Unit 1:  The Current Impact of Environmental Law Within The UK

1.4  Definitions in UK Environmental Law

As it has been previously mentioned, exact definitions are an integral feature of UK law. This means therefore that legal definitions of environmental law are limited. The Environmental Protection Act 1990 (EPA 1990) section (2) defines the environment as consisting of:
  all, or any, of the following media, namely, the air, water and land; and the medium of air includes the air within buildings and the air within other natural or man-made structures above or below the ground.

This scope denotes a very functional approach. As each medium has its own set of laws, it can be said that EPA 1990 rationalised the rules to apply to a polluting event. For example, prior to the act being passed a range of remedies could be applied to a certain situation for example, noise emitted from a factory could have been a criminal offence, a contractual offence, a statutory nuisance as defined by the Local Authority.

EPA 1990 provides the foundations of the majority of environmental law. Supplemented with this, s.4 of the Environment Act 1995 (EA 1995) has made an Environment Agency (EA) for England and Wales and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) for Scotland. The 1995 Act gives the general environmental and recreational responsibilities, which are described under pollution control and a Code of Practice for both Agencies.

When focusing upon legal definitions of the environment it is also necessary to concentrate upon other terms such as pollution and harm. There is a plethora of scientific definitions of pollution and in the main, they relate to adverse ecological reactions. The legal definition of environmental pollution, as defined by s1.(3) of EPA 1990 is described as:

  pollution of the environment due to the release (into any environmental medium) from any process, of substances which are capable of causing harm to man or any other living organisms supported by the environment.

It is widely held, however that the definition of pollution constantly changes as knowledge grows and hence, legislation must account for this. R V Dover Moss exemplifies the weaknesses in the EPA 1990 definition. In short, the case involved a company accused of polluting a drinking water stream. During a period of high rainfall, the stream burst its banks and washed over the companies contaminated land. Dover Moss were convicted, although argued that they had not polluted the spring under the S1 (3) EPA 1990 definition of pollution, as they had not released their harmful substances into the water. The court was subsequently forced to revert to the Chamber's dictionary definition of pollution-

  Pollute: to soil; to defile; to make foul; to taint; to corrupt; to profane; to violate- Pollution: act of polluting, state of being polluted; defilement.

Defining harm is also another important facet of environmental law. It has been widely agreed in the past that the harm caused by a particular pollutant has been determined in terms of its degree of toxicity to humans and certain species of plants and animals. Harm in this context is now more currently regarded as ecological damage, which is undoubtedly far more difficult to measure than a pollutant's impact upon living species alone. Ecological damage is incremental and is therefore very difficult to define and measure its extent within an ecosystem. The science of Ecotoxology has arisen from such study, whereby pollutant environmental risk assessments are undertaken for specific pollutants based on their toxicity to single and multi-species and on their physicochemical properties. Such study enables a better understanding of the safe concentration levels of particular pollutants in the environment. However, the harm to a species caused by a pollutant may not give an accurate indication of the damage caused to other species or to an ecosystem such as the failure to understand the broader environmental implications of organochlorine pesticide use, through their bioconcentration, biomagnification and longevity. A more precise measure of the scope of the harm caused can be more accurately assessed in terms of the pollutants impact on energy flow through an ecosystem and energy flow, and pollutants impact on species diversity. The interactions between energy flows, community dynamics and organisms throughout ecosystems are extremely complex and inevitably, are difficult to determine.

It is necessary for the scientific community to measure ecological damage more accurately and to devise tools for predicting the short and long- term effects of specific pollutants within ecosystems and to define safe concentrations. The legal definition of harm could then be extended from harm to man and any other living organisms to a more specific definition that would be accountable for biodiversity, structure and function of ecosystems.