[froggo]

This thread is being written from a Canadian angle and my concerns center around environmentalism.

I have often noticed that you will find elected politicians trying to take a stand against environmental concerns. In Victoria, the mayor Lisa Helps banned all plastic bags and was taken to court by the producers of plastic bags and was told that she could not ban all plastic bags because it interfered with the livelihood of the plastic bag producers.
Many people have often tried to stop things like clear-cutting and have been told that they cannot interfere with the clear-cutters right to be industrious.
And now you see some big court cases emerging in the United States surrounding pipelines, where, we can presume, the courts will always be forced to favour the industrial nature of corporations over anybody's environmental concern. (Many justices are even apologetic when they have to read their deliberations, stating that they must do as the law states, even if its against their own consciousness)
Even if a President or a Prime Minister were to attempt a drastic shift in eco-consciousness they would likely be shut down by the courts; and it is clear to me that the laws do not reflect the times swift enough to prevent or preserve something requiring immediate attention. Yet on the other hand, the courts exist as well to prevent any one leader from becoming too tyrannical and democracy acts to stabilize progress gradually.
Are we enchained by the systems we have created, or do you believe that everything will balance itself out and everything will be bright and sunny in the future?

[Gardener]

The courts simply uphold (and occasionally interpret) the Law, as passed by Parliament (or Congress, or whatever).
The courts are not blocking progress; they are upholding the law.

If you want "Progress", get the law changed.

[froggo]

And the simple mechanisms of the courts is what i'm referring to as the cause of inability to properly deduce an impediment of standards .
I will borrow an example from Ronald Wright's book "A Short History of Progress" to elucidate my point.

...The catastrophe on Easter Island was man.
Rapa Nui, as Polynesians call the place, was settled during the fifth century A.D. by migrants from the Marquesas or the Gambiers who arrived in big catamarans stocked with their usual range of crops and animals: dogs, chickens, edible rats, sugar cane, bananas, sweet potatoes,and mulberry for making bark cloth. (Thor Heredadls theory that the island was peopled from South America has not been supported by recent work, though sporadic contact between Peru and Oceania probably did take place.) Easter Island proved too cold for breadfruit and coconut palms, but it was rich in seafood: fish seals porpoises, turtles and nesting seabirds. Within five or six centuries, the settlers had multiplied to about 10,000 people—a lot for 64 square miles. They built villages with good houses on stone footings and cleared all the best lands for fields. Socially they split into clans and ranks—nobles priests and commoners--- and there may have been a paramount chief, or “king.” Like Polynesians on some other islands, each clan began to honour its ancestry with impressive stone images. These were hewn from the yielding volcanic tuff of a crater and set up on platforms by the shore. As time went on, the statue cult became increasingly rivalrous and extravagant, reaching its apogee during Europes high middle ages, while the Plantagenet kings ruled England.
Each generation of images grew bigger than the last, demanding more timber, rope and manpower for hauling to the ahu, or altars. Trees were cut faster than they could grow, a problem worsened by the settlers rats, who ate the seeds and saplings. By A.D. 1400, no more tree pollen is found in the annual layers of the crater lakes; the woods had been utterly destroyed by both the largest and the smallest mammal on the island.
We might think that in such a limited place, where, from the height of Terevaka, islanders could survey the whole world at a glance, steps would have been taken to halt the cutting, to protect the saplings, to replant. We might think that as trees became scarce, the erection of statues would have been curtailed, and timber reserved for essential purposes such as boatbuilding and roofing. But that is not what happened, The people who felled the last tree could see that it was the last, could know with complete certainty there would never be another, and thy felled it anyway. All shade vanished from the land except the hard-edged shadows cast by the petrified ancestors, whom the people loved all the more because they made them feel less alone.
For a generation or so, there was enough old lumber to haul the great stones and still keep a few canoes seaworthy for deep water. But the day came when the last good boat was gone. The people then knew there would be little seafood and—worse—no way to escape. The word for wood, rakau, became the dearest in their language Wars broke out over ancient planks and worm-eaten bits of jetsam. They ate all their dogs and nearly all the nesting birds, and the unbearable stillness of the place deepened with animal silences. There was nothing left now but the moai, the stone giants who had devoured the land….

So if the standards by which our bureaucracy sustains itself (economic growth) cannot be altered due to the laws having a history of precedent stemming from those standards (much like the rapa Nui's traditional cult-like worship of idols), then how can a person come along and actually effect necessary change before it is too late, when they will always be shut down by the courts?