While a desire to protect the environment is at the heart of environmental law that desire can be seen right across populations in countries. That's because the environmental law is not just about valuing the environment but protecting it so we as populations live within the carrying capacity of the earth. A better way to think about an environmental law is as the law of environmental problems.
Some problems are going to be very local: contaminated land. Others are going to be global: climate change. A common feature of environmental problems is that they are both physically complex and socially complex.
They're physically complex because they involve ecosystems--if we put fertilizer on agricultural land and it runs off into rivers, a whole range of implications might happen for the natural environment and also for human health, but they're also socially complex. Environmental problems are often caused by a range of different people not intending to harm the environment but each of their actions contributing to environmental problems. Nation-states play a significant role in environmental law and that's because they have the authority and the capacity to develop collective responses in relation to these problems.
Modern environmental law really has its roots in the 1960s and it wasn't just a response to environmental problems it was also part of a commitment to make societies more just, more fair and more democatic. Environmental law is not a magic wand. It's not a case of passing a piece of legislation, signing a treaty, or a court deciding a case and an environmental problem disappears.
What is required is the creation of legal frameworks which ensure the ongoing management of an environmental problem in as fair and just a way as possible. Environmental law is very technically complex. If you look at a textbook on the environmental law of any country it's big, it's thick, and environmental lawyers need to know a lot of law and they know how to apply it with nuance and sophistication.
Environmental law has required the expansion of the legal imagination. That's because a lot of law hasn't developed with the environment and these type of collective action problems in mind and so with the development of environmental law we've had to think about different types of legal obligations in countries such as India and New Zealand. There have been legal developments where the legal rights of rivers have been recognized.
An important theme in environmental law is environmental justice, but environmental justice means many different things. It might mean justice between nations, justice across generations, justice within local communities, or even a form of justice that takes the rights of the earth into account. Environmental Law is often controversial.
We might debate whether there's an environmental problem, we might debate how to solve it, there may be issues about what is a legitimate role for government, and given the fact that environmental law often requires limiting people's behavior, it will awake resentment, but while it is controversial it is also necessary and it's necessary coming back to my first point, because we have to live within the carrying capacity of the earth.
