Last month we noted that much environmental science is reductionist and thus supported by traditional scientific methodology. But there is a second type of environmental science that involves highly complex systems, where the basic knowledge base is not yet mature or stable, or indeed adequate, and where the only tools available are themselves highly complex and far from transparent.

Let’s call these areas nonreductionist environmental science, or NES. NES can involve everything from epidemiological studies to identify subtle effects in populations with numerous confounding factors, to estimates of loss of biodiversity, to models that predict the effects of global climate change. In almost all cases such science cannot be falsified or replicated, is not testable by experiment, and is not transparent to the uninitiated.

Because it cannot be falsified, NES begins with a more difficult burden of consistently demonstrating objectivity, rather than biasing results for ideological reasons. This burden is all the heavier because the policy recommendations drawn from NES – for land use, reduced economic activity, limited consumption and development – are often frequently at odds with such traditional desirable policy assumptions as economic growth. Those adversely affected by such policy recommendations are likely to demand a high level of proof before they acquiesce to them. Their skepticism may be magnified by a recognition that many environmental scientists are drawn to their field through a self-selection process that includes a strong sense of impending environmental disaster, and thus may already have a worldview that makes them prone to conflate the normative with the objective.

It does not help that NES is inevitably used by environmentalists as primary ammunition to advance their positions and policy prescriptions as privileged over any others – jobs, economic performance, development, or the like. This process tends to reposition science as a subfield of policy. For example, the deep-green eco-theologian Thomas Berry writes that “Ecologists recognize that reducing the planet to a resource base for consumer use in an industrial society is already a spiritual and psychic degradation… To the ecologists, the entire question of possession or use of the earth, either by individuals or by establishments, needs to be profoundly reconsidered.” While NES practitioners obviously don’t control what commentators say, the effect is nonetheless corrosive of perceived scientific objectivity.

Perhaps more problematic is the perception that NES performed by environmental regulators and governments, as much of it is, is biased towards supporting preconceived policy goals. Thus a Resources for the Future study (Science at EPA: Information in the Regulatory Process, 1999) quotes a US EPA official that “It’s hard to avoid being perceived as an intellectual gadfly or snob when you understand your mission to be cajoling [EPA] program offices into taking science seriously and not playing games with the numbers to prop up a political position.” And recently, Nature (417:678) reported that an independent scientific review by Germany’s science council of the Wuppertal Institute – one of the leading environmental research and policy institutions in Europe – “slammed” it for “selective” results, and recommended that it no longer receive public money unless the objectivity of its research improved.

It is probably too strong to suggest that there is a crisis of faith regarding NES, though the outcome of the Kyoto process suggests that possibility. But it is not too strong to recognize that as NES continues to expand into industrial ecology, “sustainability science,” and the like, it increasingly jeopardizes its validity to the extent it fails to rigorously observe the critical difference between scientific and normative approaches, especially in highly contentious public debate. Existing policies and practices, like all social institutions, have a great deal of inertia and powerful forces supporting them; if they are to be changed, it will require equally powerful challenges. The more NES is understood to be normative and partisan, rather than objective – the more it is seen as ideological rather than scientific, especially in method – the less likely such change will be.

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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.