> Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.
Indeed, we know that (pace Rousseauian claims) man misbehaves not because some "system" has made him do so, but because he chooses to behave in such a manner, often knowing fully well he is choosing misbehavior. I think most of us, if we're honest, even if our moral understanding is variable, admit that we have acted in ways we knew were unjust before we acted.
To take this discussion further, government is a natural institution, i.e., one which follows from human nature and is natural to human societies for the sake of the common good (whether at the level of the family, the community, nation, the world, etc.). Part of what the common good entails is the administration of justice which requires an authority to administer that justice. In your example, if the problem is, say, industrial destruction of the common good that is our environment which we need to live (provided there exist better ways to secure the good produced by legitimate industry or legitimately permissible industry without that destruction), then the problem is a deficient law that fails to guard the common good.
Healthy criticism of authority is important because we know that those in authority are capable of choosing badly either through malice or incompetence. However, just at there is an excessive deferral and submissiveness some show toward authority that subordinates evidence and reason to authority, there is also a hostility to the very idea of authority. The latter is what rests at the bottom of anarchism. Anarchism in practice devolves into the rule of the powerful because no authority acts as a bulwark against power for the sake of the common good.
So on the one hand we have unbridled capitalism wherein the powerful dominate and exploit the weak, and on the other we have socialism which is the tyranny of government. Both converge at essentially the same point. In both cases, the powerful impose their "laws" on the populace for their own benefit. The empirical evidence corroborates as much and there is no sense in placing one's hope in either. The meat grinder of human existence on this earth is not to be abolished and the solution is not revolution. All revolutionaries are opportunists that prey on resentment, whether it is the product of envy or righteous anger, and parlay it into their own power. It also results in orgies of violence, dead bodies, and rivers of blood.
We are much better off engaging in good actions in our daily lives, many which may require pain, suffering, and sacrifice. All social action is the action of individuals for individuals. A society is only as good as its members. To many, that message isn't sexy. It lack the ecstatic grandeur or the messianic and eschatological satisfaction of what revolution seems to promise. They are like the woman at the well. There is a lesson to be learned here.