viewpoint Barry Commoner Washinston University, Sr.Louis, M o .
Present benefits and future risks The nation has suddenly awakened to the fact that we are in a grim and potentially fatal environmental crisis. The enormous power of modern technology is stressing the environment, breaking vital links in the web of biological processes that sustain the ecological system in which we live. With this power we have acquired a new responsibility: to be prudent and conservative stewards of the thin global skin that sustains us and all who will follow us on this planet. In response, citizens are demanding new and more stringent rules to govern the balance between the benefits and risks of new technology. Public opinion has already defined limits to the risks which are acceptable in exchange for the benefits from a wide range of activities: driving a car, traveling in a train or an aircraft, skiing, working in an industrial plant or living near it. These are personal, voluntary acts. Other benefit-risk issues relate to large-scale social enterprises in which the risiks are involuntary. Chauncey Starr (Science 165, 1232, 1969) has evaluated the quantitative balance behvc:en the benefits and risks associated with such activitii:s which has in the past been accepted by the general Public. A striking result of his study is that for activitie s of equal benefit the public will accept a risk about 10,000 times higher when the activity is voluntary rathr:r than involuntary. Recent developmenIts attest to a new appreciation, on the part of the public, for the social, aesthetic, and moral value of an unpollu ted environment. In response to public demand, polluticm standards which have long ..... 1...-_..,. .been accepted without compiaint 1IMVC ocen IIIBUC: LUIIsiderably more rigorous. One explanation for this change is suggested by the ten thousandfold differencebetween the acceptable benefit-risk ratios of voluntary and involuntary activities. This reflects a more stringent public morality when action of some members of society impose a risk on others, who are given no choice in the matter. The new assaults on the environment considerably intensify this moral factor. I believe that the public has now become aware that environmental pollutants represent an assault by the present generation not merely on involuntaly living victims-who have some recourse, however difficulthut on generations not yet born, and thus defenseless. It is proper and fitting that acceptable levels of pollution should he established by public mores. While evaluation of the benefits to be derived from an insecticide or a power plant and an estimation of the resultant
environmental hazards require scientific analysis, the choice of the balance between benefit and risk does not. There is no way for science to determine that it is better to suffer a high rate of emphysema than it is to raise the taxes required for a pollution-free system of urban transportation. This is a social, political, and moral judgment. Like all such judgments, it belongs, in a democracy, not in the hands of experts, hut in the hands of the people. But how can the ordinary citizen exercise his judgment if he does not understand the technical facts that determine benefit and risk? This creates a new task for the scientific community: to provide, freely to the public, in understandable form, the scientific evidence relevant to the benefits of new technology and their environmental risks. Good beginnings have been made to meet this responsibility. For example, committees of scientists affiliated with the Scientists' Institute for Public Information have already made important contributions to public information about pollution problems: in Minneapolis and New York on reactor siting; in Rochester on water pollution; in Colorado on the hazards of nuclear operations; in California on pesticides; in St. Louis on the whole range of environmental issues through the magazine Environment. But this is only a small start. If this nation is to solve its massive environmental problems by democratic means, every citizen must be informed about the relevant benefits and hazards of the technological 71 :" SA.. rl_..-.~ ~ ~. .. .~ . I I I> ULC IUI LLIC CLMC Luulmunlry 01 sclentlsts to take up the task of environmental il -^^
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Director. Center for the
Volume 4, Number 8, August 1970
625
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