Polly Higgins left a career at the Bar to pursue a question with far-reaching consequences: could severe environmental destruction be treated as a crime under international law? She argued that it should, campaigning for ecocide to be recognised alongside the offences prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. The campaign did not achieve that change during her lifetime. But Higgins’s legal proposals, books and organising helped give the idea a name, a public profile and a continuing place in debate.

From Glasgow to the English Bar

Born Pauline Hélène Higgins in Glasgow on 4 July 1968, she grew up in Blanefield, at the foot of the Campsie Hills. Her father had been a meteorologist during the Second World War and her mother was an artist. Higgins attended St Aloysius’ College in Glasgow, then studied at the University of Aberdeen and Utrecht University before completing postgraduate study at the University of Glasgow. During her university years she worked with Austrian artist and environmental activist Friedensreich Hundertwasser; a later period in Vienna brought her into contact with the European ecology movement.

Higgins trained in law at City University and the Inns of Court School of Law in London. She was called to the Bar in England in 1998 and practised in London, specialising in corporate law and employment. Her earlier legal career also included work on a case for a person injured at work. After three years representing that client, she looked out of a window at the Court of Appeal and considered the harm being done to the Earth. She later described the thought that the Earth, too, needed a good lawyer. She stopped practising as a barrister to devote herself to environmental advocacy.

A proposed crime against peace

Ecocide—the destruction of the natural environment by human activity—was not a new term when Higgins took it up. It had been proposed as one of the international crimes against peace in 1996, but was left out of the final Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Higgins began campaigning for its inclusion around 2009. In 2010 she lobbied the United Nations Law Commission to recognise ecocide as an international crime, seeking a legal route to hold business executives and governments criminally liable for environmental harm. The campaign did not succeed in securing that recognition during her lifetime.

Higgins’s case was that environmental devastation could not be separated from the conditions that lead to conflict. In 2010 she argued that resource depletion could be followed by war, and that human-caused destruction of this kind could be regarded as a crime against peace. Her proposal was to make ecocide the fifth such crime. The significance of the idea lay in its attempt to move responsibility for environmental harm beyond political criticism or civil remedies and into the realm of criminal accountability. It was an ambitious legal and political campaign, not a change already made to international law.

Her work also included research and legal writing with academic collaborators. In 2013, Higgins, Damien Short and Nigel South published “Protecting the planet: A proposal for a law of ecocide” in Crime, Law and Social Change. This gave the proposal a place in scholarly discussion as well as public advocacy. Higgins held the Arne Naess Professorial Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo from 2013 to 2014; it was an honorary, non-academic appointment.

Books, campaigning and recognition

Higgins wrote Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of Our Planet (2010) and Earth Is Our Business: Changing the Rules of the Game (2012), setting out the legal proposal and its implications. Her third book, I Dare You to Be Great, appeared in 2014. Eradicating Ecocide won the non-fiction category of the People’s Book Prize in 2011. Through writing and campaigning, she sought to build support for a legal principle that could apply to decision-makers responsible for environmental damage.

She started the Earth Protectors group to raise funds for the cause and was a founder of the Earth Law Alliance. The current of work described under the Eradicating Ecocide campaign and these organisations was not a single legal institution: it brought together advocacy, public education and efforts to support the proposed change in law. Higgins also delivered the Rachel Carson Memorial Lecture in 2012, titled “Ending the Era of Ecocide”. The Ecologist named her among its top ten visionary thinkers in 2009, and Salt magazine placed her at number 35 in its 2016 list of inspiring women. In 2018, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society awarded her an honorary fellowship and its Shackleton Medal.

Her recognition extended beyond the United Kingdom. She received an honorary doctorate from Business School Lausanne in 2013 and an award from Slovakia’s Ekotopfilm in 2017. These honours reflected the international reach of her environmental advocacy, while her Scottish upbringing and legal training in England remained central to her own story.

The campaign after Higgins

Higgins died on 21 April 2019, aged 50, at a hospice in Leckhampton, Gloucestershire, and was buried in Slad. She had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer the previous month. Her death brought an end to her direct work, not to the wider discussion of ecocide. A panel of experts convened in 2021 to draft a legal definition of the term. That development belongs to the continuing debate, rather than proving that Higgins’s proposed crime had been adopted by the International Criminal Court.

The distinction matters. Higgins lobbied for ecocide to become an international crime, but the campaign had not achieved that outcome by the time she died. Her contribution was to press a defined legal proposal into public and professional debate, develop it through books and legal writing, and organise support around it. The later drafting of a definition shows that the question remained active; it should not be mistaken for the enactment of the change she sought.

Why Polly Higgins deserves a place in British Legacy

Polly Higgins deserves a place in British Legacy because her work joined a distinctly practical legal question to a global environmental concern. Trained at institutions in Scotland and London and called to the Bar in England, she used her experience of law to argue that severe environmental destruction should carry criminal responsibility at the international level. She did not secure that change, and her achievement should not be overstated as though ecocide had become an International Criminal Court offence. Her importance lies in articulating and campaigning for the proposal, writing about its legal foundations, and keeping accountability for environmental harm within the remit of public debate.

Her record was not limited to a headline-making idea. Higgins wrote three books, published legal scholarship with Damien Short and Nigel South, founded or helped establish campaigning organisations, and used public lectures and advocacy to explain the case for a law of ecocide. Recognition from the People’s Book Prize, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and other organisations marks the reach of that work, while the 2021 expert drafting panel indicates that the legal discussion continued after her death. For a British legacy, the relevant connection is both personal and professional: a Scottish-born campaigner, educated in Scotland and Europe, who trained and practised in England before taking a legal argument into international debate. Her example shows how one barrister’s sustained advocacy can put a proposed change in law before audiences far beyond the courtroom, even when the outcome remains unsettled.

Sources

Polly Higgins — revision 1372385450

Adapted in part from Polly Higgins by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.