One thing that needs to come out of the uproar over the Hawaii Superferry is a fresh look at how we make decisions about protecting our state's environment.

All sides should be able to agree to this — the state and Superferry supporters who can't understand how a $300 million venture could be sunk at the last minute, and opponents who can't understand how the Superferry got this far without an environmental assessment.

We find ourselves now with a chaotic and capricious approval process in which nobody knows what to expect and the courts end up as Hawai'i's de facto environmental protection agency.

That's not fair to anybody, and in the end it's not good for either business or the environment.

The state Supreme Court's ruling requiring an environmental assessment for Superferry improvements at Kahului Harbor after the state Department of Transportation Department said none was needed left state officials and the lower courts uncertain about where to go from here on the Superferry and broader issues.

Two weeks after the high court's ruling, the parties are still arguing in Maui and Kaua'i circuit courts about whether the ferry can sail while the environmental assessment is being done and whether the order applies to harbors beyond Kahului.

State Transportation Director Barry Fukunaga claims the Supreme Court broke new legal ground by requiring greater assessment of secondary environmental impacts, potentially setting up a cumbersome and unpredictable approval process for relatively minor improvements to state facilities.

Even Kaua'i Sen. Gary Hooser, who applauded the court's decision, said the current situation leaves "legal ambiguities that need to be clarified."

The Lingle administration should begin that process by thoroughly reviewing the court's 104-page ruling and reporting to the public on what kinds of environmental reviews it now believes are required when state facilities are altered or improved.

Any ambiguities should be taken up in next year's Legislature to clarify exactly what requisites the state and businesses must meet so that everybody knows what is expected and we can settle these issues in an orderly process rather than thrash them out piecemeal in court.

Critics believe the Superferry made a mistake by not accepting a deal offered by Democrats in the Senate this year that would have let the ferry sail while an environmental assessment was conducted at the state's expense.

That did seem like a fair compromise, and the Superferry probably could have saved itself a lot of trouble by going for it, but in the end it would have only exacerbated the bigger problem of random and arbitrary decisionmaking.

Piecemeal political solutions to environmental disputes are no better than piecemeal judicial solutions.

However stringent the approval process is going to be, it needs to be reasonably predictable and without the need to constantly be running to the Legislature and the courts, or nothing is ever going to get done.

The Lingle administration had a clear predisposition to grant the Superferry's request for an exemption from environmental review, leading to criticism that the law was clear all along and the administration just chose to ignore it.

But it wasn't as simple as that. The law allows exemptions from environmental assessments for nearly a dozen reasons, and the state administration has always exercised a degree of judgment in applying the law.

If the state was so obviously misguided in this case, its position wouldn't have been upheld in the Maui Circuit Court before the high court overruled.

The only thing obvious is that the rules have changed and everybody needs to be made clear on what they are and how they'll be applied.

Nobody benefits from regulatory chaos except lawyers.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net. Read his daily blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com.