And, over the past three years, Congress has begun to scale back and reform environmental regulation. Although it remains to be seen how far and how fast these reforms will move, they are bound to carry much further than anything the courts have done, or could have done. The courts, however, provided an institutional channel for the growing discontent with environmental regulation, and they helped to change the environmental debate and agenda. In so focusing on the tangible harms of disembodied value commitments, the courts have resurrected questions that environmentalism had successfully suppressed and cannot answer. Intellectually and politically, environmentalism has been put on the defensive, even if its residual force may prevent or delay serious regulatory reform for many years.
Complexity is much more manageable in private backyards than in a world-wide political commons.
But the courts have reminded us of the costs and dangers of an unconstrained political process. They have reminded us that the assertion of values that transcend politics is an ideological attempt to place someone's values and interests over everyone else's. This is the beginning of reason and balance in environmental politics.