Environmental Law

It is easier to describe law than to define it. However, law has been described as the body of rules regulating the human conduct regarded as obligatory or binding by its members.


Environmental law are laws that are concerned with the protection of the natural resources of the environmental media - land, air and water - and the flora and fauna (plants and animals) which inhabit them.


The function of this branch of law is to regulate human conduct with a view to sustaining life, which is incontrovetibly the most important of all fundamental rights.


The content of environmental law is wide and extensive. It covers subject areas like water pollution, air pollution and land degradation, noise pollution, wildlife and natural resources conservation, pest control, fishery, environmental sanitation, solid waste management, land use and planning, matters of afforestation and deforestation, and desertification, among others.


Law is obviously not the only instument of social control in the society as there are others like public opinion, religion, and custom. Law is unique, especially within the the confines of the environment because its presciptions are backed with sanctions.


However, not all environmental problems are human generated. Granted the fact that some environmental problems are occasioned by factors outside the immediate control of humans, the role of law here is to ameliorate their impact by preventing aditional disturbances to the ecosystem that might be occasioned by human activities either by omision or commision.


Law combines a number of techniques in environmental protection to achieve sustainable developmwnt and these include the penal technique, the administative regulatory technique, and the grieviance-remedial technique.


The paramount social value which the law communicates, regulates, and reinforces is that of the survival of the society.


It has benn acknowledged that a massive pollution of the environment through despoilation of land, water and the air, by industrial waste, chemicals, oil, the dumping of refuse/garbage, the indiscriminate use of pesticides, and by any other means threathens the very conditions of social survival.


Law is apparently the most potent weapon that can be employed to regulate human activities with a view to sustaining social survival.