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The Siren Song of Environmentalism
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16172 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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6 / 1989 |
1,634 Words |
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Hugh W. Ellsaesser
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The spectacular growth in science and technology since World War II has been accompanied by a steady decline in the number of math and science courses required of nonscience students. As a predictable result, we now have a general population and a population of scientists who can hardly communicate with one another. The scientist today evokes not respect and gratitude, but fear. He is regarded not as one of us, but as a madman bent on pursuing his own Faustian bargains. Did he not invent nuclear weapons and energy, which are now poisoning the earth? Did he not introduce the use of fossil fuels, which through greenhouse enhancement are now turning the polar glaciers into rising sea levels and the shrinking continents into deserts?
A glance at any recent news publication reveals that science is in trouble--and not merely for the reason noted above. And if science is in trouble, we are all in trouble. In the tribal sense, the scientist replaced the medicine man as the seeker and repository of truth because he had developed the scientific method by which, in many cases, it was possible to separate that which we know from that which we merely believe. Truth has always been a valuable commodity, and while scientists did not always prosper, they usually survived.
But as history has repeatedly revealed, humans appear to be genetically engineered to cope with almost any adversity save their own successes. Science became too successful. Overconfidence and impatience led to more and more frequent skipping of the tediousness of applying the scientific method. Government support of research for national defense and other societal problems offered a far larger and more lucrative market for the services of scientists than the mere marketing of truth and knowledge. Today, the chief occupation of most scientists is no longer the pursuit of truth and new knowledge, but the pursuit of government contracts for research support.
As a result of all these forces, including a gradual transformation of the public perception of scientists, the charlatans are now more successful than the scientists. Selling "new clothes" to "the emperor" has been transformed into selling protection of the public to congressmen.
The rise of environmentalism and its drive for clean air and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the late 1960s, because "pollution was increasing faster than the population" were unhampered by the fact that nearly every available measure of airborne pollution revealed a downward trend during the 1960s. The inability of health scientists to document the health effects of specific air pollutants did not prevent announcement, within the mandated 120 days following the formation of the EPA, of federal air-quality standards for five specific pollutants, "based on health effects." The Community Health and Environmental Surveillance System (CHESS) Program, designed to justify the standards after they were adopted, ended in an ignominious fiasco but did not undercut the legal status of the standards.
A 'margin of safety'?
But the EPA is still not out of the woods on this. Even a reluctantly adopted 50 percent increase in the level of ozone permitted still leaves the acceptable standard below naturally occurring levels in many parts of the world. In Los Angeles, the ozone standard has been exceeded regularly, on 100
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