MONOGRAPH 40 volume 1

30 Transparent and consistent sentencing in the Land and Environment Court of NSW: orders for costs as an aspect of punishment Judicial Commission of NSW 1.6 Environmental offences Class 5 matters are environmental crimes dealt with by the LEC in its summary criminal enforcement jurisdiction. The LEC deals with offences and other breaches of law under a large number of diverse legislations (see Appendix A ). In short, however, the LEC deals with two broad categories of offending: • Crimes against environmental protection laws • Crimes against environmental planning laws. 1.6.1 Crimes against environmental protection laws Human activity can have adverse — and often incrementally adverse — effects on the natural environment (see Text Box 2 below). 262 G Bates (ed), Environmental law in Australia , 6th edn, LexisNexis, 2006, pp 3–4, who then went on to say: “[These] environments include: the natural environment, the built or urban environment, the cultural environment and the economic, social, health and work environments. Inevitably these environments overlap, and so environmental laws may serve more than one function”. Text Box 2 One of the crucial issues of our time is how to avoid serious, and perhaps cataclysmic, damage to the natural environment. The causes of such damage are both complex and controversial, and arise from a wide variety of social and economic pressures. The results, however, are more readily apparent. The evidence that pollution, land degradation, deforestation, ozone depletion, climate change, and the loss of biological diversity are inflicting serious and in some cases irreversible damage to the planet which sustains us, is increasingly compelling. N Gunningham and P Grabosky, Smart regulation: designing environmental policy , 1998, p 3. Environmental law, or “environmental and natural resources law”, seeks to address the short- and long-term effects of human activity on the natural environment. The core concern of environmental law is environmental degradation caused by pollution. The body of local, national and international treaties, statutes, regulations and common laws exist to address, control and regulate environmental pollution, and to manage valuable and often fragile natural resources such as forests and native vegetation, wildlife habitats and species, waterways and fisheries, even the air that we breathe. However: environmental law in reality is not so much about blanket protection of “the environment”, as about enabling decisions to be made that reflect a balance between the different environments that are the concern of government. 262 Seeking a reasonable balance between competing environmental “tensions” is fundamental to the work of the court in the application of environmental laws: Environmental laws typically prohibit or restrict the use or exploitation of the environment, including the consumption of natural resources, but then enable that prohibition or restriction to be lifted by a person applying for and a regulatory authority granting some form of approval to use or exploit the environment. Hence, natural resource laws prohibit but then enable the consumption of natural resources, such as mining of coal or metalliferous reserves, logging of forest for timber, and extraction of ground or surface water, by the granting of a mining, timber or water licence.