Needed: a new social contract with science

We live in a time of great challenges Wand opportunities, one in which scientists are tremendously lucky and privileged to be able to indulge their passions for science and simultaneously provide something useful to society. With this privilege, of course, comes serious responsibility. The rapidly approaching close of a millennium provides an opportune occasion for reflection and evaluation of the extent to which scientists are fulfilling these responsibilities.

Although the scientific enterprise in the U.S. and abroad has been phenomenally successful in producing a wealth of knowledge that, in turn, has brought untold benefits to humanity, the scientific enterprise is not sufficiently forward-looking or fully prepared to face the formidable challenges ahead. Part of scientists' collective responsibility to society should include a community-wide reexamination of their goals and alteration of their course, if appropriate. Despite the plethora of reports examining the future of the scientific enterprise in this country, there is a need for a different perspective on these issues, firmly embedded in the changes occurring in the natural and social worlds.

Science has provided tremendous insights into our bodies, minds, world, galaxy, and universe. Those that have emerged from space, defense, and medical research, among others -- all of which depend on basic research across all disciplines -- have been nothing short of astounding. Space exploration, for example, has brought about not only new understanding of the nature of the cosmos and wonderful products and technologies, but a new sense of the world and of ourselves. Scientific information is exploding on all fronts, and the dizzying array of new knowledge, benefits, economic opportunities, and products ranging from laser surgery to genetic testing, from global positioning systems to prediction of El Nino events, from the discovery of ground-breaking drugs from natural products to innovative information systems, are an obvious boon.

Much of the investment that produced this wealth was a result of strong bipartisan and societal support for science beginning in the 1960s. This was predicated in part upon an unwritten social contract with science -- specifically, the expectation that investment in research would deliver America from the Cold War, allow the U.S. to win the space race, and conquer diseases. The scientific enterprise that has produced this wealth widely is admired and envied. The question is whether this enterprise is prepared for the future. The real challenges have not been appreciated fully or acknowledged properly.

How is the world changing? First and foremost, the explosive growth of the human population lies at the core of the broad array of other occurrences. In 50 years, twice as many people will need to be fed. Although the exact slope of the increase is not known for certain, the direction is clear. The vast majority of this expansion is occurring in developing countries.

As recognized by the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the precise slope of the growth curve is not fixed yet. There are options and choices about the trajectory, although time is of the essence. The Cairo conference set as a goal the stabilization of the world's population at 7,270,000,000 by the year 2015 and the avoidance of an explosion to 12,500,000,000 by 2050. The key to achieving these goals is a population policy that goes beyond traditional family planning and empowers women through education, political equity, and better health care. The rationale is simple: Educated and secure women produce fewer children and contribute to economic development. The challenges in actually accomplishing these goals are overwhelming. Encouraging progress is being made, but is dwarfed by the magnitude of the problem, the relatively short time for altering the course, and the unwillingness of most countries to fund fully the solutions proposed.

Not only is the human population increasing exponentially, but so, too, is per capita use of energy. Other immediately relevant global changes include the unsustainable rate of use of natural resources and the generation of waste on land and in the oceans. There is a striking difference between developed and developing nations in the patterns of this overconsumption and generation of waste. Developed countries represent less than one-quarter of the world's population, but cause around three-fourths of the pollution and use more than three-quarters of its natural resources. One person from the U.S. expends energy equivalent to that of six Mexicans, 14 Chinese, and 38 people in India. Since 1950, the richest billion people have doubled their consumption of energy, meat, steel, copper, and timber, while the poorest billion hardly have expanded their consumption of these crucial items.

The growing inequity not only among nations, but within every country on Earth, is a problem whose full impact is yet to be recognized. It is important to realize that, although the rates of poverty, illiteracy, and malnutrition are declining, the number of people affected by each is increasing. The connections between these factors and social disruption are beginning to become apparent. Population growth and environmental degradation can drive people from the country into cities and across national borders. This emigration often leads to social disintegration and political fragmentation.

This litany is indeed daunting, and the extent of ignorance about some of these issues is appalling. Consider statements from two individuals formerly in key positions in the U.S. government: "It isn't pollution that is harming the environment; it's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it" (Vice Pres. Dan Quayle) or "We don't have to worry about endangered species. Why, we can't even get rid of the cockroach!" (Secretary of the Interior James Watt).

Ignorance, apathy, denial, and despair are insidious additional contributors to the predicament and continue to make progress difficult. In an insightful letter to the editor published in Time magazine a couple of years ago, the writer expressed concern about the lack of leadership on the part of the U.S. on a globally important issue, saying something to the effect that "The entire world is looking to America, but Americans are watching TV." Is this also a depiction of the scientific enterprise ignoring the global crisis? Although I recognize that many scientists are addressing many of these issues, I don't believe that, as a community of scientists, they are engaged sufficiently.

