I think environmental law should be like any other civil law, meaning based on a “demonstrable harm” principle. As in, “If your sewage outlet is upstream of my fresh-water intake, you either change it or clean it up, or I, personally, will sue the pants off of you”. This should be handled by the courts as ordinary civil liability proceedings.
There should also be a “public nuisance” factor; i.e., if you have a sewage treatment farm, with tanks, you should be required to avoid runoff if there are heavy rains. (Translation; make sure your tanks are deep enough to avoid overflow.)
Also, anything definable as an “attractive nuisance” should be required to have adequate measures to keep people from getting hurt by it. Spider Robinson once cited a case where some kids went swimming in what they thought was a freshwater tank at an industrial site, only to find out the hard way that the water in it was full of lye. It was fenced after the fact; it should have been fenced, and had warning signs up, to begin with, purely on common-sense grounds. (But as Gerrold’s Law states, “It’s too bad that common sense… isn’t.”)
In any such case, what should not be allowed are any suits by third parties acting “in the name of the public good”. Period. We have learned the hard way that this is an open invitation to mischief-making by fanatics with political and/or social axes to grind. Put simply, no “class-action” suits”, no “environmental harm” suits, and absolutely no suits based on somebody-or-other’s theory that something might, somehow, conceivably, under very unusual conditions be harmful to a… lab rat. (Alar, CFCs, etc.) Anyone not directly “impacted” doesn’t get to play.
This, by the way, is exactly how most foreign countries environmental laws have always worked, notably in Europe. Which is why people like the Green Party in Germany have to organize protests, etc., to pressure the government to ban nuclear power and/or anything else they don’t like. They can’t just hire a lawyer and go shopping for a judge who is friendly to their agenda.
clear ether
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