24
Environmental and Health
would granting the injunction be an unreasonable present burden to the
defendant? And, fourth, wherein lies the public interest? For example,
would granting an injunction provide relief to a few, while throwing
many out of work? There are other rules as well, but again the practices in
a local jurisdiction must be studies in an actual case.
The types of torts encountered in the environmental field are:
(1) nuisance,
(2) trespass, (3) negligence, and (4) strict liability. Long
before the enactment of current environmental statutes, tort actions have
afforded remedies to private individuals harmed by exposure to
hazardous wastes.
The most common of the environmental torts is nuisance. According
to Black's
Law Dictionary, nuisance is "the class of wrongs that arise
from the unreasonable, unwarrantable, or unlawful use by a person of his
own property, either real or personal, or from his own lawful personal
conduct working an obstruction or injury to the right of another, or of
the public and producing material annoyance, inconvenience, discomfort,
or hurt." By and large, a person may act as he sees fit or use his
property as he sees fit. The limitation is that the
person must act in a
reasonable manner avoiding material injury or annoyance to another.
The injury or annoyance must be material, such that it tangibly affects
the physical comfort of ordinary people under normal circumstances.
There are generally four elements of proof in an environmental tort
case. These apply to negligence, but they are effective standards for any
environmental tort. First, the defendant did or failed to do an act which,
second, he owed to the plaintiff by virtue of a legal duty. Third, this act
caused material injury to the plaintiff or his property. And, fourth, the
act was the proximate cause of the injury. Proximate cause is that which
forms a natural and continuous sequence and which, if unbroken by an
intervening act, produces the injury and without which the injury would
not have occurred.
Nuisances may be private or public. A private nuisance affects a
limited number of people while a public nuisance affects the community as
a whole. Private citizens bring private nuisance suits, but a public
official normally abates a public nuisance. Public nuisances are
generally defined by statute or ordinance and are customarily criminal
acts. A public nuisance, though a crime, may also be a tort and a
private nuisance if the plaintiff can show that he has suffered special
damages. The damages must be individual to the plaintiff and not those
which he shares with the rest of the public.
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