Are you interested in environmental law? With news about the world’s changing climate dominating headlines around the globe for what feels like decades now, a lot of people may be wondering how governments can respond to such dire warnings about a long-term threat to humanity’s survival.

Protecting the natural environment and ensuring we have clean water to drink and clean air to breathe are obvious priorities, but how does that protection manifest itself and translate into public policy?

How can laws and regulations stem the tide of pollution and environmental degradation before populations are forced to migrate due to formerly habitable regions becoming hostile and inhospitable? 

Unveiling Environmental Law: Its Role, Importance, and Impact

To put it more simply:  What is environmental law? It’s a question not easily answered in a few sentences or paragraphs. Environmental laws and policies involve a complex and interrelated nexus of rules and regulations placing a host of obligations on corporations and individuals.

In an ideal world, they come together with the aim of protecting our oceans, lakes, rivers, forests, and natural environments, all of which are under threat of contamination and destruction from increased human activity. 

As human activity encroaches more and more each day on these life-sustaining ecosystems, the pursuit of profit and opportunity comes into conflict with the overall health of the natural world. It’s this conflict where environmental laws come in and attempt to referee.

Environmental laws and regulations, in that respect, try to find a balance between protection of the public interest against those who would seek to profit from damaging activity with seemingly little concern for poisoning formerly pristine landscapes. 

Environmental Protection Laws in Canada

Canada’s constitution gives the federal government and its various provincial and territorial governments the power to enact environmental laws.

Federal environmental protection legislation includes the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the Pest Control Products Act, the Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act, the Canadian Environmental Protect Act, as well as other laws governing fisheries practices and the transportation of chemicals and other dangerous goods.

Provincial governments have authority granted by the constitution to regulate property and civil rights, as well as forestry, mining, agriculture, and energy development practices.

Key Legislation in Modern Environmental Protection

Provincial governments have ownership of natural resources within their borders, giving them the power to enact laws meant to regulate and protect environments that come under strain from the extraction and exploitation of those resources, such as coal, copper, forest products, and other elements. 

Provincial governments are also in charge of wilderness and conservation areas, such as provincial parks, though it’s the federal government that governs national parks and matters concerning endangered species and animal conservation such as regulations about migratory bird protection. 

Common-Law and Environmental Law in Canada

While it’s up to governments in Canada to regulate polluters and natural resources, that doesn’t mean private individuals can’t go to court to protect their property from contamination and seek damages from another party.

In the common law tort of nuisance, a property owner can sue another party for nuisance if their actions or conduct damages neighbouring lands. 

The Role of Environmental Law in Combating Climate Change

Common nuisance actions in Canadian courts often deal with construction work causing cracks in a home’s foundation or a retaining wall.

But other nuisance actions involve contamination of lands by a neighbour’s activity, such as a leaking underground oil storage tank or a nearby gas station that has allowed gasoline or “hydrocarbons” to seep into the ground and migrate to adjacent properties.

These actions can be decades in the making, with lawsuits naming former landowners going back generations, such as family-owned dry cleaning businesses where the chemicals used in the cleaning process have leaked into groundwater and soil. 

Allegations of negligence

Those lawsuits often involve allegations of negligence, but a long-time legal precedent set in the 1860s in Britain held that damage caused by contamination of one’s property doesn’t have to involve negligence.

In the case of Rylands v. Fletcher, Rylands, a mill owner, had hired contractors to build a reservoir to bring water to his milling operation. But the mill was next to a mine owned by Fletcher, and when it burst, it flooded the neighbouring mine and landed the pair in court. 

After various appeals and decisions, it was up to the British House of Lords to decide who was at fault. Eventually, it was determined that Rylands was liable for the damage to his neighbour’s mine since he brought onto his land a potentially dangerous thing.

Environmental Law: A Comprehensive Guide

In his case, it was the building of a reservoir that could burst and flood property he doesn’t own. Despite being cautious and careful and hiring professionals to build it, the water escape from Rylands’ mill reservoir damaged Fletcher’s mine. 

The House of Lords found that people who accumulate things on their land that could escape and damage a neighbour’s property do so at their own “peril,” despite any precaution taken to avoid that happening.

Even if you do everything right and try your best to contain contaminants – oil, gasoline, paints and thinners, chemicals – they are still your responsibility if they pollute your neighbour’s lands. 

Legal and Regulatory Developments After Environmental Disasters

When it comes to the question of “what is environmental law?” for regular people – workers, homeowners, and small business owners – environmental laws are not likely to make much of a difference in their everyday lives unless something bad happens.

Should they live near a copper mine, an oil pipeline, a natural gas well, or a forest under threat of clear-cutting though, environmental laws and regulations are likely much more top-of-mind. 

Before the world woke up to the threat of climate change and glacial erosion, much panic was made of things like acid rain and a hole in the earth’s ozone layer.

