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NRH, 08.06.07

“Forest death” and the role of scientific expertise.

This paper will focus on the institutional aspects of scientific advice to politics.

Where scientific knowledge is uncertain sound public decision-making depends on effective public criticism illuminating the issues from contrary points of view. In recent decades environmental policy has emerged as a major political arena of this character. Today’s big issue is of course global warming. But forest death from acid rain was an interesting forerunner, a more or less closed historical case. It may be worth while to analyze its mistakes to help keep future advisory processes on a sound course.

Autonomy and scientific criticism

The individual scientists’ understanding of subject matter, scientific method, and the social responsibility of science, is a necessary basis for an effective process of scientific advice. But a sound organization of science and its interaction with public discourse and political decision-making is also necessary. The success of modern science is unthinkable without its institutions. But these are highly sensitive and vulnerable to changes in general attitudes to science. During the 2 great wars of the mid-twentieth century the defence of liberal democracy was linked to a defence of scientific freedom.1

The autonomy of science was the key issue, i.e. the freedom of scientists to decide scientific questions without interference from political, religious, economic or other external authorities. But autonomy had to be combined with active social responsibility. If the freedom of science only meant the freedom of individual scientists to pursue their interests without concern for the effects on society, the result would be isolation and subordination to political powers. An ideology of “pure science”, free to pursue internal scientific interests alone, is tempting.

Why should not scientists simply stop at publishing their results and leave the practical use to the general political process? Criticizing public opinion or political decision-making for misunderstanding or misusing scientific knowledge is likely to take a lot of time and effort, create antipathy in funding institutions, as well as among colleagues dependent on the same institutions, and thus become a hindrance to won scientific work and career. Retribution could be swift and direct during totalitarian regimes of the mid-twentieth century. A more indirect, milder and less visible way of suppressing scientific criticism, important in the liberal democratic and capitalist systems that prevailed toward

1 Representative proponents of this argument were the philosopher Karl Popper, the sociologist Robert Merton, and the chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi. 3 the end of the 20th century, is a selective funding process favouring those projects most germane to dominant political goals and ideological values. From the 1960s on there has been strong and persistent criticism of the scientific establishment for egoistic and short-sighted submission to such an ideology of

“pure science”, for good reasons.

The philosopher Karl Popper combined autonomy and social responsibility of science in the theory of science that he called critical rationalism.2 His unruly

“disciple” Paul Feyerabend radicalized the message criticizing the superficial concepts of “objectivity”, “neutrality” etc. that accompanied a growing influence of the ideology of “pure science”.3

It is worth while today to emphasize that free and public criticism is the foundation of reliable knowledge. This was the idea of critical rationalism. On aspect is internal scientific criticism to asses the validity of various claims, to sift mere hypotheses from well supported facts. Another is science based criticism of popular beliefs and policies, a main way to translate scientific knowledge into rational social action.

2 See, for instance, The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and its Enemies, published in a number of versions from the mid-1940s on. 3 See, for instance, Feyerabend’s , Against method (1975) and his autobiography Killing Time (1995). His Auseinadersetzung with another unruly disciple of Popper, the Hungarian refugee with a Marxist past, Imre Lakatos, is also illuminating: Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, For and Against Method (1999). 4

“Forest death” in Scandinavia4

Sweden and Norway were pioneers in research on acid rain and its effects. This research was from the start closely linked to environmental politics. One important goal was to stop long distance air pollution. The general story is well known to this audience so I will primarily present some selected facts in order to show how the ideals of critical rationalism were let down in the process. I will focus on Norway, partly because the conflict between scientific integrity and political expediency was more acute than in Sweden and partly because that is the country that I know best.

The research program “Acid precipitation: Effects on forest and fish” (SNSF) was carried out in the period 1972-1980. It was the biggest research program in

Norwegian ecology and environmental science till then, and it played a central role in the first phase of international acid rain research. Gro Harlem Brundtland was Norwegian minister of the environment 1974-1980. The research program expanded greatly during this period and was closely geared to diplomatic efforts to curb emissions of sulphur oxides abroud because they damaged Scandinavian nature.

It was the perceived possibility of radically reduced growth of forests that initially made the Norwegian government support SNSF. While fresh water

4 Further details and references are found in Roll-Hansen 2002. 5 fishery had little economic importance, the forest industry was central to

Norwegian economy. But the disappearance and death of fish had great public appeal and soon became a main driving force in the project. The main result of

SNSF was that long distance air pollution caused acidification and loss of fish in lakes and rivers over a large area of southern Norway. But for the forest no clear negative effect was found. This was a considerable disappointment to the diplomatic campaign.

