Levels of environmental law
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Environmental law exists at many levels and is only partly constituted by international declarations, conventions, and treaties. The bulk of environmental law is statutory—i.e., encompassed in the enactments of legislative bodies—and regulatory—i.e., generated by agencies charged by governments with protection of the environment.
In addition, many countries have included some right to environmental quality in their national constitutions. Since 1994, for example, environmental protection has been enshrined in the German Grundgesetz (“Basic Law”), which now states that the government must protect for “future generations the natural foundations of life.” Similarly, the Chinese constitution declares that the state “ensures the rational use of natural resources and protects rare animals and plants”; the South African constitution recognizes a right to “an environment that is not harmful to health or well-being; and to have the environment protected, for the benefit of present and future generations”; the Bulgarian constitution provides for a “right to a healthy and favourable environment, consistent with stipulated standards and regulations”; and the Chilean constitution contains a “right to live in an environment free from contamination.”
Much environmental law also is embodied in the decisions of international, national, and local courts. Some of it is manifested in arbitrated decisions, such as the Trail Smelter arbitration (1941), which enjoined the operation of a smelter located in British Columbia, Canada, near the international border with the U.S. state of Washington and held that “no State has the right to use or permit the use of its territory in such a manner as to cause injury by fumes in or to the territory of another or the properties or persons therein.” Some environmental law also appears in the decisions of national courts. For example, in Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference v. Federal Power Commission (1965), a U.S. federal appeals court voided a license granted by the Federal Power Commission for the construction of an environmentally damaging pumped-storage hydroelectric plant (i.e., a plant that would pump water from a lower to an upper reservoir) in an area of stunning natural beauty, demonstrating that the decisions of federal agencies could be successfully challenged in the courts. Significant local decisions included National Audubon Society v. Superior Court (1976), in which the California Supreme Court dramatically limited the ability of the Los Angeles to divert water that might otherwise fill Mono Lake in California’s eastern desert.
Types of environmental law
Command-and-control legislation
Most environmental law falls into a general category of laws known as “command and control.” Such laws typically involve three elements: (1) identification of a type of environmentally harmful activity, (2) imposition of specific conditions or standards on that activity, and (3) prohibition of forms of the activity that fail to comply with the imposed conditions or standards. The United States Federal Water Pollution Control Act (1972), for example, regulates “discharges” of “pollutants” into “navigable waters of the United States.” All three terms are defined in the statute and agency regulations and together identify the type of environmentally harmful activity subject to regulation. In 1983 Germany passed a national emission-control law that set specific air emission thresholds by power plant age and type. Almost all environmental laws prohibit regulated activities that do not comply with stated conditions or standards. Many make a “knowing” (intentional) violation of such standards a crime.
The most obvious forms of regulated activity involve actual discharges of pollutants into the environment (e.g., air, water, and groundwater pollution). However, environmental laws also regulate activities that entail a significant risk of discharging harmful pollutants (e.g., the transportation of hazardous waste, the sale of pesticides, and logging). For actual discharges, environmental laws generally prescribe specific thresholds of allowable pollution; for activities that create a risk of discharge, environmental laws generally establish management practices to reduce that risk.
The standards imposed on actual discharges generally come in two forms: (1) environmental-quality, or ambient, standards, which fix the maximum amount of the regulated pollutant or pollutants tolerated in the receiving body of air or water, and (2) emission, or discharge, standards, which regulate the amount of the pollutant or pollutants that any “source” may discharge into the environment. Most comprehensive environmental laws impose both environmental-quality and discharge standards and endeavour to coordinate their use to achieve a stated environmental-quality goal. Environmental-quality goals can be either numerical or narrative. Numerical targets set a specific allowable quantity of a pollutant (e.g., 10 micrograms of carbon monoxide per cubic metre of air measured over an eight-hour period). Narrative standards require that the receiving body of air or water be suitable for a specific use (e.g., swimming).
The management practices prescribed for activities that create a risk of discharge are diverse and context-specific. The United States Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1991), for example, requires drip pads for containers in which hazardous waste is accumulated or stored, and the United States Oil Pollution Act (1990) mandates that all oil tankers of a certain size and age operating in U.S. waters be double-hulled.
Another type of activity regulated by command-and-control legislation is environmentally harmful trade. Among the most-developed regulations are those on trade in wildlife. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES, 1973), for example, authorizes signatories to the convention to designate species “threatened with extinction which are or may be affected by trade.” Once a plant or animal species has been designated as endangered, countries generally are bound to prohibit import or export of that species except in specific limited circumstances. In 1989 listing of the African elephant as a protected species effectively prohibited most trade in African ivory, which was subsequently banned by Kenya and the EC. By this time the United States already had banned trade in African ivory, listing the African elephant as a threatened species under its Federal Endangered Species Act (1978). Despite these measures, some countries either failed to prohibit ivory imports (e.g., Japan) or refused to prohibit ivory exports (e.g., Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe), and elephants continued to face danger from poachers and smugglers.