Isolated decisions, even isolated decisions made with high-quality procedures coordinating well-intentioned participants, sometimes produce outcomes that none of the participants would have endorsed. Without a mechanism to ensure that the collective implications of fragmented series of uncoordinated decisions are taken into account, it is all too easy to think we are making good choices all along, and later wonder how we failed to realize our intentions. Environmental policies provide multiple examples of this kind of dysfunctional decision-making: in species conservation, emissions reduction, and adaptation to sea-level rise, we see series and collections of discrete decisions producing wildly suboptimal outcomes. In this paper, I analyze some examples of decision failure in environmental policy, and I suggest some practices that might improve things.