Environmental Law: Definitions and Implications

Major environmental disasters such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 and more recently the deep-water Horizon oil platform disaster in 2010, set off waves of public awareness about the dangers of oil and gas development and its deleterious effects on our oceans. 

Both those disasters changed environmental law in significant ways. After the Exxon Valez spill in March 1989, which saw millions of gallons of oil gush into the coastal waters off Alaska and kill hundreds of thousands of animals, the U.S. passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.

The new law upped fines and penalties for oil companies that suffered spills and began requiring ships transporting oil to be double-hulled.  More than 30 years later, oil can still be found in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, despite the company paying nearly $4 billion to clean up and restore the area. 

Deepwater Horizon oil platform disaster

A little over two decades later, it was the Deepwater Horizon oil platform disaster that horrified the world as images broadcast around the globe showed dramatic and fiery explosions at the facility in the Gulf of Mexico.

The company that owned the offshore drilling rig, British Petroleum, eventually settled hundreds of lawsuits related to the disaster for $20 billion. That sum included fines and criminal penalties for the catastrophe that killed 11 people and injured many more.  

But it was back in 1970 when Richard Nixon established the United States Environmental Protection Agency, a move that may seem out of step with the image of the modern Republican Party.

Contaminated sites around America

On the heels of the agency’s establishment, major car manufacturers agreed to start building vehicles with catalytic converters that drastically reduced engine emissions in the decades since. As well, a decade after its establishment, the EPA established a fund to finance the cleanup of waste dumps and other contaminated sites around America. 

In its first two decades, the EPA focused on clean water and clean air regulations, as well as taking on the task of ridding schools of carcinogenic asbestos.

In the last decade or so, the EPA has been tasked with the United States’ response to climate change, including the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions for oil refineries and coal-burning power plants, as well as working with the U.S. Department of Transportation on vehicle emissions regulations. 

Environmental laws in both Canada and the United States

Environmental laws in both Canada and the United States involve a mixture of federal, state, and provincial regulations, all trying to strike a delicate balance between environmental protection and sustainability with economic growth, with debatable success. 

Canada’s environmental regulations began to be administered by the Department of the Environment, established in 1971 and later renamed Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Administered through the Federal Ministry of Environment, Canada’s environmental laws evolved from the early 20th century onwards to tackle environmental protection and prevention of pollution, in addition to conservation measures and preservation of biodiversity. 

Ecojustice Canada

Environmental law in Canada has been shaped by both governments and through legal actions launched by public interest litigation organizations, such as Ecojustice Canada.

The environmental law charity, also known as a non-governmental organization, has launched dozens of actions to challenge government inaction and corporate malfeasance on environmental issues including endangered species regulations, oil pipelines and the cleanup of orphan wells left by bankrupt companies, fish farms, mines, as well as regulations of toxins such as Monsanto’s carcinogenic pesticide known as Roundup. 

Field of environmental law

Other and more modern threats to the environment continue to dominate the field of environmental law these days, including the issue of so-called microplastics showing up in our oceans as well as the growing conundrum about how to deal with electronic waste from discarded cellphones and computers.

A spin-off from more traditional areas of environmental law, for instance, includes what’s known as right-to-repair regulations. 

Tech behemoths such as Apple and other electronics manufacturers now find themselves under increasing “grassroots” pressure to make their devices easier to repair, and therefore less disposable.

Challenges and Successes: Case Studies in Environmental Litigation

Just a few years ago, Canada came under fire for allowing the export of electronic waste to China and Pakistan, the legality of which was unclear.

The growing amount of electronic waste produced in Canada poses a modern and difficult challenge, of course, but it’s also important to remember that the country only banned the export of asbestos in 2018 after coming under intense international and domestic criticism.

Dozens of European nations had banned the export of asbestos long before Canada did, which had two of the last remaining mining operations for the material, which were both located in Quebec.  

What is Environmental Law?

The evolution of environmental laws and regulations throughout the world continues day by day as the threat of climate change looms over the global population, now nearing eight billion people.

With the increase of human activity putting pressure on natural environments and testing the earth’s carrying capacity to limits never seen in history, the need for strong environmental laws and regulations in both developed and developing nations becomes clearer with every passing moment. 

International Treaties and Agreements: Global Environmental Law Insights

It’s often been framed as a matter of individual action, with environmental laws targeting polluting behaviours of regional populations such as plastic bag bans, recycling fees and deposits, or more overreaching laws and policies such as gasoline taxes and modern carbon taxes.

The effectiveness of small-scale environmental laws may be hard to gauge since the largest polluters in the world are a small handful of nations – China, the U.S., India, and Russia in the lead- and a select group of 20 oil and gas corporations, including Chevron, BP, ExxonMobil, and Saudi  Aramco.