In 1970, Elizabeth Wickenden, a longtime activist on behalf of public social provision and a broker between voluntary social welfare agencies and the federal government, despaired of a quiet revolution occurring in social service provision. “Virtually unchallenged and undebated,” she observed, “the principle established with the first large-scale federal welfare program, the Federal Emergency Welfare Administration [sic], that public funds should only be expended by public agencies, was quietly repudiated.” Through a series of domestic initiatives, including the Economic Opportunity Act of 1965 and amendments to the Social Security Act in 1967, the federal government had begun to channel a significant amount of money through nongovernmental organizations. To older activists like Wickenden, who had fought hard to build the public infrastructure of the welfare state, such a trend was troubling, as it seemed to indicate a dwindling commitment to public social provision that had informed New Deal social policy.

The evolution of hazardous waste into a national environmental problem is a puzzling phenomenon. The public and media perceive hazardous waste to be a major environmental and public health risk. Yet, although the problem of hazardous waste and its resultant contamination has long been known, no one took it seriously until about 1978. An interesting question is, Why did the public and media ignore hazardous waste for so long, particularly during a period of unprecedented public and media interest in the environment, especially pollution, in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s?

Were it not linguistically awkward, I would be inclined to entitle these remarks a discourse on what went wrong with the love affair of policy-makers, academic pundits, and hard-core positivists with the world of science. In the nineteenth century, science was as identified with progress as bacon is with eggs. This optimism has given way to a pandemic mistrust of science by all sorts of elites. Popular displeasure became transparently evident in the waning decades of the twentieth century. Mistrust of science has only deepened in the first years of the new millennium. The ease with which scientific products are converted into destructive weaponry only partially accounts for the new skepticism about conventional claims. Unanticipated negative human consequences of actual discoveries in areas ranging from genetic engineering to wireless communication are at least as important an element in popular concerns. Nonetheless, professional assertions about the benefits of science continue unabated. Peter Watson in his fine recent survey, The Modern Mind, in which he asserts science as such “provides a new kind of humanity and a canon for life as it is now lived,” typifies these claims. The limitation in this by no means unusual formulation is that few people are actually involved in the life of science, while many are affected by applications of scientific work that often have indeterminate or, even worse, destructive consequences.