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Environmentalists believe that the scientific evidence for ozone depletion
and for the greenhouse effect is irrefutable. As the ozone layer disappears,
more harmful radiation will reach the Earth’s surface. And as greenhouse
gases accumulate in the atmosphere, the planet will become warmer, causing
the seas to expand and low-lying areas to flood. These are held to be matters
of fact.

In a similar vein, many environmentalists argue that their case is based
on ‘objective reasoning’. This phrase comes from Norman Moore, who until
recently was a leading scientific authority in the Nature Conservancy Council.
He relates how he established that toxic pesticides had accumulated in the
food chain. The finding was not a question of opinion; he had shown that
through unexpected but relentless natural processes, farming practices which
used organochlorine insecticides were threatening to poison people. Max
Nicholson, a leading environmentalist and former director-general of what
was then the Nature Conservancy, makes the same point. Speaking about attempts
to persuade the agrochemicals industry to change its policy, he states:
‘Had not the scientific base of ecology and conservation been already so
sound, the successful agreement with the industry could not have been concluded.’

Moore and Nicholson suggest that the scientific credentials of the conservation
movement lend it considerable authority. This claim can be understood in
relation to sociologist Max Weber’s famed analysis of the three basic forms
of social authority: the traditional, the charismatic and the legal rational.
The testimony of scientific conservationists such as Moore and Nicholson
can be seen as showing that the environmen-tal movement is peculiarly committed
to, and uniquely favoured by, legal-rational authority. Other contemporary
social and political movements commonly draw on traditional authority (for
example, nationalism), charismatic authority (new spiritual movements) or
on some combination of these.

Both Nicholson and Moore acknowledge that the environmental movement
has long-standing ties to science. Many of the more ‘establishment’ nature
conservation societies in Britain – such as the Royal Society for Nature
Conservation, the British Trust for Ornithology and the various Naturalists
Field Clubs – have a background in natural history. So the green movement
is doubly bound to science, by epistemological affinity and common descent.

But many greens are uneasy about aligning themselves too closely with
science. Such ambivalence about science stems in part from the role science
and technology have played in bringing about our ecological problems. After
all, scientists invented the CFCs which are threatening the ozone layer.
Technological advance allowed humans to develop nuclear power, which in
turn has brought us persistent environmental problems. It was scientists
who developed the pesticides which in the past three decades have contaminated
our food and our wildlife. There is also a more diffuse connection: the
pollution caused by motor vehicles, power generation and waste disposal
is an integral feature of present-day industrial society. Many environmentalists
are thus critical of technical progress and, at least, equivocal about science.
Some see scientists as active collaborators in our society’s ecological
destructiveness.

Greens may also distrust science because of the particular activities
of sections of the scientific establishment, such as those involved in the
development of nuclear power and weapons or in the genetic engineering of
food crops and domesticated animals. Equally, greens may be repelled by
cases of the harming or mistreatment of laboratory animals.

In the face of these problems with science’s record on environmental
issues, some of the ideologists of the movement have been attracted to versions
of the green argument which are founded on non-scientific forms of authority.
For example, they seek to underpin an ecological world view in conventionally
religious or other spiritual ways and claim to gain a knowledge of nature’s
purposes and needs through this religious and spiritual inquiry. But in
secular Western societies these appeals have only a limited attraction –
as the recent episodes involving David Icke have shown – and scientific
expertise remains the principal form of legitimation in the leading environmental
organisations.

In fact, environmental pressure groups such as Greenpeace and Friends
of the Earth are relying on scientific authority to an increasing extent.

In 1989, Greenpeace appointed a geologist as its director of science
in London. The group’s biographers now announce that it has equipped itself
with the ‘most sophisticated mobile laboratory in Europe’. In the late 1980s,
Friends of the Earth increased the technical sophistication of its campaigning
staff and now boasts of its ‘enhanced . . . standing in academic and institutional
circles’. Both organisations now supply scientific references in support
of their campaign material. And their cam-paigners insist on the importance
of getting the science right.

There are undoubted benefits for greens in turning to science; besides,
there are no viable alternatives. But the move has been less beneficial
than had been anticipated; in some respects the movement has even been confounded
by science.

To understand the sociological implications of embracing science, we
need to examine the special authority enjoyed by legal-rational forms of
argument. In recent years, social scientists have suggested that the authority
commonly associated with scientific beliefs is not as straightforward or
as unequivocal as many people, including Weber, appear to have assumed.
These sociologists and philosophers have argued that the public, policy
makers and more traditional philosophers of science have exaggerated the
authority of science.

