mm Reconsidering Sustainable Development Reviewed by Allan Mazur A η éléphant, enviously watching a £^ mouse scamper back and forth JL J L through a tiny hole in the wall, said to the mouse: "I too would like to walk through your mouse hole. How may I do it?" "That's easy," answered the mouse. "Make yourself as small as I am." "But how do I do that?" asked the éléphant. "Listen," said the mouse, "I just supply the basic idea. You hâve to work out the détails." But détails can be elusive. Perhaps as hard as shrinking an éléphant is reaching the goal called sustainable development, where humankind takes from Earth what is needed without at the same time ruining the environment beyond repair. During the 1960s and 1970s, as U.S. and Western European concerns about industrial pollution grew, they collided head-on with the ambitions of Third World nations to accelerate the exploitation of natural resources so thèse nations also could enjoy the fruits of the industrial âge—material progress, éducation, better health, modern entertainment, the good life. Faced with thèse seemingly incompatible aims, the United Nations World Commission on Environment & Development addressed the problem in its 1987 study "Our Common Future/' The UN's solution, rather like the mouse's, is to exploit Earth without hurting it, to pursue industrial development for the benefit of ail people, but to do so in a sustainable way without damaging the environment. The phrase "sustainable development" has since gained currency, although no one seems sure what it means or how it can be accomplished, and critics charge that it is an oxymoron without substance. To his crédit, Kai Ν. Lee, director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Williams Collège, Williamstown, Mass., plays the rôle of the éléphant and gets right to the point, asking in "Compass and Gyroscope: Integrating Science and Politics for the Environment," "How 26
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Science and the créative forces of political conflicts are offiéred as key tools in pursuing evasive, and perhaps surrealistic, goals "Compass and Gyroscope: Integrating Science and Politics for the Environment," by Kai Ν. Lee, Island Press, 1718 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 300, Washington, D.C. 20009,1993,243 pag es, $25 do we do it?" Unfortunately, readers may believe, as I do, that he plays the mouse as well, leaving crucial détails unspecified. Lee's plan is to use science and democracy—his metaphorical compass and gyroscope—as navigational aids on the voyage toward sustainability. He does not tell us where on the horizon we will find our goal, but he believes it is better to sail with navigational tools than to sail blindly. Surely, no one would disagree. Lee's compass, his application of sci-
ence "to understand far better the relationship between humans and nature," is called adaptive management, which he defines as "treating économie uses of nature as experiments, so that we may learn efficiently from expérience." Lee attributes this strategy to a séries of ecologists whose papers I hâve not read and also to the eminent social psychologist Donald Campbell, whose work I know better. For décades, Campbell has advocated that social policies—for example, state laws requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets—be evaluated for their effects. If the policies are found useful, they can be applied more broadly; if found useless, they can be discontinued, saving administrative costs (and, in the case of helmet wearing, removing a restriction on personal freedom). To evaluate such policies in the most rigorous sensé requires a controlled experiment where, for example, 25 randomly designated states enact and enforce a helmet law while the other 25 do not. One would then compare several years of motorcyclist fatalities in both sets of states to see if the helmet law reduces the death rate. Recognizing the impediments to carrying out such an experiment, Campbell has worked out with great sophistication and explicit detail alternative research designs that approach the validity of a true experiment but are more feasible to pursue. One such design starts out by taking the motorcycle fatality rates in states that hâve a helmet law and comparing them with those in states without this law. A différence in death rates, if there is one, cannot be attributed with confidence to the helmet law, because states with the law weren't randomly selected and may differ from states without the law in other ways that affect motorcycle fatality rates. For example, states with the law may also enforce speeding laws more strictly. By comparing fatality rates in thèse states, before and after the law was enacted, one can find out whether death rates dropped immediately after the law was imposed. However, some extraneous factor, cor-
related in time, could be the real cause of fewer fatalities—perhaps motorcycle brakes were improved at about the time the helmet law was enacted. To find out whether such a factor is involved, look at whether states without the law also experienced fewer fatalities. Then détermine whether among states with the law, those with strict enfoncement and a high rate of compliance have fewer fatalities than those with lax enforcement and poor compliance. Using Campbell's System for checking and cross-checking, the efficacy of the policy can be tested pretty well, if not with the rigor of a true experiment. This is the crux of Lee's adaptive management, though his book is not as clear a methodological guide as CampbeU's "Expérimental and Quasi-experimental Designs for Research" (Rand McNally, Chicago, 1966). Through such methods, we have learned that the efficacy of a policy may have little to do with its enactment. For example, sociologist Leon Robertson has demonstrated