ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the nature and use of taxes and fees on environmentally related activities. It describes a distinction between the environment, which refers to the context and surrounding conditions including such elements as air and water quality, visibility, or aesthetics, and natural resources, which are easily identifiable, tangible units such as fisheries, minerals, timber, or water quantity. An important distinction, in principle and practice, can be drawn between taxes and fees as levies on persons. The distinction between taxes and fees is important in practice since the constitutionality of levying them differs in many legal systems. The existing tax structure of governments may make it infeasible to collect certain types of taxes. Collection becomes problematic when existing agencies are either designed to collect taxes and fees on unrelated units of assessment, such as sales taxes at retail levels and income taxes, or have no collection experience.
