Two somewhat linked thoughts from the feed reader in the last week.

Neil Flanagan, on the generational shifts amongst environmentalists from the literal to the abstract:

My (undeveloped) conjecture is: the older generation sees environmental problems from an intuitive (fishkills & pesticide) perspective, whereas the later generations see the issue in terms of abstractions (%CO2 over 10,000 years). I think I can say that ecology is based on systems thinking. “Ecosystem,” after all, precisely refers to an interrelated organization. That complex activity can only be understood through abstractions that make consequences more intuitively threatening.

But the older generation seems to approach an environmental issue as perceptible, in that anyone can readily see the links and the loops and understand their consequences. You cut down a tree, and this directly harms the environment and limits one’s access to it. A particular, standing in for the general, is irrevocably lost. Building where there once was a grassy patch is paving over paradise, and a building that brings any cars to the neighborhood is causing pollution.

The primary enemies of the 1960s were intensely graphic horrors such as the burning Cuyahoga, broken bird eggs, and the disfiguration wrought by thalidomide. The problems were so obvious, you could see them with your eyes, and that his how we noticed in the first place. For the generation brought up during an era of global warming, the agents are more nefarious. How does one picture a rise of water over decades? How do you draw the cancer cluster caused by dioxins in an aquifer? You have to rely on the numbers.

This kind of paradigm shift obviously impacts the way we regulate our environments.  We, as a society, structure our response (often via regulation) to how we’ve defined the problem.

Alon Levy on highways and cost control, and the role of a particular moment of time in shaping our regulations and institutions:

Second, it reminds us that many of the rules that are currently associated with government dysfunction were passed with opposite intent and effect back in the Progressive Era. Lowest-bid contracts were an effort to stamp out corruption; civil service exams were an effort to reduce patronage; teacher tenure was meant to make teachers politically independent; the initiative process was intended to give people more control over government. All of those efforts succeeded at the time, and took decades of social learning among the corrupt and incompetent to get around. Although programs built under these rules often turned out badly, such as the Interstate network, with its severe cost and schedule overruns, this was not due to the contractor collusion seen in the 1910s or today.

Combine the effects of unintended consequences, changing paradigms and a shifting understanding of the issues at hand, institutional momentum, and you can end up with the kind of slog we have.

There are questions of rigidity and enforceability to ensure that regulations have ‘teeth,’ but adaptability is also key.  Defining the scope of the regulation is also a critical element.  Frankly, aside from constant review and reevaluation, I’m not sure there’s any way to future proof these kinds of institutions.