Green criminologists often deploy the notion of harm to capture patterns of environmental victimisation sitting outside the narrow and legalistic confines of environmental ‘crime’. In doing so, their analytical gaze is cast wide, resulting in a lack of focus on states and their specific obligations to protect citizens from such victimisation. The current article addresses this by using the dialectic conception of state crime to direct criminological attention towards these obligations. Using its constituent elements of human rights, deviance and legitimacy, the article examines the state duty to protect environmental human rights, the importance of involving opposition groups in research on deviant state activity, and the challenges faced by scholars attempting to evidence the illegitimacy of such practice. In doing so, literature from state crime and green criminological scholarship is synthesised, resulting in a concept of state environmental crime that is of utility to both fields.