Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Council, environmental organizations began to focus on congressional
lobbying and legal action in response to immediate affronts to local and
regional environments. Their strategy was one of reaction. Laboring dili-
gently to influence new legislation and uphold the standards of existing
laws in order to counteract corporate and governmental environmental
transgressions, environmentalists planned future strategies of environ-
mental protection based on existing or immediate environmental hazards.
Because of their uncertainties, rising atmospheric CO
2
and ozone deple-
tion— what Michael McCloskey referred to as “first-generation issues”—
had not yet germinated into tangible threats, and therefore, garnered little
in the way of strategic planning or fund-raising.
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Meanwhile, concerned climate scientists worked within rather than
against executive bureaucracies. They were generally unburdened by the
immediate needs of public constituencies, and they sought to illuminate
the potential risks of what NCAR social scientist Mickey Glantz referred to
as “those low-grade, but continually increasing, insults to the environment
for which pluralistic society (the national as well as international com-
munity) has not yet found an effective policy-making process.”
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Rather
than reacting to the impacts of climatic change, many of these scientists
believed, governments and societies should work to preempt environmen-
tal catastrophe through mitigation and adaptation. Theirs was a gospel of
preparedness.
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Through the National Climate Program Act, the National
Academy of Sciences, and the joint DOE-AAAS workshops, climate sci-
entists worked to incorporate climate change into government policy from
the inside out.
Scientists and environmentalists also differed over the relative priori-
ties of economic development and environmental protection. Echoing the
early twentieth-century debate between “conservationists” like Theodore
Roosevelt and his Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot and “preservation-
ists” like Sierra Club icon John Muir, environmental leaders of the 1970s,
including McCloskey, David Brower, and Thomas Kimball, saw a funda-
mental tension between rapid economic development and the health of
the natural environment.
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“While I think we should be very sensitive and
understanding with respect to the need for economic advancement by the
poverty-stricken,” wrote McCloskey shortly after the 1972 U.N. Confer-
ence on the Human Environment, “I think that we are not in a position
to be emphatic in stating that the two goals are entirely compatible. On
