Legal Regulation of Environmental Protection in Certain Fields of Human Activity

The authors prove that with the purpose to implement the tasks of ensuring the appropriate quality of the environment in Russia, environmental legislation provides for a system of measures, which, along with giving a special legal status to certain specially protected areas or establishing rules and regulations for the protection and rational use of natural objects, also includes special environmental requirements mandatory for observance and execution by all legal entities, individual entrepreneurs and citizens engaged in various types of economic and other activities that have a negative impact on the environment. The list of these types of activities is not exhaustive and includes special rules and requirements for real estate construction, operation of industrial, power and agricultural facilities, transport, etc. The requirements are comprehensive and thus different from the duties imposed on users of natural resources and third parties using certain natural resources (forests, water, etc.). In particular, rules dedicated to the protection of forests from fires contain sufficiently unique prescriptions that can be used only to protect forests. In a similar manner, the measures for fauna protection through the maintenance of the Red Data Book are clearly localized by this natural object. The comprehensive nature of the requirements for certain types of activities consists in the fact that they are aimed at regulating the activities threatening several natural objects rather than one. Requirements for environmentally safe operation of power facilities are a typical example in this case. Requirements for construction and operation of nuclear power stations are intended to exclude any repetition of the tragedy of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, when the radiation had a negative impact on not one component of the natural environment (land, forests, water, fauna, air) but all at once, and the environment contaminated with radiation caused harm to the life and health of hundreds of thousands of people. Harm to nature and the health of citizens from tests of nuclear weapons or from more peaceful activities, for example, the use of pesticides in agriculture is equally complex with regard to its consequences. In the latter case, violation of environmental requirements in the field of chemicalization of agriculture results in harm to land, surface and ground water bodies. 

Keywords: Activities, Agriculture, Chemical weapons, Defense, Green fund, Human settlements, Industry, Missiles, Ozone layer, Pesticides, Power industry, Protective zones, Requirements, Sanitary protection zones, Technical regulations, Transport, Urban development, Waste, Zones with special conditions of use, Zoning