Law Commons^™

The Natech: Right-To-Know As Space-Time Puzzle, Gregg P. Macey

Gregg P. Macey

Federal environmental law began with a plea: that agencies and other parties consider, and mitigate, the environmental impacts of their work. The task remains unfulfilled given the nature of those impacts: They feature system effects, nonlinear interactions, feedback loops, discontinuous and threshold dynamics, and uncertain boundaries. The administrative state has limited means to address them. It relies on artificial constructs to assess and respond to impacts, such as worst-case scenarios, reasonable foreseeability, and scales that are either inappropriately narrow (“linked” projects) or large and vague (“program-level”). Right-to-know laws share this shortcoming, a product of the disasters that led to their …