I am the law

In amongst the many, many new tasks I was set by my supervisors in a frankly brutal project meeting earlier this week I was instructed to 'familiarise myself' with Environmental Law. In itself, that is a fairly hefty task. When you factor in that the best book the science library has on the subject is only available for day loan, even with my extra special postgrad privileges.

So I got the book out this morning, and after a day of studying it I've picked up a few things.

1) There is shitloads to learn about Environmental Law
It's fair to say I'm not particularly familiar with literature on law, academic or otherwise, but to me it's a bit of a shock when the preface, contents, list of figures, tables and cases take up the first 35 pages of any book. I mean, seriously, 35 pages before you even hit the introduction? That's a serious list of figures, tables and cases! They are not fucking about with their reference list here!

2) We, as a species, are completely insane
There is an international treaty to prevent 'harmful contamination' of the Moon (yes, that Moon), yet the best we've come up with so far on greenhouse emissions is the creaking, outdated and dubiously effective Kyoto protocol. And the USA at least signed the Moon one. That smacks to me of a treaty for the sake of having a three week conference in the Bahamas on government money, but then again, maybe there was a serious problem of astronauts leaving fag buts and dumping industrial by-products up there.

3) For the most part, Environmental law isn't all that Environmental
Until pretty recently, most legislation around the protection of 'the environment' was actually more about protecting public health and private property. And it wasn't exactly great at that either, seeing as how a lot of it relied upon people suing each other. Problem with that is, when everyone is polluting to some extent, nobody wants to be the proverbial pot proverbially calling the proverbial kettle black. Proverbially. Also it was prohibitively expensive unless you were absolutely sure you were going to win. And you never were.

There's a problem with treating the environment as property too. I mean, who owns 'the environment'? Do all of us own it? Maybe none of us? It appears to depend on who is going to have to pay to clean something up.

4) There are however, signs of hope
For a long time, environmental law focused on single issues (and usually just the most dangerous or visible ones at that), but of late there has been a move towards the concept of sustainable development. There are more definitions of sustainable development than I've had hot dinners (a major factor in why it's making painfully slow progress in a legal world where the slightest ambiguity is seized upon and ripped apart like a goat in the raptor pen), but eventually we should be living our lives so as to "meet the needs of society without damaging the capacity for future generations to meet their needs". And I don't think that's entire unreasonable as a place to start.

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I've had a hankering to start blogging about sports, mostly football. However, I'm aware that a lot of my friends couldn't give two flying monkey cocks about the need for Rafa Benitez to commit to linking the defensive and attacking portions of Liverpool's midfield in the manner that first Aquilani and then Lucas did successfully against Portsmouth and Lille. So I'm going to start a separate blog for that, details will follow.