Environmental protection rules intervene if an environmental factor is harmed without necessarily causing harm to identifiable victims. Ecological crimes aim at harming individuals or their property, small communities, but especially humanity as a whole, the general interests of society. Defending the values promoted by environmental law (including through criminal law) appears to be fully justified, given the importance of environmental factors for life on earth, for the fight against pollution, deterioration of living conditions, etc. A large part of the criminal norms in the field of environment are norms of reference or reference to other legal texts (some of them even in other normative acts), a fact that considerably complicates the activity of judicial interpretation of the punishment. However, the complexity of the norm is not the only reason why the activity of implementing the criminal norms with an impact on the environment is difficult.