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 PROPOSAL FOR A NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAB


 Ian McHarg
 Department of Landscape Architecture
 and Urban Planning
 University of Pennsylvania



 There are people in the National Science Foundation who care about the
human condition, who would like to do something about it and, of course,
they're scorned. Because as we know National Science Foundation, like science
itself, gives dignity and approbation to people as a function of the level
of abstraction. So if you're engaged in or concerned with subatomic power
particles so you can attack the gonads of the world, you get high approbation.
If you're concerned with submolecular biology, molecular biology, and you
couldn't recognize an organism with a label on it, you get great approbation,
but if you're concerned with the human condition, you know that you have dirty
fingernails, you speak with a very bad accent, and you certainly shouldn't
get government support. Now this is strictly paradoxical. Why? Because
all of this thing is being supported by public funds. It would seem
reasonable to assume that those people who are concerned with enhancing human
health and well being should, in fact, get public support and those people
who are engaged either in irrelevance or enterprises which are profoundly
dangerous to human survival like both atomic physics and some aspects of
molecular biology should get persecution but not prosecution.

 So one of the purposes of this enterprise today is to devise some sort
of strategy under which those beleaguered people in the National Science
Foundation who really care about enhancing human health and well-being should
be, in fact, given respectability and indeed support. I think the only way
in which it can be done is for this enterprise to ally with itself people who
have commanding positions in the accepted and respectable disciplines, but
who have, either because they've already got their bloody Nobel Prize or
because somehow their distinction is great enough for them to extend
themselves, to concern themselves with human problems; for one or either of
these two reasons, such people have got to be induced to enter into the
National Science Foundation, either as a review committee or something else.
There's got to be a group of people of such impeccable distinction and
respectability that they can speak to the mandarins of molecular biology and
the physically deformed people in high physics and insist upon full attention
to the problems of society.

 So I would suggest that the first and most important thing to address
is to try and make a list, and I think this group can probably make a better
list than I can because all of you are scientists. I would say George Wald,


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