Ecological injury’s spatial and temporal scales are ill-suited to how law is made.

Evidence

Several dominant characteristics of the problems presented by ecological injury are systematically problematic for the ways in which law is made in this nation. As a result of this mismatch, it is exceedingly difficult to enact, implement, and enforce needed environmental laws. Moreover, over the longer term, these laws invariably become sources of great controversy and resistance, generating a destructive cycle of public distrust of law and of lawmaking institutions. Most revealing of this mismatch are the contrasting natures of the spatial and temporal dimensions of ecological injury and of lawmaking institutions. The temporal and spatial dimensions of the former are ill-suited for redress by those of the latter. Indeed, the chasm between the two explains much about the peculiar way in which environmental law has evolved during the past three decades. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 43

Categorization

• XREF: This structural mismatch thesis connects directly to the polyad’s cross-course theme of listening/observation-as-method and why institutions structurally fail the vulnerable. — connects to: Nature’s lack of a fixed baseline complicates legal sorting of human from natural change. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 62; Microbial ecology and nanotechnology expanded spatial horizons inward. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 927; Environmental law’s impossibility is the precondition of its possibility — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 596 (+1 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The core framing of the entire book — the mismatch between ecological injury and lawmaking institutions explains the peculiar evolution of environmental law — is dense, paradigm-level, and resists summary.

Broader Connections

• Environmental law’s impossibility is the precondition of its possibility #complicates (0.80) — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 596
• Environmental standard-setting is institutionally unsuited to the legislative arena #corroborates (0.80) — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 838