Aside from the obvious, and often extremely weak, way in which existing laws on environmental pollution are enforced by authorities I see three main ways in which an environmental group or a determined activist can use the law to really make a positive impact on the natural environment:

1) Exposure

2) Coercion

3) Political action

It is easy for environmentalists considering using the law to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty of legislation, case law, the relative merits of criminal, public and civil law, and the web of national and international rights that may or may not be relevant. But it doesn’t have to be as onerous as all that. I believe that the most simple methods are often the best, essentially because they are easier to carry out effectively by many people.

Exposure can be extremely simple, and it can have extraordinary power.

Think of a large multinational company, with a bad reputation for damaging the environment; in fact, take your pick - ExxonMobil, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemicals, Monsanto ... The one thing, apart from their reputation, that all of these companies have in common is that their activities have been exposed – made public – by the efforts of numerous concerned people and organisations. But what has this got to do with the law?

Imagine that all of these companies had their headquarters in North Korea. Do you think that their activates would be so widely exposed to the public and their reputations so tarnished? I very much doubt it. Laws exist in these countries that allow such exposure to take place.

So let’s consider a mythical company called BigCorp, based in the USA. They have been a staple in the oil and chemical industry for many years, are popular with their shareholders and seen as a good employer to thousands of people. They operate in 30 different countries and have a number of subsidiaries - BigCorp UK, BigCorp France and BigCorp India – which operate at arm’s length from the parent company. Unknown to the general public, they have been lobbying the US Government to ensure that climate change never reaches the top of the government agenda; the Government has been responsive and has done its best to ensure the public don’t worry about climate change – they just keep buying the oil, and BigCorp’s profits keep increasing.

In the UK a conscientious employee in the IT department sees a blocked e-mail coming to the CEO of BigCorp from the UK organisation the Confederation of Big Business. It was blocked because it contained a very large attachment. The subject line of the e-mail is “Re: Government climate policy. Lobbying successful.”. The employee is worried enough by this to invoke the company Whistleblowing Policy, and also speaks confidentially to a friend who works for a local newspaper.

At the same time a French environmental organisation, concerned about BigCorp France’s lack of investment in anything but oil starts up a subvertising web site called BigCorpSucks.com. There is no intention of making money from the venture, the site simply copies the company’s own web site but includes facts and figures about global warming, along with links to other environmental organisations.

In India, a local environmental activist, concerned that an oil refinery is about to be built on an area of wetland by BigCorp India, invokes the Freedom Of Information Act to find out how planning permission was granted. After a delay of 4 months a redacted letter between BigCorp Inc. and the local state government is sent out, which shows clearly that BigCorp had threatened to pull out of India had the refinery not been granted planning permission.

Frustrated by the lack of internal action, the UK employee asks her friend to publish an article citing an anonymous source, which suggests that the UK Government has caved in to a lobbying exercise by the CBB on behalf of BigCorp. A fan of BigCorpSucks.com in the USA does a search on Google News and comes up with a local UK online newspaper article about BigCorp’s suspected lobbying activities. He is interested enough to invoke the USA Freedom Of Information Act to find out whether any Senators have interests in BigCorp. It turns out that there are three Senators who have sat on the board of BigCorp Inc.

The Indian activist gets to the last item in his FOI request and finds a redacted letter from one of the American “BigCorp” Senators sent to the Head of Planning for the Indian state being put under pressure. It contains misinformation about the usefulness of wind power and how India needs to accept the continued growth of fossil fuels.

The American and Indian activists go public. In the USA the Washington Post publishes an article about the oil interests of American Senators, using their contacts to expose a web of BigCorp misinformation. In India, the activist decides to contact the BBC World Service web site, who publish an article including the two redacted letters.

Two months later, BigCorp admit that climate change is partly caused by humans and that they are about to commence the largest renewable energy investment in living memory.

This may be fiction, but all of the activities carried out by our heroes were entirely legal in their countries.

But what if companies do not take any action and try to ride out the storm or, say a Government agency decides to carry out some activity that is potentially damaging to the environment? Sometimes exposure cannot work by itself, and more direct legal action is required. There are many ways in which we can attempt to use existing laws as a form of coercion (e.g. fines, cease and desist orders, refusal of permission etc.), but unfortunately they are so weakly enforced in most cases that we have to be more creative.

One method that has been used effectively is judicial review.

Judicial review can be used in many countries as a means of challenging government decisions that adversely affect the environment. Providing the objector has sufficient “standing” (organisations are more effective than individuals in such cases) then a judicial review could be granted on the grounds of illegality, irrationality or impropriety. This has been used jointly by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth in the UK to challenge the opening of a nuclear reactor on Sellafield, Cumbria, and more recently by Friends of the Earth in challenging the dropping of a critical environmental policy by the UK Government.

In both cases the reviews had mixed results, but whether the judicial review is successful or not, the decision being questioned will have been subject to far greater exposure than may have been possible using other methods. This is not just restricted to direct public authority actions; it can be used wherever a public body has been lobbied to favour a commercial activity which impacts the environment, and the exposure for the company if they have unfairly used lobbying (or worse) could be devastating in the public eye.

A second form of coercion is the ability to potentially sue a company or even a government for lack of environmental control. This type of action has been very successful with regards to harm caused by personal injury, the abuse of workers’ rights and gross neglect of the environment causing damage to health; so is there any reason why this could not extended to general environmental damage against a company or even an entire country?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is widely recognised as the core of basic human rights laws worldwide. The legal framework for this, the International Covenant On Civil And Political Rights contains the statement “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence”, which could be interpreted as “no one can have their home taken away from them due to sea level rise, hurricane, sandstorm, landslide or other environmental event caused by the inaction of a nation in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions”.

If, as seems increasingly likely, catastrophic environmental events are linked directly to greenhouse gas emissions, then we could be seeing a whole new area of environmental litigation, based on fundamental human rights.

This leads on to the final way in which the law can be used, and it goes right to the core of our right to call ourselves a civilised race.

There are nations that suppress individuals’ fundamental human rights. This is clear, but the extent to which human rights and thus the ability to raise environmental awareness are suppressed in some countries still leaves me speechless; you only have to look at the regimes of North Korea, Burma, Sudan, China and Zimbabwe to imagine how desperate, and brave, environmental and human rights campaigners have to be to try to make a difference.

The clear way to resolve this is through political action; through lobbying your government, working with organisations such as Amnesty International or, as in the recent case of Google in China, using a combination of exposure and political pressure to ensure multinational companies do not succumb to the oppressive regimes of such countries.

I am fortunate to live in a country where I can write the things that I do, post them on the Internet and not have the fear of someone coming into my home and taking me away for what I have written. If another person or organisation does not have the right to make a difference then those people that do have rights have a moral duty to lobby on their behalf. We should all have the right to be able to use the law to protect our planet.