Fifty five years ago, on January 19, 1968, the American publication“Science” reported on the (typical) capture of an advisory group by engineers and technocrats..
Many ecologists doubt the ability of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to advise the government properly on problems of environmental pollution and disturbance. Moreover some environmental scientists within NAS itself find it deplorable that, in setting up an Environmental Studies Board last year to co-ordinate studies of environmental problems the leaders of NAS and NAE saw fit to include five people with backgrounds in industrial research but no one with a background in environmental biology. In the view of these critics, the environment’s “despoilers” may be better represented on the new board than its “preservers.”
Carter (1968)
Carter managed to get a great quote out of Lamont Cole, president of the Ecological Society of America – “The National Academy doesn’t know enough about ecology to know how ignorant it is.” This pithy summary is an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect before that was named…
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 322.5ppm. As of 2023 it is 418ppm, but check here for daily measures.
https://www.esa.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/94/2022/02/Cole_LC.pdf
The context was that everyone was beginning to get seriously perturbed by water/air pollution in the US (and some were beginning to grok the global implications). So what do you do? You ask the experts to set up an investigatory/advisory panel. And then they do – made up of people exactly like them….
[According to a new journal Environmental Science and Technology, the aforementioned Environmental Studies Board had been set up in early 1967. Ah, no, wait, further down in the Carter article there is this –
“This board was appointed in January 1967 by Frederick Seitz, president of NAS, and Eric Walker, president of NAE. THE board, establishment of which was recommended in a 1965 report (Restoring the Quality of Our Environment) by PSAC’s Envrionmental Pollution Panel, was assigned the responsibility of over-seeing and coordinating environmental studies carried on within the two academies. With this sweeping mission the board’s role is potentially one of great influence.” ]
Frederick bloody Seitz…
What I think we can learn from this
Any panel or programme – or research and innovation centre – will get captured by one tribe of academics, who will then funnel funding and prestige to their own tribe, at the expense of another tribe. That’s just how humans play the game. Every-so -often a Leviathan may knock heads together and insist the tribes play nice with each other, in order to get actual inter or multi-disciplinary working, but the silos – cognitive and financial – are always lurking, like the plague in that cheerful little book by the Sisyphus guy…
What happened next
Oh, a couple of token ecologists were probably appointed, if only to shut up Lamont Cole.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs..
References
Luther J. Carter (1968) National Academy of Sciences: Unrest among the Ecologists. Science, Jan. 19 Vol. 159, No. 3812 , pp. 287- 289