FOLENS E-Letter
My Lecture for FOLENS (FOLENS E-News No.6/March 2012): Advanced Global Environmental Chemistry
Professor, Field Science Center
Hiroshi Hara
This series of lectures is firmly based on the personal experience and thinking throughout acid deposition measurements on national, regional and global scales. Whereas the environmental science currently seems to be a fairly well established discipline of science, it was regarded as something in which decent scientists would never be involved when the author entered air pollution community in 1976. This recognition might be reasonable because of apparently poor approaches from the viewpoint of basic science. The state-of-art at that time forced me of thinking about science itself and its history, philosophy, and relationship with society. Currently, "the environmental problem" is personally and clearly defined : anthropogenic activities are threatening the human sustainability by changing biogeochemical cycling. Therefore, environmental science, or studies of science and the environment, requires three points: 1) both impacts and countermeasures should be in mind regardless of one's interests in the environmental science, 2) some contacts with actual problems of the environment, and 3) the best possible solutions should be always being sought for under ever-limited understanding of the environment. Discussion should be extended to philosophy of science for deepening the analysis. Like working on crops, science involves two groups of scientists: producers and consumers, which could be possibly connected with scientific revolutions and normal science as Thomas S. Kuhn once proposed. Environmental science has much more limited history and dimensions than those of traditional disciplines in the academism. Nevertheless, environmental science is intrinsically “producer” science because of the three requirements above. In this sense, environmental science needs to rest on the very basic science and to enable communications with the general public and policy makers in a manner both scientifically sound and socially accessible. On the basis of this philosophy of environmental science, the series begins with recognition of environmental problems and concludes with philosophy of science. Hot subjects of global atmospheric environment are also addressed with basic science behind the issues.