Some have suggested that the picture is not all that bad or that different from times past. After all, the planet always has had poverty, sickness, disease, death, and inequity. One way in which it is different is that very real progress has been made on some fronts. Looking across the entire population of humans, health is getting better, as judged by increases in life expectancy. Pollution in some countries such as the U.S. has been reduced substantially, especially airborne particulates and toxic materials. Moreover, governments and citizens actually are talking about most of the critical unresolved issues. Some of the progress is nothing short of astounding. For instance, it was impossible even to have population issues on the table at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Yet, two years later, in Cairo, there was remarkable agreement about not only the centrality of the population issue, but enlightened dialogue and proposals for stabilizing population. The success of the world community in acknowledging the problem of stratospheric ozone depletion and mobilizing political will to decrease the release of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) is very good news. These successes provide models and hope.

Nonetheless, the global situation is much worse in many other regards and, in fact, quite different from previous eras. If one examines the evidence, the conclusion is inescapable: The spatial scale, rates, and kinds of environmental changes now occurring are fundamentally different from ever before. The vast area devoted to agricultural crops is substantially larger than in the past. The extent of bleaching of corals is greater than at any time in recorded history. The area of deforested lands is bigger than ever before. In fact, the area of the rain forest the world loses every year is equal to the U.S. losing the state of Washington!

Not only are the scales larger, but the rates of changes are faster. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased dramatically since the Industrial Age began. Over the past century, humans have more than doubled the amount of nitrogen entering the global terrestrial nitrogen cycle. The two major natural sources are nitrogen-fixing organisms and lightning, but three human activities have more than doubled the total amount of nitrogen being fixed annually. The making of fertilizers, planting of legumes, and burning of fossil fuels have resulted in more than 140,000,000 metric tons of nitrogen being added to the continuing background amounts. According to one report, "Serious environmental consequences are already apparent. In the atmosphere concentrations of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide and of the nitrogen-precursors of smog and acid rain are increasing. Soils in many regions are being acidified and stripped of nutrients essential for continued fertility. The waters of streams and lakes in these regions are also being acidified, and excess nitrogen is being transported by rivers into estuaries and coastal waters. It is quite likely that this unaccustomed nitrogen loading has already caused long-term declines in coastal fisheries and accelerated losses of plant and animal diversity in both aquatic and land-based ecosystems."

The third major way in which environmental changes today differ from those of the past is in the new kinds of things humans introduce into the environment. The unanticipated destructive action of CFC compounds on the stratospheric ozone layer is a case in point. Other newer chemicals, such as a variety of pesticides, similarly have been problematic. For instance, 20,000 Swainson's hawks were discovered to have been killed by the use of an organophosphate insecticide sprayed on sunflower fields in La Pampa, Argentina, to control locusts. This is an illustration of the extent to which practices in one part of the world often have serious consequences elsewhere. Swainson's hawks migrate from Argentina to western Canada and the U.S., where they play important roles in controlling small mammal and rodent populations. Clearly, pollution or habitat degradation in one continent can have drastic consequences far afield, through what I term "biological teleconnections."

It no longer is sufficient to talk just about sustainable agriculture, sustainable forestry, or sustainable fisheries. It is the sustainability of the biosphere that is the proper concern. This is an entirely new world. The environmental changes occurring are so different in scale, rate, and kind from those of the past that history offers little insight into likely responses.

As we begin to appreciate the intimate fashion in which humans depend on the ecological systems of the planet, it will become increasingly obvious that numerous issues previously thought of as independent of the environment are, in fact, intimately connected to it. Accordingly, human health, the economy social justice, and even national security all are environmental issues.

It is obvious that the quality of drinking water and the air has a strong influence on human health. What may not be so obvious is the extent to which land-use practices affect infectious diseases such as cholera or malaria or the incidence of harmful algal blooms in coastal waters. Logging of forests usually is accompanied by the construction of roads. In Brazil, roads and the canals of stagnant water that accompany them provide prime conditions for the numerical increase of spatial expansion of populations of Anopheles mosquitoes, which are a vector for malaria. One consequence of logging in Amazonia has been the expansion of malaria from primarily a rural disease to one that also is urban. There is very real concern that climatic change would result in further expansion of this and other insect-borne diseases.

