INTEGRATED POLLUTION CONTROL IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN: RETHINKING PROGRESS WITHIN THE HISTORY OF ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

The development of environmental law is often presented as an essentially linear and progressive process, and the formal introduction of integrated pollution control in the 1990s is generally seen in this light. Yet an examination of previously overlooked historical material concerning the development of British environmental law in the nineteenth century challenges this account. From its initial concerns with the chemical industry and emissions to the atmosphere, some twenty years later the Alkali legislation in the 1880s adopted a multi-media approach, encompassing air, water, and land pollution, albeit confined to a core industrial alkali process. At the same time, the legislation introduced progressive measures aimed at remediation, and it is clear that the government inspectorate was far more ready to engage in public debate that has hitherto been acknowledged. When compared with subsequent regulation introduced throughout the bulk of the twentieth century, multi-media regulatory control under Victorian legislation represents an initiative of considerable intelligence and foresight which was not so much built on during the twentieth century as dismantled—so much so that modern reformers were able to overlook it completely. The analysis suggests that legal development does not take place through an essentially linear process of building upon the foundations or overcoming the constraints of what went before, but follows relatively discrete cycles, with periods of innovation giving way to periods of decline. This is not to encourage nostalgia for the past but rather realism about the present.