What Environment Means
Chapter Two
Syllabus topic 1, "The Idea of Environment"
Pages 5 to 8 of 595
In one line
Environment means everything outside a living thing that acts on it, and the law adds that the surroundings, the living things in them and the relationships between the two are all part of the same idea.
In the wording a student can write in an exam: environment is the sum of the physical, chemical and biological surroundings within which an organism or a community lives, together with the interrelationships among those surroundings and between them and the organism. Indian law adopts that idea in section 2(a) of the Environment (Protection) Act 1986, which defines environment as including water, air and land, and the interrelationship which exists among and between water, air and land and human beings, other living creatures, plants, micro-organism and property.
Why a definition is worth a chapter
Because the University asks about the idea of environment directly, and because the meaning of the word has changed twice in a hundred years in ways that changed the law.
There is a more practical reason as well. The word carries three quite different senses, and an examiner's question will be about one of them. A question asking you to trace the concept of environment from conventional to modern is about the second sense. A question asking whether the constitutional provisions are adequate is about the third. Mixing them produces an answer that says a great deal and answers nothing.
The three senses
The ordinary sense: surroundings. The word comes from the French environner, to surround. In this sense a person's environment is simply whatever is around them, and it is as true of an office as of a forest. This is how the word is used in phrases like "a working environment", and it is the sense the law of nuisance always used: a factory next door was an interference with your surroundings.
The ecological sense: a system. From about the middle of the twentieth century the word came to mean something more particular. The environment is not just what surrounds a thing but a system of relationships in which everything is connected to everything else. Cut a forest and the river silts; silt the river and the fishery goes; lose the fishery and a village that has never seen the forest is poorer. In this sense the environment is not a place but a set of dependencies.
The legal sense: a subject of rights and duties. Once the second sense is accepted, the environment becomes something the law has to allocate. Who owns a river? Who may pollute it, and how much? Who bears the cost when it is spoiled? Who may go to court about it? Modern environmental law is the answer to those four questions, and it exists because the first, ordinary sense of the word turned out to be too small to hold them.
What Environment Means
What is inside the environment
It is worth being concrete, because a vague answer to a question about the idea of environment is the commonest way to lose marks on this paper.
The abiotic components. The non-living parts. Air, which is the atmosphere and the gases in it. Water, both fresh and marine, on the surface and underground. Land, which for these purposes means soil, subsoil and the minerals in them. Sunlight and temperature, which is why climate belongs here.
The biotic components. The living parts. Plants, from a forest down to the algae in a pond. Animals, including human beings. Micro-organisms, which the Act of 1986 names expressly, and which matter because the decomposers are what turn waste back into soil.
The relationships. This is the part the Act insists on, and it is what distinguishes an environmental idea from a list. The definition in section 2(a) does not stop at water, air and land; it goes on to include "the inter-relationship which exists among and between water, air and land and human beings, other living creatures, plants, micro-organism and property". A statute that protected only the components would be unable to reach a project that harms nothing directly and destroys a dependency.
Property. Note the last word of that list. Indian law treats damage to buildings and monuments as environmental damage. That is not decoration: it is what allowed the Supreme Court to treat the discolouration of the marble of the Taj Mahal by acidic emissions as an environmental question rather than a question of conservation of antiquities.
The natural and the man-made environment
The Stockholm Declaration of 1972 opens by saying that both aspects of a person's environment, "the natural and the man-made", are essential to well-being and to the enjoyment of basic human rights, including the right to life itself.
That distinction is doing real work. The natural environment is what exists without human intervention: forests, rivers, wildlife, the atmosphere. The man-made environment is what human beings have built: cities, housing, drains, roads, workplaces.
Indian courts have been unusually willing to treat the second as environmental. A case about a municipality that has not built a drain is an environmental case in India in a way it would not be in many other systems, and that is because the Supreme Court accepted early that sanitation, housing and a clean street are part of the environment a person lives in.
