It engages diverse citizens, community leaders, polluters, and regulators in custom-designing environmental solutions for individual places and industries. Regulators allow flexibility to businesses to redesign products, services, and production processes to minimize environmental impacts while still making a profit.
Regulators allow flexibility when the environmental results can be better.
New technologies for monitoring environmental conditions will help provide such information, but scientists must work as peers with citizens to collect data and interpret what it means. This is the happy half of the story. The other half is that these new ways cannot replace strictly enforced national standards. Often the good cop is not persuasive if there is no bad cop waiting in the next room. The challenge is how to operate a tough regulatory regime alongside flexible civic deliberation.