ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the law's delineation of toxic environments, through an analysis of how the common law has assimilated the vocabulary and techniques of risk calculation in the legal assessment of environmental harm and hazard in toxic tort litigation. It outlines emergence of an ecological narrative through which the notion of environment is articulated and acted upon. The ecological narrative through which the environment has been identified and become an object of legal attention embraces two distinct rationalities, moral agendas and discourse of ecological ethics, and economic model of scientific ecology. Jane Stapelton observes that the increasing ‘public policy reliance’ on a prudential response to risk has been paralleled by ‘a general broadening of the catchment of situations recognised by the courts as giving rise to tort entitlements’. The main consideration of much risk commentary in social sciences is how risk is produced by collective anxiety and politics, or as a function of certain forms of scientific or actuarial calculations.
