast out of the community, doomed never to be accepted in the community again. The crimes would usually be serious, especially if they violated closely held community values, such as those practiced by a religion. The shunned man or woman would be condemned to wander alone in strange places among people they didn’t know.

In the world of Carbon Run, the community is the entire planet, and the shunned or disidentified person still lives among his fellow humans, but he is functionally non-existent, particularly in a society dependent on good record-keeping. This form of climate justice extends beyond traditional environmental policy to cosmic-scale accountability. This is where artificial intelligence enters the picture. The character of Martin Scribb is sentenced to disidentification after he is convicted of an enormous release of methane gas from the ocean floor during a methyl hydrate drilling operation. The release causes “The Spike,” when global temperatures rise quickly, devastating a world already damaged by CO2 and past methane emissions.

A chart showing how atmospheric methane has spiked. How do we hold people responsible for this?

An “execution” by an artificial intelligence agent

The judge’s order authorizes a law enforcement agency, the Bureau of Environmental Security, to send an artificial intelligence agent to scour every digital record source on the planet, erasing everything about Martin: birth certificate, employment records, social security records, tax records, property records, bank records, media mentions, social media posts, school records, absolutely everything stored about his existence. In the digital realm, he is erased from existence.

In addition, he suffers what I call a “social execution“. He is turned out onto the street with nothing but the clothes on his back. He has no money, no identification, no way to make a living. He is also marked on the forehead with a bony growth in the shape of a tulip, the universal sign of the disidentified. In public, he is essentially invisible, not unlike the fate suffered by many homeless people in our society. For Scribb, life is a constant scrabble for survival.

Enduring a “social death”

Ironically, the societal shunning means he can walk into a grocery store, for example, and pilfer an apple or a loaf of bread, because everyone is required by statute to ignore him, with a heavy fine for violations. However, the law allows the store owner to physically eject the dissed from their property, rather than accept the theft.

I’m personally opposed to capital punishment, except in the most egregious, evil cases, such as mass murder. That said, I would not be opposed to a “social death,” wherein an individual committing a crime so heinous the planet is threatened, he or she would deserve to be made a living ghost.

Today’s climate justice movements focus on protecting vulnerable communities from environmental harm. Perhaps future societies need more radical measures to protect the planet from those who would profit from its destruction.

What do you think of my idea of “disidentification” for serious environmental crimes?

Image by Sang Hyun Cho from Pixabay