The Uncertain Search for Environmental Quality

The growing concern with environmental protection has manifested itself in both the natural and social sciences in a concerted research effort to extend our understanding of ecological systems and to employ this knowledge in the design of policies for an improved environment. Biologists and chemists have labored, for example, to learn the dynamics of the processes of decay and assimilation of waterborne wastes in streams and rivers; at the same time, economists have turned their tools of applied welfare economics to the evaluation of policy alternatives for the preservation of water quality. While all this is certainly commendable in itself, the trouble has been that the analyses forthcoming from these efforts have taken a highly technical form. The description of river dynamics (a "materials balance analysis") typically takes the form of a highly complex set of simultaneous differential equations. Likewise, the economist's "cost-benefit analysis" draws on a substantial set of often-implicit assumptions as well as extensive quantitative studies. Simply to understand the character of these analyses and their limitations requires considerable expertise. How, then, can policy-makers, who are not technical experts, evaluate such analyses and incorporate them in an intelligent way into actual policy proposals? This, incidentally, is not simply a matter of following the prescription of an able technical adviser, for there are typically important value judgments and individual interests at stake; technical assistance is obviously important, but it is not the whole of the decision. In addition to making technical analyses comprehensible, there is the closely related and crucial matter of the actual use of such analyses in the process of debate leading to the formulation