Most of the time, farmers do not need soil surveys. From time immemorial, when taking new land into cultivation they learnt to find good soils and avoid bad, often using what would now be called indicator plants.

A recurrent theme of chapter 7 can be condensed into the statements:

1. land degradation is serious, it has already had adverse and sometimes irreversible effects on production, and it will become worse if action is not taken;

2. but from lack of good measurements, we do not know just how serious it is.

This dilemma is recognized in a classic understatement in Principle 15 of Agenda 21: ‘Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.’

There can be no doubt, for example, that soil erosion is severe in Haiti, Lesotho, and highland Ethiopia, or that pasture degradation is widespread in the hills of northern Pakistan and many parts of the African sahel.

The atmosphere and oceans are natural resources which are shared world-wide. Human impact upon them results from the sum of actions by individual nations, and all have some degree of access to the resources they supply. These are commonly referred to as the ‘global commons’.

For the case of the oceans, access is increasingly limited by legal constraints on fishing rights, enforced with difficulty and subject to frequent disputes.

Management of land, of its soils, water, forests, pastures, and wildlife, has been central to human society from its earliest times. Land resources provide the basis for more than 95% of human food supplies, the greater part of clothing, and all needs for wood, both for fuel and construction. The developments of the industrial age have substituted coal, oil and minerals for some of the fuel, construction, and fibre needs, but have in no way removed the basic dependency of society upon the renewable resources of the land.

There has always been competition for land, sometimes reaching the level of conflict. In prehistoric times, among communities dependent on hunting and gathering, it would have shown in the kind of territoriality found amongst animal populations.

Much of the content of any textbook on science, technology and society inevitably concerns the richer countries of the world, where most of the technological change associated with industrialisation has occurred, and where most of the world's research and development are carried out. But the world's wealthier countries contain only about one-third of the population of the globe. The remaining two-thirds live in the poorer countries, sometimes referred to as the Third World.

Despite their low levels of industrialisation, these poorer countries still have a major interest in science and technology, especially in terms of the contribution that they can make to solving some of the problems of poverty, malnutrition and low levels of output of goods and services. Equally, though, the nature of the relationships between science, technology and society are very different from those which occur in the rich industrialised countries. In the Third World, for example, some 70–80 per cent of the people usually still live in the rural areas and are involved in agricultural production as a way of life. This compares with a figure of 5 per cent or less for most of the industrialised countries. Differences such as these dramatically illustrate the need to think carefully about the role of Western science and technology in the lessdeveloped countries. Before going on to consider this in more detail though, it is important to discuss a little further what is meant by the Third World.

What is Science, Technology and Society, and why should anyone want to study it? In particular, why should science students have an interest in the subject? Many science degrees have a unit or two concerned with it, and some have several. It is natural for students to wonder why. Would it not be more sensible for, say, chemistry students to study as much chemistry as possible? There are many reasons why students, whether scientists or not, should study science and technology in their social aspects. First, we need some background and understanding of the significance of science and technology in the recent past, and their importance in the modern world.

The importance of science and technology

Most people would agree that science and technology are of great importance in the world today. Some highly developed countries, such as Sweden and Switzerland, spend 2 or 3 per cent of their gross domestic product (i.e. the total wealth a country produces) on science and technology. As we shall see in the next chapter, Australia spends about $5 billion a year (about 1.34 per cent of its gross domestic product), but is not considered a big investor in the area. These large sums tell us that decision-makers in government and industry are strongly convinced of the importance of developing science and technology.

It is equally clear that science can alter our entire conception of ourselves and our place in the universe.

This chapter aims to give you some idea about the world-wide scientific community and what makes it work. As the quote from Maxwell suggests, we will not be concentrating upon facts and figures, but upon the basic organisation of science, and its particular ‘go’, the way it works.

More than fifty years ago, the sociologist Robert K. Merton (1942) outlined a theory of how the scientific community works. Merton saw science as a self-regulating community of researchers, governed by a strong and distinctive ethos. This ethos involved the sharing of information, scepticism about results until evidence was produced, and a strong belief in the pursuit of truth. Merton was a shrewd observer of humanity, and was fully aware that many scientists pursue careers for their own self-interest. However, he argued, the ethos of science bound scientists to conform to the rules and expectations of science. In addition, scientists constantly scrutinised each other's work, ensuring that standards were maintained. Merton's ideal should be borne in mind as we investigate the scientific community.

