HENRY LANSFORD

Should The Public Make Public Policy?

I would like to begin by quoting from The New York Times for last March 28:

The public finally caught up with the supersonic transport last week But after the Senate voted 51-46 to cancel government support of the SST, there were some bitter recriminations. The public had been misinformed, the plane's supporters charged--and in any event, what business did the public have making such an important technological judgment?

. . . when the battle was over, Senator William Proxmire, the Wisconsin Democrat who had led the long uphill battle, interpreted the outcome simply: "I think it was the people. There was enough publicity so they got to know something about it."

A prominent aerospace banker in New York, who thought the project should have been continued even though it was too risky for private capital, commented: "You don't ask the man in the street who doesn't have any expertise to make a decision on this kind of thing."

Underlying the disagreement on the SST was the shared sense that consulting the public had been decisive, and that a new mode of decision-making had been fashioned in the process.

I am aware that the decision to cancel government support of the SST program was not a simple one, and that many of you undoubtedly would disagree with me and with each other about whether or not the best decision was made. But my present concern is not with the decision itself, but with the process by which it was made. The news story that I just quoted raises two important questions: first, did the public have any business participating in this decision, and, second, was the public (and the Congress) provided with the necessary information to make a wise and considered decision?

The principal issues that were raised about the SST program had to do with the cost of developing the supersonic transport and with possible environmental damage that might result from SST operations. It is difficult for me to see how anyone can seriously maintain that we, the people who collectively comprise that great clumsy animal known as the public, should not have had a voice in deciding whether or not to continue public support of the program. We were being asked to foot the bill and to live with any adverse environmental effects, and I don't think that we were exactly "consulted" about the decision--it was more that we hollered so loud that we had to be heard.

I think that the Times writer is wrong in saying that the SST defeat fashioned a new mode of decision-making. I see it as another example of a decision-making process that has been developing over the past several years, based on the premise that the individual citizen should participate in decisions that affect the quality of the environment in which he lives. Although the SST was defeated in Congress for economic as well as environmental reasons, it was really the prospect of environmental damage that brought the public into the fight. It was the same sort of battle that has been waged over building dams in the Grand Canyon, continuing the unrestricted use of DDT and other dangerous pesticides, and other issues that involve the possibility of serious environmental consequences. The public has decided that such decisions are too important to be left to the experts, and, like it or not, the policy-makers are going to have to listen to what the public has to say about such issues.

Educating Environmental Decision-Makers

This brings us to the second question: did the experts provide Congress and the public with the scientific knowledge they needed to make an educated decision? SST supporters in government and industry have cried "bread and circuses," charging that the legislators and the public made an emotional and irrational mob decision, while environmentalists maintain that the defeat of the SST was a triumph for the forces of reason and sanity.

How did the legislators and the public get most of their information about the SST during the last critical weeks before the program was voted down? House and Senate committee hearings produced a great deal of impassioned testimony both for and against the SST, and most of us got our information from news stories about those hearings.

The news coverage, at least in the papers I read, included such germane information as an account of an exchange between Arthur Godfrey, the noted detergent salesman and conservationist, and Gordon Allott, senior senator from Colorado. Godfrey testified that many times, while on hunting trips in the Colorado Rockies, he had seen the sky clouded over by midmorning with contrails laid down by jet aircraft. Senator Allott responded that he had lived in Colorado all his life and had never seen such a thing happen, and besides, he didn't believe in damaging the environment by shooting wild animals. This edifying discussion closed with a contribution from Senator Cotton of New Hampshire: "As a point of personal privilege, both of you are dead wrong. The most beautiful spot in the country isn't in the Rockies. It is in the White Mountains of New Hampshire."

The news stories on the House hearings were equally educational. Prof. James McDonald, of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona, advanced the hypothesis that the SST might increase the incidence of skin cancer by destroying atmospheric ozone and allowing more ultraviolet radiation to reach the earth's surface. This testimony was rebutted by Rep. Silvio Conte of Massachusetts, who recalled that McDonald had testified at House hearings in 1968 that "humanoid occupants" of UFOs had been sighted and that they may have made "limited contact" with humans. According to the Associated Press, Conte then observed: "When a man comes around telling me that SSTs are going to cause skin cancer, he's got to back up his theory that little men are flying around in tin cans."

I admit that I have chosen some extreme examples to make the point that there is a good deal of the atmosphere of the circus in some Congressional hearings. However, the news stories also included accounts of testimony by Dr. S. Fred Singer, chairman of the SST Environmental Advisory Committee; Dr. William W. Kellogg of my own institution, the National Center for Atmospheric Research; and other expert witnesses who presented thoughtful statements unaccompanied by performances for the grandstand. I am not attacking the institution of Congressional hearings or the way in which the media covered the SST hearings. My point is simply that such hearings and the media coverage that they receive constitute a somewhat less than perfect mechanism for educating policy-makers and the public about enormously complex and critically important environmental issues such as the impact of the supersonic transport on the atmosphere. The decision to cut off government support for the SST program may have been right and it may have been wrong, but I cannot accept it as a rational decision based on careful evaluation of complete and correct information.

Are New Institutions Needed?

The Congressional hearings and news stories were not the only ways in which information about the SST was disseminated, of course. The issues were discussed in articles by professional scientists and science writers, on television talk shows, by speakers at service club luncheons, in classrooms and seminars, and throughout many other media and institutions. Yet I still doubt that most of the people, private citizens and policy-makers alike, really were adequately educated about the environmental issues that were involved. In a way, the decision was made in terms of bread and circuses: the bread that the people were asked to give up to the program and the circuses that were performed in the hearing rooms on Capitol Hill.

Do we need new institutions that are constituted so they can marshal the latest and best scientific knowledge on environmental issues and present it such a way that it can be understood and applied by the public and decision-makers in government and other centers of power? Many influential people believe that we do, and specific proposals have been made to establish such institutions.

One such institution may be the Institute for Environmental Studies proposed in 1970 by a study group of the National Academy of Sciences. It would be independent of the government and supported with both government and private funds. One of its major jobs would be to support environmental policy-making by "carrying out imaginative, objective, and accurate studies and defining their results in a cogent and reasonable manner to the public, Congress, and the Executive Branch of the government." The institute's staff would include economists, sociologists, lawyers, architects, social psychologists, and political scientists, as well as ecologists, biologists, physicians, and chemists. As I write this, the National Science Foundation and a large private foundation are discussing the establishment of this institute.

Another institution of this sort is the Inter-American Institute of Ecology, incorporated earlier this year. This institute is described as "devoted both to ecological science and to the process that leads from that science to social action." In addition to divisions devoted to field and laboratory research, numerical modeling, information resources, and other functions that are included in many existing institutions, the Inter-American Institute of Ecology will include a division of policy research to "help bridge the gap between fundamental ecological knowledge and responsible public policy" and a division of education and communication to develop "effective two-way communication between ecologists and the public at large." The planners of the institute envision the most pressing problem of this latter group as "the establishment of two-way communication with persons responsible for decisions involving the environment--such persons as legislators, administrators at all levels of government, businessmen, labor union leaders, educational administrators, and others."

As new institutions progress from planning to reality, not all of the concepts that were envisioned by their planners necessarily become concrete elements of the operating institutions. Perhaps the two that I have mentioned will fill the needs that their planners judged to be pressing reasons for their creation. Perhaps they will be no more effective than existing institutions. The important point, I think, is that new institutions clearly are needed to help bridge the gap that now divides the people who generate new knowledge about the environment from those who badly need that knowledge as a basis for shaping sound and responsible public policy.

Return to Professional Papers

---

This site is hosted by the National Association of Science Writers