ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the heterogeneous array of rights recognized in those branches of law most immediately connected with the physical world. The form of environmental law is a pragmatic mixture of chiefly judge-made private law and statutory systems of regulation carried out by public bodies. The chapter argues that the tendency to include more and more concerns under the environmental label frustrates the identification of a category of rights which is sui generis in that it is quintessentially and explicitly environmental in character. This task is not merely of academic interest since it has important implications for the role of the state in environmental intervention. A regulatory approach which placed the onus upon a would-be polluter to demonstrate the harmlessness – understood to mean an absence of irreversible effects on natural ecosystems – of any proposed discharge seems the very antithesis of the traditional English approach.
