Have you missed a permit compliance monitoring or reporting event and been financially penalized? Has your environmental impact statement approval been delayed by regulators’ paralysis by analysis or by many challenges from project opponents? Has your farm or livestock operation been accused of degrading a nearby water body although you comply with discharge permit monitoring requirements?
These situations, and many similar ones, share two underlying issues: lack of effective explanation to decision-makers of ecosystem complexity, and inappropriate models used to analyze environmental data. How environmental data are analyzed really matters.