Farmers, workers, and business people constituted a segment of the environmental opposition that stemmed from direct economic interest. Each of these groups considered its material objectives to be threatened by the expansion of environmental policies. There was another part of that opposition, however, that arose from quite a different quarter, in the realms of science, economics, and planning.

Professionals in those fields were not as firmly hostile to environmental objectives as were those in agriculture, labor, and business; rather, they were prone to argue that although environmental values were quite legitimate social objectives, those objectives were often pushed to excess and expressed in emotional rather than calm and rational terms. Hence they did not tend to array themselves in the forefront of efforts to attain environmental objectives but sought to restrain such efforts. In so doing they became an important element in the environmental opposition.

Diverse fields such as air- and water-pollution control, health, economics, forestry, soil conservation, water resources, and wildlife management were intimately involved with environmental affairs. Each came to argue that its role in such matters was to be neutral rather than one of advocacy, to be professional rather than promotional. Yet within the day-to-day choices of environmental politics, in legislative, administrative, and judicial action, individuals assessed their own specialized knowledge in one way rather than another so as to identify themselves with a particular direction of political choice. Underlying the ideology of political neutrality was the preference for one side or the other in political controversy.