Thus, Scandinavian demands had made little headway at the beginning of the

1980s. But then appeared “new kinds of forest damage” (“neue Waldschaden”) in Germany and quickly changed public and political opinion. An international agreement in 1985 led to radical reductions of sulphur emission.

The strong attention to acid rain in the 1970s had made the Norwegian public receptive to the news about forest death in Germany. It made big healines: “In

Germany 35 percent of forests are severely damaged or dead. The situation is similar for large areas in Southern Sweden”, informed one of the large national daily newspapers in March 1984. The Norwegian minister of the environment has “already sounded the alarm”. But scientists at the Norwegian institute of forest research (NISK) said the newspapers and the minister were “over- dramatizing”: Present knowledge about Norwegian forests gave no reason to expect similar developments. 6

The NISK scientists continued to voice their doubt about the developing catastrophe described by the mass media. The damages that could be observed were not extraordinary and most likely due to familiar causes, for instance, draught in Southern Sweden. Nevertheless the belief that Norwegian forests were already suffering heavily from acid rain gained a firm hold on Norwegian public opinion. In October 1985 the Norwegian prime minister on visit to

Britain rebuked Thatcher for the British “acid rain that destroys forests and fishing lakes in Norway”.5 The claim about fish had substance though it was not yet accepted by the British. But for the forest there was no evidence despite a decade of intense investigations.

Through the following years public criticism and attacks continued against the scientists at NISK who would not accept the obvious. A Swedish science journalist had prime time on TV to present his book, “If trees could cry”, and deride the NISK scientists for their incompetence. They were only given time on the radio to reply. Thus the sobering information from the scientists was not directly suppressed. It was simply downplayed by the editors and journalists of the mass media.

5 Quoted from an editorial with the heading “British bad manners” (“britisk uskikk”) in Aftenposten (Norway’s largest daily newspaper), 30 October 1985. 7

This biased communication of scientific knowledge about forest health continued well into the 1990s. For instance, in August 1993 the Norwegian minister of the environment was reported as making England responsible for

“damaging” (“ødelegge”) 84 000 square kilometres of Norwegian forest and predicting losses of billions of crown to the Norwegian timber production in a few years time.6 But by the late 1990s the alarmist reports had disappeared and public fears subsided.

The public illusion of catastrophic Waldsterben appears to have been more tenacious in Scandinavia than in Central Europe. At the end of the 1980s serious popular articles as well as scientific literature said clearly the widespread beliefs in catastrophic Waldsterben had no sound basis either in factual observations or in well established theory. The “new forest damage” that received so much attention in the early 1980s turned out generally to have causes of a familiar kind.7

What are the lessons?

The big reduction in emission of sulphur oxides and other air pollutions that started with the 1985 protocol has been taken as paradigm example of effective and highly beneficial scientific advice to politics. The main positive results are

6 Dagbladet og Aftenposten, 19 August 1993. 7 See for instance: ”Mythenreiches Waldsterben”, Die Zeit, 25 November 1988, p. 92; “Hie Waldsterben, da Waldwuchern”, Die Zeit, 17 November 1989; Schmidt-Vogt 1989; Becker et al. 1990. Zierhofer (1999) has given a historical account of the course of events in Switzerland. 8 better health and less damage to buildings, statues and other outdoor objects in the countries of emission. And the reductions turned out to be much less expensive than first expected and this result is well worth the effort. However, the decisive political argument, the need to save the forests, was based on illusion. It is notable that this irrational aspect of the process does not seem to worry social scientists who have analyzed the relation between environmental science and politics in 1990s, and taken acid rain and forest death as a paradigmatic case.8 Some simply take at face value the claims of environmental activists and dismiss or overlook the more substantial scientific investigations.

Others take a pragmatic attitude, since the effect is beneficial it is does not matter what caused the action.9

Such sceptical, disinterested, or purely instrumental views of scientific knowledge undermine its rational use in politics. It is true that science depends on the same basic criteria as common sense for judging what is true and false.

