ABSTRACT
In this chapter we explore the environmental regulations and pollution of many countries and regions of the world. The chapter is organized by continent and then by country. We start with North America, then move to Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, Oceania and then conclude with Antarctica and the oceans of the world. The countries that will be evaluated account for 70% of the human population and 75% of the land area on Earth.
To widen our perspective and grasp a more comprehensive and educated view, we also evaluate 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 will focus our discussion of each country on the fundamentals which include:
Protect the air
Protect the water
Protect the land
To address each of the above listed fundamentals, we will examine how each country addresses air pollution, water pollution, solid and hazardous waste, and remediation of polluted sites. We will examine how most countries address legacy pollution issues through a discussion of the framework that each country has developed to investigate and remediate historical sites of environmental contamination. This means that we must also examine the significant historical sites of contamination in each country because the experiences and lessons learned from these sites have influenced and uniquely shaped each country’s choices in developing environmental regulations perhaps more than most other factors.
We compare and contrast how these countries’ environmental laws differ and see how they compare to the United States. Some findings might be rather surprising in that it will become apparent that some countries are more advanced compared to the United States in how they have chosen to organize and implement their environmental regulations and where they focus internal resources. In addition, the governments of some countries have different attitudes and relationships with industry. The regulatory agencies of some countries have chosen to form working partnerships with industry with the intent to work more closely together to solve complex environmental issues rather than an advisory type approach which much too often results in polarizing points of view. The result of working together saves time, effort, and resources and in the long run, has resulted in the fact that some counties are better at protecting human health and the environment than the United States.
Surprising still might be that some countries either lack key environmental laws or the will to enforce the environmental laws they have due to other social or economic challenges or the political realities some countries face. One overriding difficulty many developing countries face is lack of infrastructure, training, and education to properly implement their own environmental regulations. Another overriding factor is climate and climate change which in some instances has greatly increased the negative effects of pollution on the environment and humans.
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 affects the entire Earth and will be recorded in Earth history and cannot be reversed.
