The Greening of Environmental Law

Environmental law in Canada has moved through three distinct stages. The first, beginning with the passage of the early environmental protection statutes, is described as symbolic regulation. Regulation, because these laws did purport to regulate activities that had deleterious effects on the natural environment, and symbolic because the level and degree of regulation was largely symbolic. By the mid \u2770s and early \u2780s these laws had given way to two complementary developments. The first involved the introduction of environmental assessment (or audit) statutes and procedures; the second involved a strengthening and expanding of the traditional regulatory tools. The clear thrust of this period was preventive or how to anticipate and avoid potential environmental problems before they arose. Neither symbolic regulation nor preventive regulation have been particularly successful in avoiding or remedying pollution problems, however. The approaches either proceed from a wrong premise about the nature of the problem (market or technological failure) or assume that the solution lies in a process that is highly adversarial and hence time-consuming, expensive and unlikely to generate creative solutions to difficult problems. Growing recognition of these deficiencies has led to a third, greener stage of environmental regulation: co-operative problem-solving. The premise behind this approach is that all of society shares the problem of environmental degradation and hence all of society must work together to solve the problem. This new and emerging stage of regulation is not without its problems, but it clearly offers the promise of harnessing the creative energies of all sectors of society to build co-operative solutions to environmental problems