There are two main components to this claim. First, it is argued that
scientists’ judgments inevitably go beyond the evidence on which they are
based, so that scientific authority cannot be justified by a simple appeal
to its factual foundations. In other words, scientific facts do not completely
determine the conclusions which are drawn from them. Secondly, it is argued
that even facts themselves are provisional. Factual observations may themselves
be affected by scientists’ assumptions or by their prior theoretical commitments.
In short, even its factual basis does not grant science an indubitable authority.
For example, the factual evidence for global warming is very difficult to
establish. Many factors may affect the world’s climate or the sea level;
it is hard to know whether any changes measured can be put down to a warming
trend or to some other factor. In some cases there are accepted distortions
in the evidence, but no way of compensating for them. For example, to establish
climatic trends, series of temperature measurements need to be compiled
over decades. Until recently, such measurements have commonly been made
at recording stations in urban areas – which have themselves become warmer
because of urbanisation. So there is no indisputable way of establishing
the facts. And even if the facts of warming were unanimously accepted, there
can still be disagreement about the implications. Warming might have causes
other than the greenhouse effect: for example, there might be astronomical
reasons for temperature variations in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The acquisition of scientific knowledge is far more complex than is
normally supposed. Scientific knowledge depends on judgment and interpretation;
these features also characterise the environmental movement’s use of scientific
expertise. This being so, what happens when environmentalists try to enlist
science as a ‘friend of the earth’? Conservation and environmental organisations
make extensive use of science; they call on expertise on, for instance,
food chains, on species identification, or on energy conservation. Such
organisations typically have large numbers of scientifically trained employees.
They often have scientific advisory committees and call on the voluntary
support of university scientists and scientific civil servants.

But is this scientific base sufficient to grant environmental groups
the authority they seek? Firstly, science may be an unreliable ally in that
– unlike religious leaders – scientists may not have an answer to every
question. Similarly, they accept in principle that their knowledge is revocable
and incomplete. This incompleteness may take a number of forms. For example,
members of the scientific committee of one of the groups I studied, the
Ulster Wildlife Trust (UWT), were concerned to learn of proposals to site
a salmon farm in a sheltered marine lough in Northern Ireland. One worry
was that the fish cages would need to be treated with the anti-fouling paint
TBT or a similar preparation. The scientists could not say precisely what
would happen after TBT was used partly because different applications have
different effects. For example, boats painted with anti-fouling agents distribute
the chemical around the lough, while the direction of water currents would
determine the after-effects of using it on cages. The scientists were in
the awkward position of assuming that there was a scientific answer to the
question of the anti-foulant’s effect but not knowing what it was.

There is a clear feeling in the UWT, as in other of the UK’s Wildlife
Trusts, that there is a need to be ‘reasonable’ and not oppose all development.
Yet the very rigours of scientific evidence and proof render ‘reasonableness’
very difficult. The limited and provisional nature of scientific knowledge
thus makes it hard to respond satisfactorily to new proposals.

‘Not knowing’ can also be a disadvantage because of the impact it has
on the public. Members of the public may look to the scientific experts
in conservation organisations for authoritative judgments and be frustrated
because the ‘experts’ do not know. For example, birdwatchers, and even shooters,
may be concerned about the reasons for fluctuations in bird populations.
They see this as the kind of question which conservation scientists should
be able to settle, but the scientists may well not know nor even be sure
how to find out.

Science may thus be a poor ally to environmentalists because scientists’
knowledge is inevitably limited. Unlike a traditional or charismatic authority
they do not have the ability to respond to every contingency.

Such ‘shortcomings’ may well be common to public uses of science. But
conservation scientists face these problems in a particularly concentrated
way. For one thing, scientists working in environmental pressure groups
often cannot commission or carry out the research which they would ideally
like to see performed. According to Jacqueline Cramer of the University
of Amsterdam such scientists therefore face ‘pragmatic uncertainty’. She
argues that they are commonly called on to make recommendations at short
notice, often using readily-available research material which may vary in
quality. They frequently lack the time or resources to conduct research
of their own. Studies of the environmental effects of, for example, minute
quantities of contaminants demand a great deal of time since the substances
build up in the environment very slowly. Scientific equipment and research
can also be very expensive. The environmental groups simply do not have
the financial resources to fund major research projects. Even those organisations
with big budgets face many conflicting demands. For example, Greenpeace’s
campaigns and their boats continually require high levels of funding. The
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (Europe’s largest nature conservation
and environmental organisation) uses much of its income for the purchase
of reserves for the direct protection of birds. To spend money on research
is to divert funds from direct environmental action. In many cases environmental
groups are not even able to monitor all the potentially useful scientific
information which is published in journals; after all, even university libraries
subscribe to only a fraction of the available scientific journals.

When they do turn to the academic literature, environmentalists typically
find that research reports cannot meet their own practical queries. As sociologists
of science have long pointed out, most academic scientific research deals
with problems that arise within a particular discipline. It is not intended
for immediate use by ‘customers’ and the objectives of academic ecologists
are unlikely to coincide with those of practical conservationists.

