I understand if you have never heard of Polly Higgins.
The late Polly Higgins gave up everything to defend a single client. Her client was not a person or a company, but the planet itself. And what she set in motion is now quietly reshaping the ground beneath global markets.
I first heard about this amazing story on a recent Shepheard-Walwyn podcast, where host Jonathan Brown spoke with Higgins’ close friend and co-founder of Stop Ecocide International, Jojo Mehta. The episode stayed with me, and the more I listened, the more it echoed something we talk about here in every newsletter.
For context, Higgins was a courtroom lawyer in London, and the cause she dedicated the last several years of her life to was named ‘ecocide.’ This term refers to serious, widespread, or lasting damage to the natural world. Higgins wanted it recognised as an international crime.
The vested interest that fought back would be intimately familiar to those of you who study the 18.6-year Real Estate Cycle.
In a financialised world, governments step in and make things worse, the rich get richer whilst the rest of the world are badly exposed to the whims of those in charge.
Higgins saw the same thing happening to the planet. Companies extract. Governments permit. The damage gets passed on, while the profits stay private and future generations inherit the bill.
In the early 2000s, whilst looking out over the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Higgins reached a simple conclusion. The Earth needed a good lawyer. The law protected people, companies, and property. Nothing in international law was protecting the living world itself.
So, she sold her house, left her career, and began her life’s work.
This life’s work came to a head when she forwarded her precursor document to the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. The draft included a clause stating that environmental destruction to be treated as a crime. Yet it was quietly dropped.
There are currently four international crimes against peace: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. Higgins spent her last decade trying to add a fifth.
After she died in 2019, the people she worked with continued to carry that mission forward. Now, we are closer to that reality than you may believe.
Here is where we bring the story to the here and now, and why you should become interested.
Jojo Mehta, who co-founded Stop Ecocide International with Higgins, makes a sharp point. Right now, money often flows towards projects that then pass their own environmental costs onto everyone else, because there is little legal risk in doing so.
Change the rules, and you suddenly change that same calculation. Some of the largest firms in the world are already paying attention, because clear rules create safer ground for long-term investment.
The movement is gaining ground at the highest levels, too. Several nations have formally raised ecocide on the world stage, and several countries are drafting legislation around this they will soon become law. The sooner you see things for what they are, the easier it becomes to prepare.
Mehta mentions a useful step in the process, and it is a simple one. Talk about it. The more people understand ecocide, the more its adoption starts to feel inevitable.
To hear the full story in their own words, I encourage you to watch the following episode with Jojo Mehta on the Shepheard-Walwyn YouTube channel at your leisure. Simply click on the embedded link below.
