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Engineers in all disciplines practice a profession of those who must obey rules governing their professional conduct. One important set of rules that all engineers should be aware of is environmental statues, which are laws enacted by US Congress and governments of other countries around the world.

Environmental law, also known as environmental and natural resources law, is a collective term describing the network of treaties, statutes, regulations, common, and customary laws addressing the effects of human activity on the natural environment. The core environmental law regimes address environmental pollution. A related but distinct set of regulatory regimes, now strongly influenced by environmental legal principles, focus on the management of specific natural resources, such as forests, minerals, or fisheries. Other areas, such as environmental impact assessment, may not fit neatly into either category but are nonetheless important components of environmental law.

The objective of this chapter is to provide an overview of history behind present environmental laws and regulations and environmental pollution in various countries and continents. Much of the materials presented in this chapter has been adopted from various sources that include the following: United States Code (USC); Code of Federal Regulations (CFR); United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA); United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP); Centre for International Environmental Law; Environmental Law Handbook by Sullivan and Adams (1997); Environmental Regulatory Calculations Handbook by Stander and Theodore (2008); Environmental Law by Upadhyay (2012); Environmental Law and Policy in India: Cases, Materials and Statues by Divan and Rosencranz (2002); Craig, Selected Environmental Law Statutes, West Academic Publishing Co. (2016); Lynch (1995); Google; and Wikipedia. Most of these sources can be found online.

Environmental law came into existence as a result of confrontation with the serious problems concerning environment, prior, during, and post Industrial Revolution. In response to environmental problems, laws seek to protect and promote environment. It is designed to prevent, control, and regulate environmental pollution.

Environmental protection and its preservation is today's concern of all. Present environmental conditions in many parts of the world clearly indicate that human activities on the Earth are interconnected. Today society's interaction with nature is so extensive that environment questions have assumed all proportions affecting humanity at large. Environmental destruction and pollution have seriously threatened human life, health, and livelihood. Thus, there has been a thrust on the protection of environment all across the world. If the quality of life is to be assured to present and future generations, they should be saved from the environmental failures. Nature's gifts to humanity in the form of flora and fauna have to be preserved in natural form. The proper balance of the world's eco system is in urgent need. The only answer to tackle this problem is sustainable development. The purpose of environmental law is to protect and preserve our water, air, Earth, and atmosphere from pollution. But the law alone cannot tackle the problem of pollution. There has to be awareness of the problem and sustained efforts are required to manage it.

The situation may be clarified by noting that with the development of science and technology and with ever‐increasing world population came tremendous changes in the human environment. Such changes upset the eco‐laws, shifted the balance between human life and the environment. In such a situation, it became necessary to regulate human behaviors and social transactions with new laws, designed to cope with the changing conditions and values. Accordingly, a new branch of law called environmental law, developed in order to face the myriad challenges of such system.

The need of environmental protection is a big issue and ranks high among people's priorities. Also the issue of environmental protection is big in terms of the size of the problems on hand and the measures required to solve them. Some of the major problems, for example, are population growth (Figure 2.1), global warming (Figure 2.2), depletion of ozone layer, acid rain, toxic waste, and deforestration.

Long‐term global population growth is difficult to predict. The United Nations and the U.S. Census Bureau both give different estimates – according to the UN, the world population reached about 7.31 billion in late 2015 (United Nations Secretariat 2015). Figure 2.1 shows a trend that the human population has been growing rapidly since the mid‐1800s, which goes hand in hand with the degradation of the environment's natural equilibrium.

Population increase over the last two decades, at least in the United States, has also been accompanied by a shift to an increase in urban areas from rural areas (Wallach 2005), which concentrates the demand for water into certain areas, and puts stress on the fresh water supply from industrial and human contaminants (Water 2011). Urbanization causes overcrowding and increasingly unsanitary living conditions, especially in developing countries, which in turn exposes an increasing number of people to disease. About 79% of the world's population is in developing countries, which lack access to sanitary water and sewer systems, giving rise to disease and deaths from contaminated water and increased numbers of disease‐carrying insects (Powell 2009).

Figure 2.1 World's population growth over 100 years.

Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2017).

Figure 2.2 shows recent behavior of average global temperature anomaly (land and ocean combined). As can be seen in Figure 2.2, the bulk of the warming has occurred in two periods – from 1910 through 1940 and from 1980 to the present. Line plot of monthly mean global surface temperature anomaly, with the base period 1951–1980. The black line shows meteorological stations only; circles are the land–ocean temperature index, as described in Hansen et al. (2010). The land–ocean temperature index uses sea surface temperatures.

These problems are global issues which require an appropriate global response. The question of environmental protection is big issue in terms of the range of problems and issues, namely air pollution, water pollution, safe drinking water, pesticides, noise pollution, waste disposal, radio activity and waste, and conservation of forests and wild life. The list is exhaustive. Moreover, the issue in the field of environment is big in terms of the knowledge and skills required to understand a particular issue to be solved. Accordingly, it can be said that environmental issues range “from a local street corner to the stratosphere.” It is thus clear that the humanity faces overwhelming environmental problems. Law is invoked to protect humanity and our eco‐system by solving environmental problems as they strike directly at our most intimate links to the biosphere, which is a thin shell of life – only about five miles thick – covering the planet like the skin of an apple.

Figure 2.2 Earth's temperature rise since industrialization over 100 years.

Source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp.graphs.

The range of environmental protection has worldwide coverage and is not confined to an isolated area or nation. The problem of environment pollution is global and concerns all countries irrespective of their size, level of development, or ideology. Notwithstanding political division of the world into national units, oceanic world is an interconnected whole and winds that blow over the countries are also one. Environment is a universal phenomenon pervading the whole world at large. If the nuclear test is carried out in one part of the world, the fall out may be carried by winds to any other part of the world and such fall out of irresponsible disposal of use radioactivity from a remote energy planet in one country may turn out to have greater adverse effect on the neighboring countries than the danger of a full‐fledged war.