The first point to make is that science is a varied activity, even within one country, as Figure 2.1 illustrates. It is based on official Australian statistics, and shows three important things about science in this country. It shows where the largest amounts of money come from to support science, where that money goes, and where the scientists are.

This chapter begins by explaining why governments take an interest in science and technology. Some of the problems of determining the collective will of the community are then analysed, showing that it is often difficult to decide priorities for allocation of public resources. This leads into a general discussion of what constitutes public policy, including the process of policy development. Science and technology policy raises particular issues which are especially important for professional scientists and engineers, but are also of broad public interest. These issues are considered in general terms before the chapter concludes with a discussion of some specific problems affecting Australia and New Zealand in the 1990s. These problems illustrate once more that the way we treat science and technology affects what is produced.

Why public policy for science and technology?

Public policy for science is necessary because a significant fraction of all science is funded by government, so decisions must be made about the scale and direction of that funding. We are talking about large sums of money. In Australia in 1996 government spending on science and technology was running at about $4 billion per year, so on average each person in the community was supporting science with about $200 per year through taxes. Because choices about which technologies will be used and how they are used have significant social impact, governments intervene to try to keep those impacts acceptable to the community.

In Chapter 1 we said that technology is the means we use to change and exploit our surroundings. This is done because it is believed that these changes are for the better: that it is better to have a city here, a coal mine there, and so forth. (We make no judgement here about whether it really is better to have the coal mine, etc.) While Homo sapiens has always had technology, use has not always been on a large scale and hence has not always produced economic growth. It seems that the condition for the large-scale use of technologies is that the society in question is, or has been, industrial. (The qualification is needed because some highly technological societies are now termed post-industrial: they are no longer properly called industrial, but they were industrial at some time.) Thus, the process by which a society becomes industrialised is relevant to our overall purposes because it has to do with the optimal conditions for the application of technology.

In Chapter 2, reference was made to Derek J. de Solla Price's book, Little Science, Big Science (Price 1965). Price pointed out that the number of scientists has expanded about a million-fold since the time of Galileo. Naturally, this huge growth has led to an enormous increase in the amount of literature, in science and in related subjects.

Given the sheer scale of publication today, it is reasonable to ask: is important information going to be lost? The short answer is, not necessarily. To someone who knows their way about the information jungle, it is not difficult to locate any information you want. In parallel with the growth of the scientific literature, the means of navigating around it has developed. In our view, it is essential for any person who wants to be informed to understand these techniques, and this appendix outlines some of the most important methods.

In almost any library, the books are treated separately from the journals and magazines. The latter are usually referred to as ‘periodicals’. The means of finding your way around the books are usually better known, and more and more libraries are resorting to computer catalogues.

The computer catalogue

Computer catalogues vary, but they enable you to find out far more than the older card catalogues. Searches by author and title can be carried out, but perhaps the most important improvement is the use of keyword searching.

Science has been getting some bad press over the last decade or two. More and more scientists have been accused of behaving badly. In some cases, they have been accused of mistreating human or animal subjects. In other cases, they have falsified their findings, or simply accepted behaviour by other people which was clearly wrong. As John Forge argued in the last chapter, it is reasonable in many circumstances to regard scientists as responsible for the effects of their conduct, and in this chapter we shall see what that conduct was, and what the consequences were.

To think about right and wrong conduct in science, we have to know two things. We have to know what the conduct is, and we have to know by what standards to judge it. As we shall see, this is often very difficult. This chapter will take you through some cases in which scientists behaved very badly. We shall look at some of these, and ask why they did so. In other cases, there is fierce debate about whether they did right or wrong. We will look at the arguments on both sides.

The great sociologist Robert K. Merton regarded science as a self-policing system. In his view, apprentice scientists are rapidly educated in what is, and is not, acceptable behaviour in science. Further, once they are working in science, their conduct is constantly under scrutiny.