The Quality of Life, Population and Environment: The Role of Science

Abstract

One common response to our problems of quality of life, population, and the environment is that the answer lies in the further development of physical science and technology. After all, one may reason, for a century the Malthusian spectre has been kept at bay by science and tech? nology. What they have done for a century, doubtless they can do for another, or for as long into the future as we can look. Yet more optimistic are interpretations emphasizing the concepts of growth and development. These depict the advance of science and technology as a source of unending dividends of economic progress, which accrue automatically to a society once it has passed through the take-off into sustained growth.1 Much of today's opinion derives implicitly from the idea that tech? nology makes automatic progress freely available to us. It was on this basis that Galbraith represented our present problem not as fighting scarcity but as accommodating ourselves to affluence.2 In Marcusens more radical approach, the failure of society to distribute to us the benefits automatically generated by technological progress was a basis for branding society as obscene, and attacking it.3 In these views? which now perhaps are all a bit dated?technology is the open sesame to the future. What is needed is not a particular kind of science and technology, but just more of the same. A quite different approach has been to turn away from science when seeking answers to preservation of the environment and the quality of life. Some physical scientists who have become exercised about these problems have sought the answer not in any branch of science but in ethics, in attacks on big business and materialism, in predictions that a miraculous change in human nature will or must occur.4 A final ap? proach is to reject science and technology in a yet more thoroughgoing manner, that is, to try to undo the technological changes of the past cen? tury and return to unspecialized or primitive production methods. To consider in a scientific spirit the problems of preserving the en? vironment and the quality of human life leads, I suggest, to an approach quite different from any of these. We do not reject science, but neither do we depict an unguided and automatic development of science and 46