Chapter One

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.... Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana, 1905, The Life of Reason, Volume 1

Santayana's quotation is often repeated because it is advice that makes so much sense, but is too often ignored. What we remember can save us in the long run. We forget important events at our own peril. It is one thing to fail but quite another not to learn from our failures. We must consider the reasons and events that led to the failure in hopes that corrective actions and preventive measures are put in place to avoid their reoccurrence. This is not easy and is almost always complicated. Every disaster or failure has a unique set of events. Often, seemingly identical situations lead to very different conclusions. In fact, the mathematics and statistics of failure analysis are some of the most complicated, relying on nonlinear and chaotic approaches and nontraditional statistical methods, such as Bayesian theory. Having said this, identifying these challenges certainly is not meant to imply that we cannot apply the lessons learned from environmental disasters to ongoing decisions. We can and must, and certainly will throughout this book.

The reasons for failure vary widely. All of the three types highlighted in this book's subtitle, "mistakes, mishaps, and misdeeds," have caused environmental problems, but in very different ways. The terms all include the prefix mis-, which is derived from Old English, "to miss." This type of failure applies to num