The Legal Essence of the Ecological Harm

Abstract

In the article some legal issues of the essence of environmental harm caused by the violation of environmental legislation are investigated. Basic features of the ecological harm are analysed. The main features are: spreading over a large territory, displaying for an indefinite time, the difficulty of monetary value, the inability to establish causal relationships between the harm that emerged in the environmental field and the immediate source it’s caused by.A circle of problematic issues which have to be resolved both in the law and its practical application are determined in the article. Among these problems are the following: determination of the human harm caused to health of citizens, the need to identify and to compensate the moral harm which occurs when the environmental rights of citizens are violated, the creation of the necessary methods for determining the harm caused to the health and life of citizens.