The campaign to recognise ‘ecocide’ as an atrocity crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has gained traction since the 2010s, driven by the inadequacy of existing legal instruments to confront large-scale ‘environmental destruction’ amid intensifying ecological discontinuities. Informed by existing international humanitarian and criminal norms against ‘environmental destruction’ during international armed conflicts, a likely definition of ‘ecocide’ as an ICC crime would revolve around “damage to the (natural) environment”. However, this normative basis betrays the original political and epistemic force of what the term ‘ecocide’ initially sought to condemn. Coined during the Second Indochina War (the Vietnam War), early articulations of ‘ecocide’ did not target an abstract offence against the ‘natural environment’, but the material and epistemic violence underlying ‘ecocidal warfare’ aimed at severing people from land, life-systems, and collective self-determination. However, a strand of contemporary legal discourse constrains the conceptual stakes underlying an international crime of ‘ecocide’ by staging ‘anthropocentrism’ and ‘ecocentrism’ as conceptual binaries, reinforcing a worldview inherited from international law’s normative groundings: one that for centuries has reduced earthly materialities and relationalities to a prophetical duel between anthropos as ‘humanity’ against an externalised oikos as ‘nature’. This chapter problematises such bifurcation by revisiting the ontological and doctrinal assumptions underlying contemporary discourse on ‘ecocide’. It situates the erasure of earlier ‘ecocide’ discourse within a historical trajectory shaped by strategic interpretive practices by the United States regarding the legality of environmental warfare in Indochina—arguably enabled by ontological assumptions that naturalise the divide between ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’. Rather than a rushed amendment to the Rome Statute, the chapter calls for slowing down to articulate the phenomena and structures that have normalised ‘ecocidal violence’ under the guise of legality and ‘human nature’. In this regard, Richard Falk’s proposed International Convention on the Crime of Ecocide stands as a solid benchmark that requires far more sustained consideration than it has been afforded thus far.