Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
public in studying and protecting the global atmosphere. This absence
would persist until relatively recently in the history of global warming poli-
tics. America's mainstream environmental organizations relied on broad,
middle-class grassroots support in their public campaigns to influence
domestic environmental policy. Scientists instead sought to gain influence
among high-level bureaucrats and government officials at organizations
associated with the United Nations, whom they hoped would sponsor the
research that would ultimately underpin sound environmental policies.
The SCEP and SMIC reports did gain a popular audience, and a related
work,
The Limits to Growth,
became an international bestseller thanks in
part to its release during the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environ-
ment. But while these works certainly had polemical elements, they did not
call on the public at large to take action, nor did they call on people to rally
around or against specific sectors in business or government.
Atmospheric scientists were themselves largely middle class, and many
participated in America's environmental organizations. But as a group they
actively sought to divorce their personal values from their professional
opinions, and this shaped their approach to the atmospheric environment.
They couched their discussions of potential threats to the global atmo-
sphere in the equivocal language of scientific uncertainty, and their calls
for action largely targeted government officials and scientific elites who
controlled the budgets and agendas of science itself. The scientists believed
that more and better science would inform appropriate policy discussions,
in which they did not need to take sides.
Scientists' commitments to objectivity and political neutrality contin-
ued to limit the extent of their advocacy in the early 1970s. Their cautious
scientific concerns about atmospheric change failed to capture the interest
of America's major environmental organizations in a significant way until
the 1980s, and even then, scientists directed their appeals more toward gov-
ernments and other scientists than toward the public at large. As a result,
scientific concern over changes to the earth's atmosphere and climate initi-
ated by the supersonic transport grew into a distinct— but not altogether
separate— form of environmental activism guided more by the professional
values of science than by the middle-class consumer values at the heart of
mainstream American environmentalism. Only as environmentalism itself
became more global and more scientific did atmospheric change become a
central concern of America's professional environmentalists.