In addition, Cramer points out that environmental scientists are handicapped
by ‘the low level of theoretical development of ecosystems-ecology’. There
is less consensus in ecological science than in many other areas of natural
science, so that the interpretation of ecological information is likely
to be disputed.

However, even Cramer’s account understates the degree of uncertainty
facing conservation scientists in that there are some matters which are
enormously difficult to observe. Environmentalists face a particular difficulty
when they have to decide how to respond to agents or damage that are almost
impossible to monitor. The role of science as an empirical friend to the
environmental movement becomes almost paradoxical in such cases. Were it
not for science, greens could hardly campaign about ozone depletion or global
warming at all. Yet the scientific evidence may disappoint campaigners by
its uncertainty and ambiguity. For instance, as mentioned earlier, it is
extremely difficult to gather definitive evidence of global temperature
variation. Equally, information about the carbon dioxide content of the
atmosphere in past decades is elusive; it is therefore hard to prove that
warming followed increases in this greenhouse gas.

Similar points arose in the international dispute over acid rain which
raged between environmental campaigners and the British electricity supply
service. While there was no doubt that power stations emitted acidic gases,
the authorities would not accept responsibility for acidification of the
environment. It was possible to argue that the geographical pattern of acidification
did not correspond with what was known about the dispersal of waste gases,
that the chemicals causing acidification did not appear identical to the
range of gases emitted from the power stations, and that there were other,
more local, causes which could lead to acidification of rivers and lakes.
Scientific authority was needed to support a campaign about acid rain but
the scientific evidence was ambiguous. Because the issues taxed the limits
of knowledge and of scientists’ power to make observations, science was
only a grudging friend to the greens.

In some cases such deficiencies come close to intrinsic problems of
science as a way of knowing. Most nature conservationists would defend science
as a form of knowledge by pointing to its observational basis and its methods.
But the observational basis is open to interpretation, and as soon as there
arise competing and plausible accounts of what the observational facts are,
then the basis itself becomes problematic.

This argument achieves its most spectacular form in the philosophical
problem of ‘induction’. For centuries philosophers have pointed out that
we can only assume that the Sun will rise tomorrow; we cannot know such
things for certain. In the past, traditionalists tended to use such arguments
to contrast science unfavourably with other forms of knowledge, such as
religion or logic. Logical deduction appears much more certain than empirical
induction.

In recent years, these arguments have not been regarded as having much
practical importance. But this line of thought does highlight a weakness
that can be used in a practical way to evade scientific authority. Those
opposed to a scientific judgment can always say that science is not fully
certain and that, for this reason, they do not recognise the authority of
expert scientific opinion.

Environmentalists tend to play down this issue in many public contexts.
Thus, in the BBC Wildlife Magazine, Jonathan Porritt, former director of
Friends of the Earth, recently wrote: ‘The scientists are now with us rather
than against us. On occasions . . . they actually seem to be out in front
of the activists of the Environment Movement. In the early 1970s, the protagonists
of the ‘limits to growth’ scenario relied primarily on an inadequately programmed
computer model. Politicians had little difficulty dismissing it as sensational-ist
speculation. Today, there’s nothing speculative about the depletion of the
ozone layer, the deforestation of the Amazon, the build-up of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere, or the pesticide residues in our water and food. Hard
scientific evidence counts for a lot in a hard materialistic world.’

This embrace of the ‘hardness’ of scientific evidence displays the kind
of strategy adopted to chase off the horrors of doubt; 10 years ago, environmentalists
might have been less welcoming to ‘hard scientific evidence’. But there
are other strategies. In 1989, Greenpeace ran a newspaper advertise-ment
campaign in Britain opposing claims by the then Sec-retary of State for
the Environment, Nicholas Ridley, that increased investment in nuclear power
generation would help to solve the greenhouse problem. The minister was
pictured with his pro-nuclear assertion printed across his mouth. Beneath
it was written: ‘Scientifically speaking, it’s just a lot of hot air.’ Greenpeace
then printed a declaration disagreeing with Mr Ridley, a declaration apparently
signed by ‘One hundred of the country’s leading scientists, doctors, and
engineers’. Now, there is something curious about the logic of this move,
for although Greenpeace seems to be invoking scientific authority, there
is an appeal based on numbers also. Their argument seems to be not just
that scientific opinion is with them, but that a lot of scientists think
this way. But in practice both sides in any dispute can usually count on
some scientific supporters. So both sides may try to claim the epistemological
high ground. An appeal to large numbers of qualified supporters is perhaps
the simplest way to respond to this difficulty in a mass public medium.

