What is the purpose of Environmental Law?

The

development of environmental law could be traced back to the early 1800 when they are dealing with public health concern primarily. This was due to the a few catastrophic influenza hits . The worst part of it came into reality when almost quarter of the world population diminished by the so called Spanish Flu in 1918 .

In 1906, Congress passed the Antiquities Act, which authorizes the president to protect areas of federal lands as national monuments. A few years later, Alice Hamilton pushed for government regulations concerning toxic industrial chemicals. She fought, unsuccessfully, to ban the use of lead in gasoline. She also supported the legal actions taken by women who were dying of cancer from their exposure to the radium then used in glow-in-the-dark watch dials. During the early 1960s, biologist Rachel Carson pointed out the need to regulate pesticides such as DDT to protect the health of wildlife and humans.

Only up to 1970s environmental law scope trying to deal with the objective of sustainable development by the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) . Contemporarily, Environmental laws today encompass a wide range of subjects such as air and water quality, hazardous wastes and biodiversity.

 Sustainable

development above is interpreted in Brundtland Report as:[1] "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

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Environmental Law it would create a regulatory framework for the sustainable use and management of natural resource base, and provides for the conservation and rehabilitation of the environment in achieving specified social, economic, reconstruction and ecological goals. However, for those who are opportunist these laws unreasonably limit the freedom of people, organizations, corporations and government agencies by placing controls on their actions

 This

could be concluded that the aim of environmental law is to strike the balance between the needs and the limitations for a better future . Hence, Environmental Law seeks to provide support, and create conditions for, protection against pollution and degradation of, and impacts upon, environmental areas and media.

Some environmental laws provide for assessing possible future impacts in advance (as part of the decision-making process), while others regulate the quantity and nature of impacts of human activities (for example, setting allowable levels of pollution). These can be so be done by implementing and regulating global, international, national, state and local statutes, treaties, conventions, regulations and policiesby the Federal and state government but United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization have also contributed environmental rules and regulations.