That challenging and almost insulting question (at least, to an environmental scientist such as myself) arose in a seminar last year. I managed to ignore it until another recent meeting raised it about the related field of industrial ecology.

Is the “purpose” of industrial ecology to support sustainability or to conduct objective research that may be used, among other things, to reduce the environmental impact of industries and economies?

Is the “purpose” of environmental science to perceive and validate new knowledge or to impose normative institutions and futures on society — for example, by forcing society to be “sustainable”?

Is “sustainability science,” announced in Science magazine and now headquartered among other places at Harvard, a science or an ideology — and does it matter? Is there a “science” in “environmental science”? A couple of columns, while not providing definitive answers, may help reach some worthwhile conclusions.

To begin, we may reject the traditional view of science as a purely objective discourse. This view was pretty firmly laid to rest by Kuhn, who, in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pointed out that science, like any human activity, reflects its time and place. Thus, for example, environmental science has flourished in the past few decades because “the environment” has become increasingly important for society.

But there is a important methodological difference between science and other discourses that does make it unique: scientific hypotheses, theories, and facts must be falsifiable, and scientific disciplines put a high premium on being as objective as humanly possible. In the words of Bertrand Russell, “In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings.” Thus, science does not preclude normative activities by scientists — but it does expect them to separate their normative from their scientific activities, especially as regards methodology and data generation.

This insistence on differentiating the normative from the objective is especially important because in modern society the amount of information is so overwhelming that individuals, no matter how educated, cannot test most scientific statements. We must take a considerable amount on faith. I haven’t the faintest idea how to design a Boeing 747, how an Internet router works, or whether a climate scientist’s model results are predictive. But I take them on faith, and on what operational tests I can manage: the 747 flies, the Internet delivers data to my computer, and the environmental science community supports the climate conclusions. Ironically, in the age of reason we have come to rely on faith to an unprecedented degree.

Faith may be justifiable. Much environmental science is reductionist: based on specific tests of particular materials, for example. It can be replicated and I am entitled to believe it because, if it is fraudulent, it will be falsified when people cannot replicate the claims. Thus, a claim by one researcher that salmon species prosper in water contaminated with heavy metal can be rapidly falsified by others performing the same or similar research.

In other words, the scientific process and its institutions — including peer review and publication in professional journals — operates with reductionist science to validate its objectivity. With this type of environmental science, then, I am comfortable in asserting that it is scientific: where results are based on bad technique, fraud, or ideology, the methodology of science will eventually expose it.

The field may be culturally contingent (environmental science is popular now because the environment is) and research projects chosen for normative reasons (I study toxic metals because I think there’s a problem), but the results and the data are, thanks primarily to the scientific method, valid. Can I, however, have the same confidence in the second fundamental type of environmental science, which I will call nonreductionist environmental science ? That’s the next question, and the next column.

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Brad Allenby is VP, Environment, Health and Safety at AT&T; an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the University of Virginia Engineering School; and Batten Fellow at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. The opinions expressed are those of the author, and not necessarily of any institution with which he is associated.