What is Yet to be Done

Abstract

The environmental crisis expresses the relation between science and society in a special way: it illustrates the overriding importance of action. Action-oriented decisions—for example, whether to stop global warming for the sake of people or in order to conserve the natural world—profoundly affect the relationship. Both the post-World War II changes in production technology, which gave rise to the environmental crisis, and the failed effort to resolve it by the strategy of control, lead to a common conclusion: Environmental pollution is an incurable disease: it can only be prevented. By design, production technologies must be compatible with environmental quality. This introduces a social interest in what is widely regarded as a private prerogative: the decisions that determine what is produced and by what means. Environmental quality is then an aspect of political economy, requiring, for example, national, democratically determined, industrial and agricultural policies. Such a sweeping transformation of production can be powerfully inspired by a vision of the economic renaissance that would be generated by the new, more productive, technologies. The most meaningful engine of change may be not so much environmental quality as the economic development and growth generated by the effort to improve it.