Modern environmental philosophy is a new type of philosophy for humans re-examining the relationship between man and nature and provides the value guidance for modern environmental law. China’s environmental crime legislation has gone through the exploration period, establishment period, and optimization period. The environmental philosophy behind this is worth discussing and determines the direction China will take environmental crime in the future and whether China’s environmental strategy can really be implemented. At present, the disputes about the environmental philosophy of environmental crime in China are mainly reflected in the contention between anthropocentrism, ecocentrism, and eco-anthropocentrism. There are radical risks of pure human centrism or pure ecological centrism, and these two theories struggle to serve as a value basis for environmental crime legislation. Although eco-anthropocentrism seems to be comprehensive, it is actually ambiguous, and it is still difficult to deal with the conflict between people and nature. In recent years, China has continuously emphasized the construction of ecological civilization construction and written this into the constitution. Therefore, in the environmental philosophy issues of environmental crimes in China, we should consider absorbing the advantages of anthropocentrism, ecocentrism, and eco-anthropocentrism, while taking the original Chinese ecological civilization philosophy as the value foundation.

In modern society, law is one of the most important means of risk prevention and control. Under the challenge of ecological and environmental risks, China’s legal governance experience provides important historical experience and theoretical samples for other countries. Faced with problems, such as the difficulty of eliminating risks, risk decisions themselves bring risks, and the huge social cost of risk response, the social system theory can provide novel and new ideas for the cognition and response of environmental risks. Combining the experience of judicial practice with social theory, especially Niklas Luhmann’s doctrine of the risk/danger dichotomy, a clearer functional orientation can be given to judicial powers based on risk communication and risk attribution. By reviewing the ecological judicial practices in China, Germany, and other countries, the role of the legal system in stabilizing the normative expectations of the whole of society can be summarized, which will provide a reference for the risk response and legal governance of the global ecological environment.