Environmental regulations
Introduction
Environmental law belongs to the branch of social law and is a system of legal norms that regulate the relationships of people with nature, with the purpose of preserving and protecting the environment in an effort to leave it free of pollution, or improve it if it is affected. Its objectives are the fight against pollution, the preservation of biodiversity, and the protection of natural resources, so that there is a healthy human environment.
It is a fairly recent branch of Law, but with great development and future, emerging in the middle of the century due to the awareness of society as a result of some ecological disasters such as the contamination of Minamata Bay, the great London smog, the Seveso or Bophal leaks, and the Chernobyl accident, among others. Its origin, as such a specialization of Law, arises from the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972.
Among its characteristics is its multidisciplinary nature, since it requires the expertise and advice of professionals outside the Law (doctors, biologists, environmental scientists, physicists, chemists, engineers, etc.) and to be constantly changing and updating, to the same extent that scientific and technical advances occur.[1].
Environmental law is characterized by having the work of the state focused on carrying out "Ecological and Economic Zoning" through regional and local governments, planning well the areas intended for life in society, tourism, and agricultural production. Preventing society from occupying these places intended for sustainable use and generating economic production and social well-being, through the Urbanization and Production Studies of the Local Government.[2].
The objectives of environmental law are pointed out as the purposes of this matter: to make viable a primary objective, macro-objective, linked to sustainability and the "socio-environmental state of law" according to Antonio H. Benjamín,[3] and several secondary objectives, secondary micro objectives, such as the protection of human health and safety, safeguarding of the biosphere itself, conservation of aesthetic, tourist, landscape heritage, prevention, repair and repression of environmental damage,[4] ease of access to justice, transparency and free circulation of environmental information, economic efficiency, protection of property, scientific and technological knowledge, social stability, democratization of environmental decision-making processes, etc.
Many environmental lawsuits raise the question of who has the most right: Are legal issues limited to property owners or does the general public also have the right to intervene? Christopher D. Stone's essay "Should trees have standing?" seriously addressed the question of whether natural objects themselves should have legal rights, including the right to participate in lawsuits. Stone suggested that there was nothing absurd in this view, and stressed that many entities that now have legal rights were, in the past, taken to be "things" without legal rights; for example, foreigners, children and women. His essay has sometimes been considered a fallacy of personification.