Whatever the complexities of enlisting scientific authority in a positive
fashion, from the conservationists’ point of view the difficulty is most
acutely felt when they are confronted with a barrier of scientific proof
– the kind of barrier erected by the British government over acid rain.
Different groups adopt different responses to this problem; Greenpeace has
tended to display impatience with – as they see it – Jesuitical arguments
about scientific proof, but this has sometimes left them open to charges
of partiality. The chairman of the UWT, by contrast, recently characterised
his group as standing for ‘informed, educated, reasonable, rational conservation’.
The problem, of course, is how to confront urgent but uncertain issues rationally
and reasonably.

The uncertainty of science

Science’s specific claims to knowledge lead to special difficulties
in the courtroom when groups try to ‘cash in’ on scientific authority. Several
case studies have shown that scientific arguments often do not stand up
in court or in public inquiries as well as might be expected. Of course,
scientists may suffer because they lack experience with courtroom cross-questioning.
But scientists also fare badly because legal procedure can focus on apparent
weaknesses in science as a form of knowledge.

Consider the case of a public inquiry into plans to develop a Northern
Irish peat bog for horticultural peat extraction. In the late 1980s government
ecologists had conducted a survey and evaluation of Northern Irish bogs,
an increasingly endangered habitat. But a peat-cutting company had already
taken steps to develop one of the bogs which had come out as highly rated
(of great ecological value) in this survey. A public inquiry was called
to determine whether development should be allowed to proceed. The developers
were represented by a senior barrister while the conservationists relied
on scientifically trained representatives.

The barrister adopted two lines of argument. First, he cast doubt on
the bog scoring system. For example, bogs may be valued because they are
virtually intact or because they are home to a wide variety of plant species.
To some extent the rank-ings of the various bogs in the survey will depend
on how these, and other, attributes are weighted. The barrister suggested
that the scores were merely a convention. The scientists could not show
for certain that the technique adopted was the best way of scoring bogs;
therefore, it could be implied, their scoring system was of little worth.
The developer’s argument traded on the scientists’ lack of absolute authority.

The barrister’s second argument operated to similar effect. He noted
that in the case of the disputed bog, there were two striking features mentioned
by witnesses but which were not in the scoring system. On the one hand,
the bog supported a rare butterfly but, on the other, the bog was elongated
rather than circular and thus unusually prone to drying out. He argued that
references to these features showed that the scientists’ assessment was
ad hoc rather than methodic. In fact, all scientific expertise must depend
on elements of judgement and interpretative skill, but these informal aspects
of science can sometimes be highlighted to make scientific evidence appear
as mere opinion.

The green movement’s dependence on science may not bring it the cognitive
authority it seeks. But there are some environmental arguments where its
insufficiency seems to be of another sort. Take the case of the preservation
of rare species, say the giant earwig of St Helena. This insect is in dire
peril because of rats introduced to its island home. ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s may be able
to tell us how to conserve this creature but it cannot tell us why we should
bother. The argument becomes even more acute in the case of creatures which
are threatened by economically important activities. According to the Marine
Conservation Society, basking sharks are endangered by our fishing practices.
Assuming the MCS is correct, it might still be argued that saving these
sharks is not worth the cost to fishing.

To put this another way, the scientific correctness of the greens’ analysis
cannot easily be transformed into action. If the destruction of the ozone
layer will cause many human deaths then possibly there is a common practical
need to remedy the problem. But with most other environmental problems the
practical implications can be disputed. There may be many reasons for trying
to conserve the rain forests: for the sake of the tribes people who live
there, for the sake of the plants and animals, on account of the likely
medicinal value of rain forest plants, and so on. The same is true for species
conservation. For example, we may wish to save the elephants for their own
sake, for the role they play in maintaining the environment for other animals
or for the potential economic value of managed herds to poor Africans. There
is much room for negotiation about the exact practical imperatives which
follow from such arguments.

The green movement is profoundly anchored in science. But, in practical
terms, it is far harder to cash in on that scientific authority than might
be anticipated. Both empirically and epistemologically, science is less
of a cognitive ally to greens than they might hope. Furthermore, even when
the scientific diagnosis is agreed there is typically room for dispute about
its practical implications.

Two main conclusions follow from these considerations. First, we can
expect that greens’ ideological ambivalence towards science may be reinforced
by the frustration felt when science fails to deliver the expected benefits.
Secondly, the green movement currently has many friends; businesses and
even cynical politicians are riding the green wave for all their worth.
From the present analysis it seems that greens should make the best of these
friendships since, should the movement’s popularity wane, there can be no
unambiguous, uncontested appeal to its scientific truth or demonstrability.

Steven Yearley is a reader in the department of social studies at Queen’s
University in Belfast. His latest book is The Green Case: A Sociology of
Environmental Issues, Arguments and Politics (Harper Collins 1991).