In Spring 2019, the Office National du Litani (ONL), the Lebanese state agency that manages the Litani River basin, demolished hundreds of informal homes and forcibly relocated thousands of Syrian refugees. In the last decade, the Litani and the reservoir it feeds, Lake Qara‘un, have become notoriously polluted. The river basin is rapidly becoming uninhabitable. The ONL’s Syrian displacement campaign was part of a broader effort to combat what they term “environmental crimes” in the Litani basin, in which they issued hundreds of violation notices to polluting factories, municipalities, and farms. Some civil society groups lauded these efforts for setting an important precedent to hold polluters accountable. But this campaign effectively held accountable only the stakeholding publics of the Litani basin—farmers, businesses, municipalities, and refugees—as environmental criminals, and meted out punishment to the basin’s most vulnerable refugee communities. If the ONL’s environmental management criminalizes the communities of the river basin to protect the Litani River, then who are they protecting the river for? And what exactly is the “environment” the ONL are protecting? This paper is a historical genealogy of “environmental crime” in Lebanon. It demonstrates that the “environment” the ONL protects is a particular arrangement of nature, technology, and political economy that they constructed and sustained, and traces how Lebanese environmental law emerged to manage these kinds of “environmental” spaces. Between 1954–65, the ONL implemented a World Bank project to develop the Litani River. The infrastructure they installed generated hydroelectric power for Beirut by extracting water resources from the communities of the Litani River basin. Since 1965, the ONL has successfully weathered challenges from Litani communities seeking to regain popular sovereignty over the Litani. Only in the last few years—years in which plans have emerged to transmit the Litani to provide drinking water to Beirut and Jabal ‘Amil—has the ONL pivoted to cleaning and protecting the Litani as its core function, using relatively recent laws governing the disposal of public and private lands and waters. The ONL’s efforts to police the Litani basin are consistent with their longer history of monopolizing the river as a natural resource and denying basin communities’ claims to it. The historical constitution of “environmental crime” in Lebanon permits governing institutions like the ONL to avoid accountability for their long-term role in making Lebanon uninhabitable while criminalizing the country’s most vulnerable communities.