In the 1994 movie, Clean Slate, the film's main character, detective M.L. Pogue, wakes up with no recollection of the previous day's events. Trapped in a fog of amnesia, he must re-invent himself everyday as he struggles to paste together his past. As the film's byline declares: "It's a day he'll never forget…until tomorrow." Though most people would not want to live in Pogue's world, a little amnesia often helps us escape bad habits, opening up individuals and organization to new ideas. As Madison Avenue PR man George Lois once said, "Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality."
Maybe a bit of amnesia is exactly what we need for our environmental policies. It is not that these policies have stopped working but their weaknesses are becoming more obvious. Cracks are appearing in the regulatory facade that are often a prelude to a systems failure. This is especially evident in the ability of the existing set of laws and risk assessment methodologies to address emerging technologies, such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology, which will result in the development of novel substances and products with little or no historical precedence.
It isn't clear if and how our environmental laws, policies, and institutions will deal with rapid technological innovation, and maybe they won't. But then what? Can we create a system for environmental protection that will work not only with 19th century technologies, like the diesel engine and steam powered electricity generation, but with the next generation of technologies and beyond?
Computer scientists, faced with design of the 21st century Internet, have turned to an interesting approach - a clean slate exercise - a sort of self-induced amnesia designed to stimulate more out-of-the-box thinking.1 Let us imagine, then, the following thought exercise:
- Given what we know now, and if we could start with a clean slate, how would we design a system for environmental protection that can deal with rapidly emerging, and potentially disruptive, technologies?
- What would that system look like in 10-15 years?
From this perspective, nothing is sacred. One can assume away the EPA, rewrite or eliminate key statutes, re-engineer risk assessment approaches, and generally focus on the entire system architecture instead of the minutia. There is an opportunity (and challenge) to design the simplest possible system that could protect humans and the environment from the impacts and unintended consequences of our technological future while simultaneously encouraging innovation.
Continue to: Clean Slate Projects
1 Over the past few years, a number of visionary and influential computer scientists, many who were involved with the creation of the Internet, have begun to talk about the need for a clean slate approach to creating a new Internet for the 21st century. It is not that the Internet has stopped working, but it isn't working very well - think of spam, worms, viruses, lost information - and it certainly is not optimized for next generation applications when we will connect billions of mobile devices to the net. The key message of the clean slate advocates is that an incremental approach to change, built on what some term "backward compatibility" won't work and what are needed are bold and transformative steps guided by a cohesive vision.
