Abstract The European Union, as the biggest supranational organization in the world, plays an important role in global environmental governance. In the past thirty years, the European Union made a lot effort in solving environmental problems and gained some success. The European Union made a lot of laws which covered all the areas of the environmental governance, and the citizens participated in environmental governance actively. The European Union has changed its way of governance from command and control to cooperation with everyone such as NGOs and citizens. The European Union leads the world in environmental governance all the time in the past thirty years and it will continue. This article will study the specific area -- normative approaches in the European Union's environmental governance. The author will study the European Union environmental law and environmental action plans -- the two big parts of the European Union normative approaches to environmental governance in detail. Also, the author will review the history of environmental problems and try to discuss the deep reasons of the problems. Through this article, we should draw on the European Union's experiences in environmental governance, and make thing better.