Environmental Issue

It was refreshing to read Mr. Crotty’s commentary on environmentalism (“More Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Better,” Feb. 25) because it was the first time that I have found someone in the matrix of local politics that recognizes some of the social complexity in this issue.

At the base of the problems created by environmentalism in government, in the media and in movement and establishment environmental politics is that most spokesmen for all of these institutions are far from knowledgeable about ecology as a science, or in knowing what constitutes scientific facts and how those arguments are made. That is, there are few real scientists in any of these institutional configurations, and because of that there is no way that there can be a real evaluation of technical or scientific information by any of these groups of people. Mr. Crotty well knows, having worked for the EPA, that there are very few scientists actually working for that agency, most are bureaucrats or engineers with MBAs or law degrees and rarely do they seek out real information. They don’t have to, they are regulators, policemen enforcing environmental laws.

Instead governments contract out their scientific decision making to entrepreneurial environmental consultants. The environmental impact statements that were demanded in the legislation of the 1970s have been a lucrative market for pseudoscientific entrepreneurs. And nowhere in the implementation of the legislation has there been any process to insure scientific accountability either in the way these EIS documents are prepared or in the evaluation of the information after government gets it.

William K. Reilly, director of the Environmental Protection Agency, himself is a lawyer, not an ecologist. If you look at the boards of directors in national environmental movements, they are top heavy with lawyers and “conservationists” but not scientists. Added to that is the appalling state of scientific literacy in the general public; there is no mechanism anywhere to insure that the information being debated to set environmental priorities has been selected with any intelligence. And clearly a lot of it has not, and I’m afraid that we are going to see more and more of this.

I applaud Mr. Crotty for his contribution to the debate. I hope we can continue to have it.

ELAINE R. BROOKS

La Jolla