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In cases where it may not be appropriate to just drop all legislation, it may instead work well to devolve the power to more local levels. This would go a long

In cases where it may not be appropriate to just drop all legislation, it may instead work well to devolve the power to more local levels. This would go a long way toward making the potential prize of influencing legislators and regulators damaging to us at a much more local scope. It would also allow the many local stages to be where we play out experiments to find what approaches work best - something that seems to be pretty much anathema in today's political scene. Your example of the Cuyahoga River is pretty apt, actually. Consider: "By the time Congress got around to passing the CWA in 1972, river fires were no longer a threat. Whatever else the CWA did — and it certainly helped improve many of the nation’s waters — it did little if anything to prevent rivers from catching flame. It’s also not clear how much the CWA accelerated improvements in water quality that were already underway at the time. While most states largely ignored water quality concerns in the first half of the twentieth century, state governments became far more active throughout the 1960s, such that by 1966 every state had enacted water pollution control legislation of its own. Progress was slow, but for those pollutants of greatest concern at the time, progress was being made well before the 1972 CWA was enacted, let alone before it was implemented and enforced." -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/06/22/the-fable-of-the-burning-river-45-years-later/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014...

anigbrowl 12y ago
I'm not so hot on local solutions. With 3000 counties in the US that leads to an awful lot of reinvented wheels and administrative waste, and local corruption is arguably harder to deal with because it's hard to get a big enough constituency together to force the issue in many jurisdictions. River fires may have been an impetus for the clean water act, but observing that they were no longer a primary issue, while true, is beside the point. An emblematic issue (or instance of a general issue)is not necessarily representative of any statistical truth. For example, I don't think most fracking activities trigger earthquakes, but it's not surprising that anti-fracking activists make a point of citing the incidents where it apparently has as a proxy for a larger number of environmental problems they worry about. Or consider how the protests over police brutality in Ferguson last year were not so much because Michael Brown best exemplified innocent victimhood, but because leaving his dead body lying in the street for hours on end was perceived as exemplary of callous indifference to local people's sensibilities (at best) or calculated intimidation of that community (at worst). One could think the shooting itself to have been justified but still be outraged about the aftermath of the event. Much of the sound and fury of the debate focused on the shooting incident but if you go back and look at contemporary news reports the initial reaction was to the way the body was left lying there in the open.

anigbrowl 12y ago

I'm not so hot on local solutions. With 3000 counties in the US that leads to an awful lot of reinvented wheels and administrative waste, and local corruption is arguably harder to deal with because it's hard to get a big enough constituency together to force the issue in many jurisdictions. River fires may have been an impetus for the clean water act, but observing that they were no longer a primary issue, while true, is beside the point. An emblematic issue (or instance of a general issue)is not necessarily representative of any statistical truth. For example, I don't think most fracking activities trigger earthquakes, but it's not surprising that anti-fracking activists make a point of citing the incidents where it apparently has as a proxy for a larger number of environmental problems they worry about. Or consider how the protests over police brutality in Ferguson last year were not so much because Michael Brown best exemplified innocent victimhood, but because leaving his dead body lying in the street for hours on end was perceived as exemplary of callous indifference to local people's sensibilities (at best) or calculated intimidation of that community (at worst). One could think the shooting itself to have been justified but still be outraged about the aftermath of the event. Much of the sound and fury of the debate focused on the shooting incident but if you go back and look at contemporary news reports the initial reaction was to the way the body was left lying there in the open.