For as long as humans have known how to walk, and how to uproot plants with their hands, they have treated the environment as their own property. As mankind built legal systems, it took millennia for laws to consider the environment itself as worthy of preservation.
The saga of prosecuting environmental crime began in 1610 A.D., with a landmark case over one man’s pigsty and the smell it produced. The perpetrator was a Mr. Thomas Benton from Norfolk, who converted his orchard into a pigsty, to the ire of his neighbour, William Aldred.
Aldred filed a nuisance case, and argued that Benton’s swine were fouling the air of his house, cutting off his light to boot. Benton took the case to the King’s Bench, arguing that “one ought not to have so delicate a nose, that he cannot bear the smell of hogs,” and, significantly, that “the building of the house for hogs was necessary for the sustenance of man.”
We know that as early as 1587, the legendary jurist Edward Coke had argued that ‘light and sweet air were as necessary as pure and wholesome water.” Thus, the Aldred Case raises a classic question in environmental disputes – one party’s financial sustenance versus another party’s health and wellbeing. One party’s right to land extending beyond just the traditional boundaries of wood and walls, to the very air he breathes and lives on. The outcome was that air pollution caused by another could be held as an example of private nuisance.
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