Nevertheless science has special authority due to its organization and sophisticated application of the common sense principles. A famous description of the institutional norms that form science as a global institution that does not discriminate by religion, ethnicity, race or class was formulated by the American sociologist Robert Merton in the mid-20th century. What he called the ethos of science was characterized by “communalism, universalism, disinterestedness,

8 Beck 1992, 1996; Hajer 1995; Hannigan 1995. 9 Boehmer-Christiansen and Skea 1991. 9 and organized scepticism”. Briefly science was an institution aimed at knowledge valid for everybody and where everybody had the same basic authority, irrespective of faith, political views or social position. 10

The last of Merton’s four norms has special relevance I think to our case, forest death from acid rain. That is “organized scepticism”, the same idea that inspired

Poppers critical rationalism. It is worth noting that this idea, that scientific search for truth need vigorous criticism and will easily degenerate where this is lacking, has recently been taken up by feminist philosophers of science, like

Helen Longino.11 This is a fundamentally liberal idea linked to the right of freedom of expression. It holds that criticism will only be effective in promoting objective truth when it is developed, formulated and launched from the most diverging points of interest and social position.

One thing that failed in the acid rain affaire was the responsibility of scientists to provide criticism of the alarmist hypotheses that were launched by certain of their colleagues and eagerly communicated by mass media. Both the internal scientific and the public criticism was fumbling and weak, no match for the journalistic sensationalism in the triggering issue of Der Spiegel, 16 November

1981. At one of the first scientific conferences, in April 1982, there spirit of organized scepticism was also strikingly absent. The only clearly critical voice

10 See for instance Merton 1938/1973, 1942/1973. 11 See for instance, Longino 1990, 2001. 10 came from a representative of the Association of German coal producers

(Gesamtverband des Deutschen Steinkohlbergbaus) who referred to the negative results of the Norwegian SNSF-project. In Norway a group that had been responsible for the forest side of the SNSF-project spoke out publicly and clearly, but were not much heeded by mass media or politicians. Not so surprising perhaps since criticisms was so muted in other countries like Sweden and Germany.

A key role of scientific criticism is to mark the difference between speculative hypothesis and well supported fact and evaluate where on this scale a particular knowledge claim is located. Without some sense for this distinction the public and its political leadership is likely to get lost in the jungle of scientific speculations, in areas where action on the basis of more or less uncertain knowledge cannot be avoided, like health and environment.

No doubt the handling of the present issue of global warming is much better organized around the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) than was the forest death and acid rain issue in the 1980s. The IPCC was set up to deliberately to avoid the irrational effects of sensationalist mass media communication that characterized this earlier event. However, this whole advisory establishment is in danger of corruption if it is not upheld by a clear understanding of the rationale for scientific autonomy that was developed half a 11 century ago in Merton’s ethos of science and Poppers critical rationalism. For instance it is a little worrying that the IPCC has turned to publishing its executive summaries before the scientific reports are publicly available. The tendency to black-list scientists who criticize the accepted majority views on specific issues concerning the geophysical mechanisms of global warming and its effects is also worrisome. Recently the largest Norwegian daily newspaper,

Aftenposten, quoted the UN’s special advisor on climate politics, Gro Harlem

Brundtland: “It is now immoral as well as dishonest to question the seriousness of the climate threat”. One may agree that much radical steps should be taken quickly to curb the emission of hothouse gases, and still be careful to guard the room for scientific criticism. Much is unknown about environmental processes in general and there is no reason to doubt that in the future we will sorely need the resource for correcting our views that an active and well based tradition of organized scientific scepticism represents.

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References:

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Beck, Ulrich (1996) Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk. Polity Press.

(Translation from the 1988 German edition, Gegengifte: Die Organisierte

Unantwortlichkeit.)

Becker, M. et al. (1990) “Kronenzustand und Wachstum von Waldbäumen in

Dreiländereck Deutschland-Frankreich-Schweiz in letzten Jahrzehnten”,

Allgemeine Forstzeitschrift, 45 (11): 263-74.

Boehmer-Christiansen, S. and J. Skea (1991) Acid Politics: Environmental and

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Hannigan, John A. (1995) Environmental Sociology. A Social Constructivist

Perspective. London and New York: Routledge. 14

Longino; Helen (1990) Science as Social Knowledge. Values and Objectivity in

Scientific Inquiry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Longino, Helen (2001) The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton University Press.

Merton, Robert (1938/1973) “Science and the Social Order”, in Merton 1973, pp. 254-256. First published 1938 reprinted 1973.

Merton, Robert (1942/1973) “The Normative Structure of Science”, in Merton

1973, pp. 267-278. First published 1942, reprinted 1973.

Merton, Robert (1973) The Sociology of Knowledge. Theoretical and Empirical

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The case of “forest death” from “acid rain”. Oslo, Makt- og demokratiutredningen, report 48, November 2002.

(http://www.sv.uio.no/mutr/publikasjoner/rapp2002/Rapport48.html) 15

Schmidt-Vogt, H. (ed.) (1989) Die Fichte, vol II/2. Berlin and Hamburg, Paul

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