Introduction / 9Where the statistical evaluation of risk is unavoidably imprecise yet remedial action seems intuitively
desirable, decisions cannot be based solely on scientific evidence and are bound to be more or less
controversial. Since decisions of any kind are necessarily political, and will be argued this way and
that, people will take sides and issues will tend to become polarized.
At this point, environmental science gives way to environmental campaigning, or environmentalism,
and political campaigns are managed by those activists best able to publicize their opinion. In their
efforts to attract public attention and support, spokespersons are likely to be drawn into oversimplifying
complex, technical issues which, indeed, they may not fully understand, and to exaggerate hazards
for the sake of dramatic effect.
Environmental science has a long history and concern with the condition of the environment has
been expressed at intervals over many centuries, but the modern environmental movement emerged
during the 1960s, first in the United States and Britain. The publication of Silent Spring in 1962 in
the United States and 1963 in Britain provided a powerful stimulus to popular environmental concern
and may have marked the origin of the modern movement. This was the book in which Rachel
Carson mounted a strong attack on the way agricultural insecticides were being used in North America.
The dire consequences of which she warned were essentially ecological: she maintained that the
indiscriminate poisoning of insects by non-selective compounds was capable of disrupting food
chains, the sequences of animals feeding on one another as, for example, insects? blackbirds?
sparrowhawks. The ‘silent spring’ of her title referred to the absence of birds, killed by poisons
accumulated through feeding on poisoned insects, but the ‘fable’ with which the book begins also
describes the deaths of farm livestock and humans. The catastrophe was ecological and so the word
‘ecology’ acquired a political connotation. A magazine devoted to environmental campaigning,
founded in 1970, was (and still is) called The Ecologist.
Ecology is a scientific discipline devoted to the study of relationships among members of living
communities and between those communities and their abiotic environment. Intrinsically it has little
to do with campaigning for the preservation of environmental quality, although individual ecologists
often contribute their professional expertise to such campaigns and, of course, their services are
sought whenever the environmental consequences of a proposed change in land use are assessed.
To some non-scientists, however, ‘ecology’ suggests a kind of stability, a so-called ‘balance of nature’
that may have existed in the past but that we have perturbed. This essentially metaphysical concept
is often manifested as an advocacy for ways of life that are held to be more harmonious or, in the
sense in which the word is now being used, ‘ecological’. The idea is clearly romantic and supported
by a somewhat selective view of history, but it has proved powerfully attractive. In her very detailed
study of it Meredith Veldman, a historian at Louisiana State University, locates the development of
environmentalism in Britain firmly in a long tradition of romantic protest that also includes the
fiction of J.R.R.Tolkien and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (VELDMANN, 1994).
‘Ecology’, then, is at one and the same time a scientific discipline and a political, at times almost
religious, philosophy which inspires a popular movement and ‘green’ political parties in many
countries. As a philosophy, it no longer demands piecemeal reform to achieve environmental
amelioration, but calls for the radical restructuring of society and its economic base. The two
meanings attached to the word are now quite distinct and it is important not to confuse them.
When people say a particular activity or way of life is ‘ecologically sound’ they are making a
political statement, not a scientific one, even though they may be correct in supposing the behaviour
they approve to have less adverse effect on human health or the welfare of other species than its
alternatives. ‘Ecologically sound’ implies a moral judgement that has no place in scientific argument;
to a scientist the phrase is meaningless.