that driver éducation courses for high school students are ineffective, or worse. Students who take thèse courses have no better safety records than those who don't. In some states, teenagers who have passed driver éducation are allowed to drive a year earlier than their age-mates who have not taken the course. In gênerai, the fatality rate among very young drivers is higher than that among those a little older. Therefore, the net effect of driver éducation is to put more of the youngest drivers on the road, thus probably producing a net increase in fatality rates. Yet when given thèse results, hardly any jurisdiction suspends driver éducation, which has a strong constituency despite the research findings. The same is true in the environmental arena, where strong constituencies keep clearly destructive policies in place or block the enactment of clearly efficacious ones, which is why environmental issues are typically embedded in controversy. It is hère that Lee's gyroscope—his second navigational aid—cornes into play. He advocates créative use of thèse political conflicts so that we benefit rather than suffer from the free play of démocratie forces. As an example, Lee discusses remédiai efforts in the Columbia River Basin to sustain yields of salmon blocked by dams from access to their traditional spawning grounds. He points out that
compromises among opposing interest groups—conservationists, Native Americans with fishing rights, and the electrical utility—have kept solutions more or less on a balanced course. There are numerous instances where the informai process of social controversy has been more effective than formai impact assessments in identifying and explicating the risks of a planned project that might seriously alter the environment. Critics attack with great vigor, stretching their imaginations for all manner of issues with which to score points against their target. Proponents counterattack, producing new analyses and funding new experiments in order to réfute the critics. Intelligent people on both sides of the controversy, diligently preparing charges and rebuttals, test the strength of their arguments in the mass média and in public hearings. As the controversy proceeds, there is a filtering of issues so some with little substance become ignored while others move to the fore. As Lee suggests, such controversies offer potential benefits for impact assessment, but how do we convert raucous political debates from headaches to remédies? Unfortunately, like the mouse, Lee speaks in generalities, and the reader must look elsewhere for guidance. For example, this year's spring issue of the journal Risk: Issues in Health & Safety (published by Franklin Pierce Law Center, Concord, N.H.) was devoted entirely to one spécifie proposai—the "science court." There are other proposais also, but none are prominent in Lee's book.
In the final chapter, Lee réitérâtes the elephantlike question: "How do we sail the unknown sea to sustainability?" And he asserts the mouselike answer: "Navigate with the compass of science and the gyroscope of democracy." Perhaps he should also have asked why the éléphant wants to walk through the mouse hole in the first place. Do we really want sustainable development as our prime goal, with its implication that every génération must leave the environment as it finds it, for ail time? Will anyone who cares be around in 20,000 years, which is twice as long as agriculture has existed? Will disasters like nuclear wars, plague, or natural catastrophe have disrupted civilization repeatedly by then, in which case, what happens to carefully maintained sustainability? Will developments in technology solve problems that sustainability is intended to avoid, thus rendering it irrelevant? Do we have the vaguest idea what kind of material and cultural world people will want 500 years from now? (Only 20 years ago, most of us thought it a good idea to clear virgin rain forest—we called it "jungle" then— for human seulement.) Perhaps the éléphant would do better with less surreal goals, like walking through a door rather than a mouse hole or improving the lives of the world's people over the next century rather than worrying about perpetuity. Allan Mazur, an engineer and a sociologist, is professor of public affairs in Syracuse Univeristy's Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship & Public Affairs. •
Advances in Chromatography. Vol. 33. Phyllis R. Brown, Eli Gruschka, editors. xviii + 283 pages. Marcel Dekker, 270 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016. 1993. $135.
Breakthrough Partnering: Creating a Collective Enterprise Advantage. Patricia E. Moody. xv + 268 pages. Omneo, 85 Allen Martin Dr., Essex Junction, Vt. 05452. 1993. $25.
Advances in X-Ray Analysis. Vol. 36. John V. Gilfrich et al., editors. xxiii + 685 pages. Plénum Press, 233 Spring St., New York, N.Y. 10013. 1993. $125.
Capillary Electrophoresis Technology. Norberto A. Guzman, editor. xv + 857 pages. Marcel Dekker, 270 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016. 1993. $165.
Applied Radiation Chemistry: Radiation Processing. Robert J. Woods, Alexei K. Pikaev. χ + 535 pages. John Wiley & Sons, 605 Third Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016. 1993. $74.95. Biological Applications of Photochemical Switches. Harry Morrison, editor. ix + 316 pages. John Wiley & Sons, 605 Third Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016. 1993. $59.95.
Catalytic Asymmetric Synthesis. Iwao Ojima, editor. xiii + 476 pages. VCH Publishers, Distribution Center, 303 Northwest 12th Ave., Deerfield Beach, Fia. 33442-1705. 1993. $110. Chemical Searching on an Array Processor. Terence Wilson. xv + 197 pages. John Wiley & Sons, 605 Third Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016. 1993. $115. Π JANUARY 3,1994 C&EN 27
