ABSTRACT
The purpose of environmental regulation is to protect human health and the environment. To achieve this goal, nations of the world have learned to concentrate their efforts on environmental regulations that protect the air, protect the water, and protect the land. This forms the framework of environmental regulations throughout the world and is one of several central rhetorical themes of this book, which is “no matter where you are, it’s all the same.” Protect the air, protect the water, and protect the land. This approach is critical if humans are to restore a sustainable balance with Earth because, as we shall discover, pollution does not respect political boundaries between countries. Pollution caused by one country often pollutes neighboring countries and sometimes the entire planet when the pollutants released are at the right place, at the right time, and in the right amount.
To understand environmental regulations, one must first understand pollution in its many types and forms and understand the behavior of pollution once released into the environment. Pollution and its behavior in nature is also a central theme of this book and is addressed in the first portion of the book.
The second portion of the book examines environmental regulations and pollution throughout the world. Most often, environmental regulations are reactive and are born out of an incident that results in an environmental disaster that all too often causes enormous harm to humans and the environment. This book explores the many aspects of how humans have caused harm to the environment and examines how more than 50 countries choose to protect the air, water, and land everywhere on Earth including Antarctica and the oceans.
The third and final section of the book examines compliance with existing environmental regulations and sustainability. A model is presented for improving and tracking compliance and sustainability efforts to work toward the ultimate goal of environmental stewardship and achieving balance with nature. Based on scientific information presented in the first two sections of the book, numerous and extensive options are presented that provide a recipe of what must be done on a global, national, local, and individual level to modify environmentally destructive human behavior to environmentally constructive human behavior.
In order to restore the Earth to a living, vibrant, and diverse world, humans need to diligently pursue global cooperation and take immediate proactive sustainability measures so that we may once again live in productive harmony with nature instead of trying to change nature.
