Scientific innovation and environmental protection: some ethical considerations.

• Author: Rose, Carol M.

Scientific research efforts and the technological innovations that follow from them are among the hallmarks of our age. Indeed, in large measure, progress in scientific knowledge and technology is exactly what people mean by the term "progress" more generally. Like every other aspect of life in the twenty-first century, the natural environment is greatly affected by science. This fact necessarily has ethical implications, and those implications are in turn the subject of this essay.

I do not open with an empty slate, of course, because others have written on this important subject of the relationship between science and environmental ethics. I can begin with two viewpoints that I do not share, but that are important all the same in the literature of environmental ethics, because they frame the debate by setting markers on opposite ends of the spectrum.

One of these viewpoints is perhaps best expressed by Peter Huber, himself both a lawyer and an engineer, and now a frequent writer on environmental legal subjects. (1) Huber presents scientific and technological innovation as overwhelmingly beneficial to the environment. Newer technologies, he argues, are generally--if not universally--safer than the old ones they replace. (2) One major reason, he says, is that newer technologies tend to concentrate rather than disperse risks, and concentrated risks can be managed more efficiently, cheaply, and less dangerously than risks that are decentralized. (3) On this argument, large industrial plants should be much safer for employees than widely dispersed smaller mills because the larger units' practices can be observed, regulated, and regularized more easily. Pollution control should be similar: Large centralized utilities are more amenable to pollution reduction than, say, individual household coal or wood fires, again because the large plants' emissions can be observed, detoxified, and monitored in a way that takes advantage of scale economies. (4)

A very different viewpoint argues that modern scientific innovation is inherently anti-environmental. A chief proponent of this view is Carolyn Merchant, who writes on the history of scientific thought. One of her primary works is The Death of Nature, (5) which traces the impact on the environment of the seventeenth-century revolution in scientific thought. She argues that since the seventeenth century, the central attitude of scientific endeavor has been one of conquest--nature has to be dominated rather than treated with respect and sympathy. (6) Merchant's argument is a kind of testosterone theory of modern science, complete with a gendered set of attitudes, with nature playing the role of the conquered female. (7) Quite aside from the gender issue, however, Merchant holds modern science accountable for some very serious damage to the environment, and more fundamentally, to our ways of even thinking about the environment. In her view, the modern understanding of science has privileged technological fixes over more modest efforts to live in harmony with nature. It has elevated the sense of sight--cool, distant, and instantaneously synoptic--over the more engaged and time-sensitive senses of hearing and touching, where understanding emerges over time through intimate connection; by the same token, modern science has encouraged deterministic reasoning to triumph over more narrative, contingent, and humanistic understandings of the world. (8) In sum, this machismo-laden understanding of science results in an attitude that applauds a heedless and triumphalist trashing of the earth and its natural structures. (9)

For a variety of reasons, I am a little skeptical of both viewpoints. First, it seems to me that people in science have enormously varied attitudes about the subjects on which they work. Moreover, both Merchant's and Huber's viewpoints have some convincing elements, and thus each casts some doubt on the other. Undoubtedly, as Huber argues, science has delivered to us vastly better means for monitoring and controlling environmental harms. But it is also true, as Merchant argues, that scientific knowledge has enabled some of the very same harms to come into being in the first place. Hence it is important to take seriously the ethical implications of scientific investigation for environmental well being, particularly the idea that scientific research may run in directions that are at best tangential--and at worst opposite--to those of environmental well being.

Legal theorists have identified one approach that may be particularly relevant to this inquiry into the potentially divergent directions between science and the environment. That approach has information as its subject matter, and considers information as an economic good. The idea is that in a certain sense information is a scarce good, and, as is the case with other scarce goods, the production of information responds to patterns of supply and demand. (10)

On this approach, one can think of scientific research as a producer of a kind of information. To be sure, the type of scientific research under discussion here may not be the deepest and most basic science--the science that goes so deep as to overlap with cosmology or metaphysics. According to all reports, science at this most basic level has no utilitarian aims. Its pursuit is motivated by sheer love of learning--philosophia as the ancient Greeks said--or perhaps also by the quest for fame among others in the same areas of pure inquiry. But that is not the kind of scientific research at stake in this discussion. Of much greater interest is the class of scientific research efforts, and the technological pursuits that follow, that do have some expected uses, even though those uses may be remote.

Even with this kind of technological research, it is easy to believe that researchers are largely motivated by sheer curiosity and sheer love of learning--or simply by the fun of the research. (11) But where practical gains can be made from scientific or technological knowledge, investment is likely to lubricate the research enterprise. And investment is the link between scientific research and the economics of information.

For example, the general press reported in early 1999 that a team of Harvard scientists had figured out how to slow the speed of light to the quite amazing rate of about thirty-eight miles per hour. (12) Two years later they reportedly stopped light altogether, at least for a very brief moment. (13) It is hard to believe that these researchers did their work just for the money rather than for the enormous excitement of learning. But whatever the scientists' motivations, some investors are likely to notice that there are practical applications of this slowing down or stopping of light--for example, making supercomputers that operate vastly more rapidly and with much-enhanced security. (14) This means that further research into the slowing of light is highly likely to attract funding. Grants, graduate student theses, papers, conferences, and more intense research efforts are likely to follow.

Here too, I should say that I see nothing the matter with this pattern as a matter of principle. People make money from information all the time. For example, people who research business management and strategies use the information to make money in the stock market, and their purchases and sales send signals to the rest of us about firm value. Indeed, our contract law encourages people to make efforts to acquire information not just casually, but deliberately. (15) On balance, it is undoubtedly a good thing that there are economic rewards for seeking information, because economic incentives can powerfully generate useful information, as well as powerfully slash misinformation. Hence I think it inappropriate to complain about the intrusion of mammon into scientific research--economic incentives are not undesirable as such, and they are probably inevitable under any circumstances.

A matter of considerably greater concern, however, is the proportion among the types of scientific information that result from economic incentives. More specifically, the problem is one of lopsidedness of information, in a shape that does not favor the environment. Consider the subjects that generate investment: All other things being equal, economic considerations are likely to move a greater quantity of funds, and at a more rapid pace, toward scientific and technological knowledge that can be applied toward private property and hence create more wealth for particular individuals or entities. A lesser quantity will move--and move more slowly--toward the environmental damages that these projects may cause. For example, given the ever-increasing market for automobiles, it is scarcely an accident that vast amounts of technological research went into the development and refinement of the internal combustion engine. But many years passed before anyone paid attention to the relationship between those engines and smog, with all its ill-effects on human health and environmental amenity. (16)

Why this disproportion? What is the reason for this information gap or lag with respect to environmental consequences? One major reason is the unpropertied character of environmental resources, and hence their inability to generate individual wealth. It is widely agreed that environmental resources are almost by definition those that do not belong to anyone in particular--a point routinely noted in the legal scholarship on environmental matters. (17) Consider the air mantle, flowing waters, groundwater, the oceans, the ozone layer, wildlife and fish stocks, and similarly diffuse resources. Who owns them? Can they be owned at all, or should they be? On the latter point of "should," it is almost a point of pride among some environmental ethicists that no one really owns such things. Nature and nature's creatures, it is said, are things in themselves--things that should be independent of the...