As for the future, your task is not to foresee, but to enable it. Antoine de Saint- Exupery, The Wisdom of the Sands

I contend that it is time for scientists, who are among the brightest, most educated and best informed people in the world, to take a more holistic and activist role in defining and changing our global trajectory. We must not just forecast it, as if we were innocent and powerless bystanders along for the ride -- we are neither! We must help change it.

It is a truism that the atmosphere and the oceans do not respect political boundaries; they connect the environments of all regions of the earth.Thus the people of the United States or any other country cannot be assured environmental security unless the rich and poor of the world address cooperatively issues of population growth, industrial practice, land and energy use, poverty and environmental degradation. While there is fear among many that something is terribly wrong with the direction we are presently heading, there is a consensus among even those most concerned that this direction is changeable, though the change will require major shifts of values, attitudes and morals on the part of individuals and governments. Moving our current trajectory from one headed toward smothering overpopulation, stark poverty, rampant disease and famine, and environmental ruin toward a target of an equitable and sustainable global society with a decent quality of life for everyone will require an unprecedented level of effort and sacrifice by individuals, and by governmental, academic, private and religious institutions throughout the world. Fine tuning or "muddling along" will not work. It's a tough job, but everybody must do it. Global survivability is not a spectator sport.

In Tom Malone's concept of tithing, each scientist would devote some fraction of his or her research time to becoming informed on human development issues and to participating in policy-relevant or strategic research. This will not be an easy change for some scientists, who tend to be conservative in many respects. We emphasize uncertainties in our knowledge rather than certainties. Some of us treat science, particularly the "hard" sciences as pure and everything else including "soft" sciences, applied science, engineering, politics and policy making as intellectually inferior activities. We generally avoid using science to influence the public or leaders of society and those that do, like Paul Ehrlich, Steve Schneider, or Carl Sagan, to give three examples, are often criticized strongly by colleagues.

Difficult as it may be, there must be change; the scientific and political systems and cultures in the United States and elsewhere are so dissimilar that the amazing increase in knowledge produced by the research done over the past several decades has had far less of a positive impact than its potential. Congressman Brown, in an address to a meeting of Sigma Xi on March 12, states it eloquently "The siren song of scientific objectivity can draw us onto the rocks of legislative inaction, by creating rhetorical gridlock, on the one hand, and by perpetuating the illusory expectation of better prediction through more research, on the other"(Brown 1993). Referring to the efficacy of communication between scientists and policy makers, Brown goes on to say "Science advice to Congress often falls on deaf ears because it is not user friendly. In a vain effort to be accurate, measured, unbiased, and comprehensive, science advice can also be irrelevant, impractical, untimely, and incomprehensible."

We must also be aware that increased scientific understanding, even to the point of near certainty, does not guarantee that the knowledge will be used by policy makers, the private sector, or by the public, all of whom make decisions based upon many other factors than level of scientific knowledge. Ludwig et al. (1993) point out that scientific certainty and consensus in itself does not prevent over exploitation of resources and environmentally destructive activities. They provide as an example the use of irrigation in arid lands and the inevitable degradation of the soil through salification. Approximately 3000 years ago in Sumer, the once highly productive wheat crop had to be replaced by less-productive barley because barley was more salt- resistant and, through irrigation, the soil had become too salty for wheat. In 1899 E. W. Hilgard pointed out that the effects of irrigation in California would be similar. His warnings were not heeded; thus 3000 years of experience and a thorough scientific understanding of the process did not prevent a repeat of an environmentally destructive activity. Thus, more research and less scientific uncertainty will not necessarily address the environmental problems of today or the future. In fact, the call by many for more research may be used by others to avoid or delay dealing directly with difficult and sensitive problems.

Walt Roberts, the founder of UCAR and NCAR, believed strongly in the concept of "science in the service of society." Behind Walt's concept and Tom Malone's notion of tithing is the assumption that there is much socially useful research that scientists can do. I suggest that atmospheric scientists ask themselves the following question: If I were to be 100% successful in my research, would it contribute in any positive way to society? Any negative way? Is there any way to modify the project to increase the probability of positive impacts, and decrease the probability of negative ones? These questions clearly require conscious consideration of values and ethics in the scientific process.

I believe the call for scientists to devote an increasing fraction of their efforts toward solving global environmental problems, and the choice made by many scientists to follow, on their own, Walt Roberts "science in the service of society" path, will lead to a new paradigm for environmental science. I list some probable characteristics of this paradigm in Table 3. (As an aside, it is interesting to note that the history of operational numerical weather prediction has already followed, to a great extent, this paradigm).

Table 3

CHARACTERISTICS OF FUTURE SCIENCE

• Increasingly goal oriented
• Increasingly whole-problem oriented
• More pragmatic
• Interdisciplinary
• Collaborative
• Distributed
• Will tolerate greater uncertainty
• Education and training of students of all ages and the general public
• Greater component of technology transfer
• Closer interactions with policy makers
• Will consider values and ethics to greater extent

However, for scientists to be effective in solving goal-oriented problems, it is necessary that society develop well-articulated goals. We need simple yet profound environmental goals analogous to the goal President Kennedy set in 1960:

I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth."

The environment is a strong candidate for a compelling new organizing principle for the nation and the world. Following the environmental revolution, a sustainable environment should be a unifying vision of all people forever.

Examples of the actions that many believe are necessary parts of an environmental revolution include:

1. Set realistic but meaningful national and global goals, and establish policies and incentives to meet these goals. An overall goal should be to get the planet on a sustainable trajectory, one that plans for and ensures the environmental security of future generations.

2. Develop new national and global priorities. Redirect scarce resources from, for example, the military, extravagant and meaningless health care for a few, expensive and marginally effective environmental regulation, excessive litigation and size of settlements, to, for example, education, reduction of poverty, contraception, and development of energy conservation and other environmentally benign technologies. Figures 3 and 4 show military and health spending statistics, while 5 and 6 demonstrate the size of entitlement programs and the Federal deficit. The deficit is depicted even more graphically in Figure 7 which shows the annual deficit from 1947 through 1992.

3. Monitor and publish widely and on a regular basis objective indicators of environmental trends on all scales, as we now do with economic and political trends. In monitoring and accounting for progress, development and growth, assign realistic values to the environment and natural resources such as minerals, energy, topsoil and forests. In accounting for quality of life, account for extinction of plant and animal species, health costs of air and water pollution, increased UV radiation, etc.

4. Improve the education, standard of living, human rights, especially the rights of women, in all parts of the world.

5. Educate the public about global environmental issues.

Emphasize what we know rather than what we do not know. A society that doesn't understand exponential growth in a finite world cannot be expected to make sacrifices and wise decisions.

6. Stabilize population on all scales -- individuals, families, cities, regions, nations, the world. Table 4 shows what some countries are already doing in this direction.

Table 4

References