In many coastal regions, the influx of nutrients from runoff from upstream agricultural lands is exacerbated by the influx of nitrogenous compounds from human and livestock sewage. Rising frequency, extent, and duration of harmful algal blooms is correlated strongly with these increases in nutrient pollution in coastal waters. Many of these blooms are not toxic; others are quite nasty. Blooms of Pfiesteria dinoflagellate from North Carolina result in fish kills and cause human health problems ranging from amnesia to compromised immune systems to skin lesions. In the case of this dinoflagellate, there are strong correlations between the incidence of the blooms and the flushing of hog farm sewage into the Pamlico estuary during extreme rainfall events.

People have been told too often that they must choose between the economy and the environment. This "jobs vs. the environment" choice is a false dichotomy. The real choice is between short-term gain and long-term prosperity. Examples include the collapse of major economically important fisheries throughout the world, or the economic disruption caused by the accidental introduction of alien species such as the zebra mussel or the jellyfish-like Mnemiopsis, which, when introduced into the Black Sea in ballast water, caused the demise of a number of fish populations in the region. The insurance industry has been a leader in private-sector concern about climatic change, in part because their business demands a long-term perspective.

Social justice, too, is an environmental issue, as the costs of environmental degradation often are borne disproportionately by racially and economically disadvantaged groups. Intensive shrimp farming in Thailand and elsewhere brings economic benefit to large multinational corporations, but also destroys mangrove forests needed to provide food and fiber and ecosystem services such as water purification, sediment trapping, and flood control for indigenous peoples.

Even national security is being viewed increasingly as an environmental issue, with multiple connections between environmental quality and security ranging from migrations to war to competition for resources to ecoterrorism such as the burning of oil wells in Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War. Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher emphasized this perspective numerous times in the last few years, maintaining that "The environment has a profound impact on our national interest in two ways. First, environmental forces transcend borders and oceans to threaten directly the health, prosperity, and jobs of American citizens. Second, addressing natural resource issues is frequently critical to achieving political and economic stability and to pursuing our strategic goals around the world." He also pointed out that the U.S. needs to pay more attention to "safeguarding the global environment on which ... peace and prosperity ultimately depend."

It is vitally important to recognize the reasons why health, the economy, social justice, and national security are environmental issues. The link among them is that human well-being and prosperity depend upon diverse, functioning ecological systems. Most people do not appreciate the full range of essential goods and services provided by nature. While many are aware of the goods mankind gets from nature -- food, fiber, medicines, and genes -- they by and large are oblivious to the essential services provided by nature. The provision of oxygen, fertile soil, and pollinators; control of floods; regulation of climate; detoxification of pollutants; etc., are services which result from the functioning of ecological systems. As humans fill in wetlands, clear-cut forests, dynamite coral reefs, lose species, or introduce alien ones, the functioning of these systems often is disrupted or the system may be lost entirely.

These goods and services together provide the life support systems for life on Earth. It is a myth that mankind is independent of ecological systems. The explosive growth of the human population, the unsustainable rate of use of resources and generation of wastes, and increasing inequity, ignorance, apathy, inertia, and despair all contribute to a world in social and ecological crisis. As stated in the Sustainable Biosphere Initiative, "environmental problems resulting from human activities have begun to threaten the sustainability of Earth's life support systems. Among the most critical challenges facing humanity are the conservation, restoration and wise management of the Earth's resources."

Scientists' roles in addressing these issues are multiple and essential. One key task is providing data to help inform the dialogue. It is important to recognize that it is the role of society to set societal goals, but these goals and decisions about the means to achieve them should stem from the best possible information about current situations and likely outcomes of different options. Scientists educate, and a knowledgeable citizenry is essential to democratic decision-making. Scientists push the boundaries of their disciplines and discover new knowledge.

Because the world has changed, it is incumbent upon scientists to recognize and respond to these changes. Specifically, what is needed is a new social contract with science, one which is forward looking. The intense efforts that have been devoted to space, medicine, and defense are necessary to focus more intensely on the challenges that lie ahead. The planet desperately needs a more effective, interdisciplinary scientific effort on the environment. A new social contract must be predicated on the assumption that scientists will help address the challenges before society, by redirecting their efforts to the most serious situations. A chronic need is to make better use of scientific information, knowledge, and wisdom. All too many environmental policies are based on science of the 1950s, 1960s. and 1970s, not the science of the 1990s. Most efforts to address economic and social issues are totally devoid of ecological knowledge and wisdom.

It is time for the scientific community to take responsibility for the contributions required to address environmental problems. The environment is not a marginal issue; it is the issue of the future.

Dr. Lubchenco, Wayne and Gladys Valley Professor of Marine Biology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, is past president and chair of the Board of Directors, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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