Worked example
Ramesh runs a small dyeing unit on the outskirts of Solapur. He discharges untreated effluent into a nullah that runs past the unit, and dumps the sludge on open land behind it. Three years later the well used by the neighbouring hamlet is undrinkable, the soil in two adjoining fields will not take a crop, and the walls of an old temple beside the nullah are stained and flaking.
What Environment Means
Take the three senses in turn. In the ordinary sense there is a nuisance: the villagers' surroundings have been interfered with, and at common law those close enough to be affected could sue. In the ecological sense the harm has travelled: the effluent has reached the aquifer, which is a different medium from the one it was discharged into, and the sludge has changed the chemistry of soil that was never touched by the discharge at all. In the legal sense several distinct questions arise, and each has a different answer: whether Ramesh needed a consent under the Water Act 1974, whether the discharge is environmental pollution within section 2(c) of the Act of 1986, whether the villagers can move the High Court under Article 226 rather than sue, and who pays for cleaning the aquifer.
Notice the temple. Under section 2(a) the staining of its walls is environmental damage, because property is inside the statutory definition. Under the ordinary meaning of the word it would be criminal mischief or nothing.
What environment does NOT mean
It does not mean only nature. A student who defines environment as forests and rivers will be unable to answer a question about urban sanitation, slums or municipal waste, which are three of the things this syllabus and this examiner care about most.
It is not the same as ecology. Ecology is the scientific study of the relationships between organisms and their surroundings. The environment is the thing studied. You can damage an environment; you cannot damage an ecology.
It is not confined to what harms human beings. The trend of Indian decisions has been away from that view, and the Supreme Court has said so expressly. That shift is the subject of a later chapter.
Distinctions that carry marks
| Environment | Ecology | Ecosystem | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | The surroundings and their interrelationships | The scientific study of those relationships | One community of organisms plus its physical surroundings, working as a unit |
| Kind of word | The thing | The discipline | A unit of the thing |
| Example | The environment of Mumbai | The ecology of the Sahyadris | The mangrove ecosystem of Thane creek |
| Used in law | Constantly, and defined in section 2(a) | Rarely, and never defined | In the wildlife and biodiversity statutes |
Quick revision
- Environment carries three senses: the ordinary sense of surroundings, the ecological sense of a system of relationships, and the legal sense of a subject of rights and duties.
- Section 2(a) of the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 adopts the second: water, air and land, and the interrelationship among them and human beings, other living creatures, plants, micro-organism and property.
- Property is inside the statutory definition, which is what makes damage to a monument an environmental question.
- Stockholm 1972 distinguishes the natural from the man-made environment and treats both as essential to the enjoyment of human rights.
- Indian courts have treated sanitation, drains and housing as environmental, which is why the case law reaches further into municipal administration than it does in most systems.
What Environment Means
Test yourself
1. Give the statutory definition of environment and say what work its last clause does.
Section 2(a) of the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 says environment includes water, air and land, and the interrelationship which exists among and between water, air and land and human beings, other living creatures, plants, micro-organism and property. The last clause converts a list of media into a system: without it, harm that travels from one medium to another, or that destroys a dependency without damaging any component directly, would fall outside the Act.
2. Why does it matter that "property" appears in section 2(a)?
Because it makes damage to buildings and monuments environmental damage, and so brings it within the Act's machinery. The discolouration of marble by acidic emissions can be dealt with as pollution rather than as a question of conserving antiquities.
3. A student writes that "environment means forests, rivers and wildlife". Give two questions on this syllabus that the student will now be unable to answer.
Any question about the impact of population growth on urbanisation, slums and municipal waste, because none of those is a forest, a river or a wildlife question. And any question about the role of government in sanitation, which is where the Indian case law on Article 21 actually begins.
4. Distinguish environment from ecology in one sentence each.
The environment is the surroundings of a living thing together with the relationships among them. Ecology is the scientific study of those relationships.
The rest of this subject
These notes are cut from the University's printed syllabus. Open the syllabus itself, or the past papers, for the same subject.