Union of Concerned Scientists

The history of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), more than that of any other U.S. environmental organization, reflects the continuing American conflict about the place of science and the roles of scientists in shaping policy in response to environmental concerns. Today, UCS works to protect the integrity of science by trying to free it from what it considers political interference while [Page 924]also working to apply it to the solution of environmental problems. The organization develops and disseminates science-based information designed to achieve this goal.

Until the 1960s, science had been seen in the United States by its usefulness to society primarily in terms of industry and industrial-scale agriculture. As late as the mid-20th century, economic justifications, backed by science wherever plausible, were essential to most public policies preserving remnants of nature in the United States. Wildlife protection societies had to focus on biologists' descriptions of how many destructive insects or weeds birds could eat, how predators' occasional chicken dinners were a small price for farmers to pay for rodent control, how the most obscure forest trees had some economic use, and how a few habitats should be protected because all creatures were part of a food chain that allowed people to hunt and fish. Even our first national parks had been approved by Congress as scenic areas with iconic wildlife sure to attract visitors and investors to the newly pacified West.

Not until 1947, when the U.S. government purchased the lower Everglades, was a national park established specifically to protect the biological integrity of an ecosystem—yet that decision was part of a larger agreement for federal investment in an upstream water management program to bail out south Florida's bankrupt agricultural and real estate investors. The science of protecting nature, even on a grand scale, was justified primarily by its relationship to supposedly scientific water management to improve the economy.

In 1962, Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring pointed to biological science that independently proved the top of the avian food chain was being destroyed by industry's scientific achievements: Persistent poisons were being misapplied as pesticides to protect farm crops. In that same tumultuous decade, scientists whose work on nuclear weapons that had given us the capability to destroy our place at the top of the earth's food chain also saw science being misused. It was the universe-explaining heroes of physics, disturbed by the participation of science in cold war and Vietnam weaponry, who started UCS and effectively brought Big Science into environmental policy. Henry Kendall and other Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty founded UCS with a 1968 manifesto that began by stating that the misuse of scientific and technical knowledge in Vietnam and elsewhere threatened our very existence.

Those same urgent concerns, stimulated by the previous century's hot and cold wars over different ways to organize global industrial society, now engage science and scientists in responding to the impacts of industrial economies on global climate change. The emergence of UCS as a political force against weapons of mass destruction brought intensity to a science-and-society conflict still being waged: Do scientists expressing themselves about the consequences of using scientific knowledge bring weightier opinion or special insight to policy debates? For today's UCS, defending the integrity of science itself has become as high a priority as their well-regarded work on energy policy, transportation technologies, and global climate change.

...