Outside Looking In: Understanding the Role of Science in Regulation

Abstract

When Rachel Carson took on the task of defining environmental health advocacy in the early 1960s, she made the business of government oversight look simple and straightforward. “Much of the necessary knowledge is now available, but we do not use it,” she wrote in her 1962 book Silent Spring. “We train ecologists in our universities and even employ them in our government agencies, but we seldom take their advice. We allow the chemical death rain to fall as though there were no alternative, whereas in fact there are many, and our ingenuity could soon discover more if given opportunity.” Carson would likely be dazzled by the extent to which governments of all stripes have since called on scientific experts to help populate a regulatory galaxy that extends from the humblest of municipal bailiwicks to the global economy. Nevertheless, the unfolding of this new world of prevention and protection has been neither tidy nor consistent. The scientific community generates volumes of data about potential hazards to human health, but the process of interpretation—resulting ultimately in the development of policy—is often heavily shaped by political, economic, and even cultural interests, which can vary dramatically from one hazard to the next, as well as from one jurisdiction to the next. The outcome of any regulatory deliberation can therefore be unexpected and downright frustrating. A given agent might be labeled a toxic threat in one place while being tolerated without prejudice somewhere else, even as the architects of each policy looked at the very same data. That prospect might puzzle many thoughtful and earnest observers who believe definitive scientific findings should yield equally definitive responses. Daniel Sarewitz recalls his early days as a Congressional Science Fellow in 1989. “The scales fell from my eyes after about a week of being [in Washington, DC],” he says. “When you’re a scientist working in academia, what you see is scientists arguing about difficult problems to try to arrive at the truth. When you’re on the Hill, you realize what’s really going on is these problems are complicated both in terms of the science and in terms of the values. It’s possible to bring many different scientific lenses—interpretations of data, choices of what data to use, what theories to use—to any given complex problem. Not surprisingly, those choices end up mapping onto value preferences and political preferences.” Today Sarewitz is director of the Consortium for Science, Policy, & Outcomes, which, in its own words, seeks to enhance the capacity of public policy to link scientific research to beneficial societal outcomes. But Sarewitz says the consortium faces resistance in moving these perspectives into open public debate. The difficulty, as he outlined in an article in the October 2004 issue of Environmental Science & Policy, stems from a common desire of both advocates and opponents of any given regulation to invoke science to make their respective cases. The former will insist that current knowledge warrants doing something, while the latter point to uncertainties in that same knowledge as justification for doing less, or perhaps nothing.