According to the law.com, environment is a very often used word, but lacking a precise legal meaning.
The term is used as an image to designate the natural, urban, industrial (sometimes also economic, social and political) environment in which humans live; according to a practitioner: the environment, not one person as a lawyer could say what it is exactly.
In addition, the environment defined by the EPA Illinois appears vague as this definition includes the list of its responsibilities on which it is dependent. Similarly in Ohio. These are grouped as follows:
- Exploitation of environments:
• Continental and marine waters
• Atmosphere + noise
• Ground - The fight against aggression:
• Prevention and control of industrial pollution
• Treatment of waste and chemicals
• Prevention of natural risks and major technologies - Protection of ecological heritage:
• Natural reserves
• National parks
• Natural sites and monuments
• Rare and fragile ecological systems - Improvement of the living environment:
• Urban environment
• Rural environment
• Regional natural parks
• Environmental animation and training.
However, in Naperville and elsewhere in Illinois, its content is not really self-explanatory. There is a juxtaposition and an enumeration of words that concern both environmental areas (waste, water, air, etc.) and environmental relations (pollution, the living environment.).
Furthermore, the issue of the environment is not foreign to the various federal and local administrations, responsible for its management, insofar as it is part of a legislative framework and of the quality of life. The law of the state of Illinois on the protection of nature and that on classified installations do not clearly define the environment.
The first legislation dates back to the law of Moses “You will have a corner outside the camp where you will go out on the sidelines. You will have a spike in your equipment and, when you crouch out of the way, you will make a hollow with it. her, then you will turn around and cover your evacuation “.
But the environment has become the living environment in which human activities take place and it is not known that these are likely to deteriorate the environment, in particular with the creation of waste and its mismanagement.
Thus, for some, it was a question of protecting human beings from the possible risks arising from that waste, that they create themselves. That is how the waste management and dumpster rental industry got started.
This term gives rise to many definitional difficulties. It is about the natural environment, but also about the concrete environment built by men, and again of all that affects the behavior of man.
The idea of environmental deterioration by industrial civilization, that of environmental pollution are often mentioned in legal texts or regulatory frameworks.
Finally, for a long time, the notion of the environment has covered, for specialists in the human and social sciences and those of the natural sciences, a meaning that does not overlap:
- In the humanities and social sciences, the environment refers to the social environment that surrounds and influences human activities;
- In natural sciences, it designates the natural ecosystems independent of human beings and surrounding a living organism, an animal or a plant.