Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
joined protestors who called for a reduction in the more than $43 mil-
lion per year the institution received from the Department of Defense.
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On March 4, 1969, a group of graduate students and distinguished profes-
sors held a work stoppage to highlight the threat posed to humankind by
“the misuse of scientific and technical knowledge.”
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At Stanford, Denis
Hayes— later a key coordinator of the first Earth Day, and a character who
will reappear in a very different context in chapter 5— helped take over an
applied electronics laboratory that conducted classified defense research.
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According to a
Physics Today
study published in 1972, four out of five physi-
cists surveyed disapproved of conducting classified research on university
campuses and opposed Nixon's actions in Vietnam.
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Objections to the Vietnam War often entwined with scientists' envi-
ronmental concerns. The American Association for the Advancement
of Science (AAAS), the United States' largest scientific society, passed
a series of resolutions between 1965 and 1972 that encouraged a peace-
ful resolution of the Vietnam War, called for a study of environmental
modification techniques used in the war effort, and finally denounced
both the use of biological and chemical weapons and the war itself.
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Scientists' concern for the environment provided a platform from which
to criticize other scientists' roles in creating technologies that served
the war effort.
The generation of atmospheric scientists that had overseen the tremen-
dous growth of their discipline during the aerospace boom of the 1950s and
1960s— Roger Revelle, Walt Roberts, William Kellogg, and others— genu-
inely worried about the impacts of technological change on both humans
and their environments, but they also understood environmental issues
in utilitarian terms. While an FBI file on Roberts from the 1940s and 1950s
identified the director as sympathetic to left-leaning causes, atmospheric
scientists in 1970 were on the whole less radical than some of their coun-
terparts in particle physics, biology, and environmental science. They saw
environmental problems less as fundamental social issues than as scien-
tific challenges. As scientists, they sought to identify the component parts
and find solutions. Most atmospheric scientists investigated the super-
sonic transport's effects on the atmosphere not as a way to undercut the
project but as a first step in making the plane better. The second step,
they believed, would be to mitigate harmful effects through a better SST
design.
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