ABSTRACT
Environmental regulations of the United States are considered by many as the most comprehensive and protective on Earth. In many respects this is true but there are significant exceptions and gaps. We shall see that some regulations in certain subject areas have perhaps matured where further improvement may not be necessary and other areas, environmental regulations are either incomplete, in need of improvement, or are lacking altogether.
Environmental laws and regulations in the United States encompass tens of thousands of pages of written rules to say nothing of the tens of thousands of pages of manuals and guidance requirements. In fact, the amount and complexity of environmental regulations is so extensive that it often requires a team of professionals to comprehend and implement. To keep this chapter manageable we will focus on the urban environmental and on the environmental fundaments which concentrate on protecting the air, protecting the water, and protecting the land.
To widen our prospective and grasp a more comprehensive and educated view, we also evaluate environmental regulation of countries that are important or unique to all humans. These countries will provide us with special insight into specific issues, situations, and problem-solving challenges due to a host of complex circumstances that some countries face. These countries have special challenges that, the combination of which, are unlike other countries and will require us to explore potential reasons behind some of the challenges faced by these nations as a result of social concerns, political unrest, lack of action, economic, geographic, geological or other factors that result in poor or excellent environmental performance. Some of these countries include Australia, New Zealand, Tanzania, Egypt, Brazil, Argentina, Korea, Peru, Malaysia, and Chile.
We conclude this chapter with an examination of Antarctica and the world’s oceans. Antarctica is a continent that has no permanent human settlements. As a first thought you might ask yourself why should we examine Antarctica, there should not be any significant environmental issues in Antarctica correct? To most of you the answer will be humbling and perhaps even disturbing. We shall have to wade through the information and data presented in this chapter to begin to understand and appreciate the depth and magnitude of the challenges that are confronting humans from an environmental perspective and that are very evident even in Antarctica.
The oceans were the origin of life on Earth and remain the prime source of nutrients and food that sustains life on our planet but have become polluted by our own actions. If not for any other reason than our own survival, we must be diligent at assessing the risks posed by pollutants, enact appropriate protections, and act on those protections to prevent further degradation on a global scale.
To summarize this chapter is to state that we must now accept the reality that humans have adversely impacted the entire Earth and that our efforts to improve our environment since the enactment of environmental regulations in the United States and worldwide have simply not been enough. Earth Scientists are now convinced that out of this fact, we have now moved the needle of geologic time into a new period called the Anthropocene. This is significant because the definition of a Geologic Age is a time period that effects the entire Earth and will be recorded in Earth history and cannot be reversed.
The result of a critical examination of the environmental regulations of the world leaves us with the conclusion that the existing environmental regulations are clearly not adequate and are in need of improvement which then leads us to the next chapter which is where we examine sustainability and improvements required so that humans can inhabit this planet in a manner that does not degrade our planet at current levels.
