Environment, Environmental Crimes, Environmental Forensic Medicine, Environmental Risk Management and Environmental Criminology.

Michelangelo Bruno Casali,Guido Vittorio Travaini,Carlotta Virginia Di Francesco,Umberto Rosario Genovese

doi:10.3390/healthcare10020263

Michelangelo Bruno Casali, Guido Vittorio Travaini + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10020263

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Abstract

Forensic medicine has always held the human environment, either seen as a source for pathological agents or the background of judicial events, in great consideration. The concept of the environment has evolved through time, expanding itself to include all the physical and virtual sub-spaces in which we exist. We can nowadays talk of technoenvironmental reality; virtual spaces exploded because of the COVID-19 pandemic making us come to terms with the fact that those are the places where we work, where we socialize and, even, where we meet our doctors and can be cured. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has contributed to shaping new virtual realities that have got their own rules yet to be discovered, carved and respected. We already fight a daily battle to save our natural environment: along with the danger of green crimes, comes the need for environmental justice and environmental forensic medicine that will probably develop a forensic branch and an experimental branch, to implement our technical culture leading to definition of the real dimension of the risk itself to improve the role of legal medicine in the Environmental Risk Management. While green criminology addresses widespread green crimes, a virtual environment criminology will also develop, maybe with a contribution of AI in the justice field. For a sustainable life, the environmental revolution must rapidly take place, and there is the need for a new justice, a new forensic medicine and a new criminology too.

Highlights

IntroductionForensic medicine has always been strictly focused on human environment, traditionally intended as either the possible source for some pathological agents or the interacting background for some judicial events [1]
Forensic medicine has always been strictly focused on human environment, traditionally intended as either the possible source for some pathological agents or the interacting background for some judicial events [1].In the XXI Century, a new description of the concept environment is probably needed, and this new kind of human environment can be maybe defined as the cumulative space for all the human actions and all the human interactions: a comprehensive space where physical sub-spaces and virtual sub-spaces do routinely coexist
According to an up-to-date definition, the human environment is the cumulative space for all the daily human actions and interactions

Summary

Introduction

Forensic medicine has always been strictly focused on human environment, traditionally intended as either the possible source for some pathological agents or the interacting background for some judicial events [1]. Everyday millions of human beings unconsciously cross—one by one—many different physical and virtual spaces: any of these interactions can be relevant for justice and, for either forensic medicine and criminology. Physical and virtual environments are very different, the former being traditional to humans and the latter being new and unknown As it is clear mainly from the AI revolution, the virtual environment has got its own rules yet to be discovered, carved and respected. Poisonous gases, chemical residues, noise pollution and wild deforestations are good examples of collective enemies to be immediately fought [11,12,13,14] Such a fight (just like every other human action) has got, obviously, a judicial face too, the face of the so-called green crimes. These two faces are firmly bound to each other

EFM as a Pure Forensic Branch

EFM as an Experimental Branch

Conclusions