that the public's unrestrained optimism about the promise of science and technology — a belief that was characteristic of the thirty years from the Manhattan Project in 1940 to the moon landings in 1969 — would also be followed by disillusionment and distrust. The 1970s marked the watershed between a time when matters of science and technology could be confidently left to the experts and the new era, when society at large would demand a far greater decision-making role. The applications of science and technology were coming to be viewed as simply too important to be left to a small coterie of experts (23). The decade brought accelerating revelations of the longterm and often invisible hazards of new technologies — in the unintended consequences of DDTs and PCBs, of asbestos and phosphate detergents; in the potential cumulative effects of burning fossil fuels on levels of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, of fluorocarbons from spray cans on stratospheric ozone, of radioactive waste management on future generations. What was emerging was an increasingly skeptical appraisal of the costs and benefits of a technological society, of the possibilities and limits of scientific inquiry itself (24). Public opinion polls nevertheless showed Americans to be remarkably steady supporters of the technological enterprise as a whole. The belief that technology generally brings more benefits than problems was consistently endorsed throughout the 1970s by majorities of 81% to 84% of the public (25). In November 1980, when Americans were asked which one course seemed to them most likely to improve the country's energy situation, only 17% put their faith in “an all-out effort to increase current energy production,'' and only 28% sought salvation in “a tough program to conserve energy”; but 47% felt that the problem would most likely be improved by “a technological breakthrough that would provide new sources of energy” (26). By 52%, a majority of Americans in 1978 continued to believe that, “Technology will find a way of solving the problem of shortages and natural resources”; but the trend appears clearly to be in the direction of expecting less of the technological enterprise. Only 29% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 who had attended college agreed that resource problems will be solved by technology, while this traditional view was held by 69% of the older, less educated, lower-income segments of the population. “Whatever the reason,” Yankelovich and Lefkowitz (27) conclude, “the important point is that skepticism about technology is likely to spread in the future. Almost invariably, the young and well educated anticipate attitudes that spread to the larger society.” The Strength of Environmental Concerns Concern for the environment, contrary to the expectations of many in business and industry circles, retained a firm position among the enduring commitments of the American public. It continued to take priority even over the restoration of economic growth: —In August 1978, only 20% of the public agreed that, “We must relax environmental standards in order to achieve economic growth”; another 18% thought we could have both environmental protection and economic growth simultaneously; but some 58% concurred with the view, “We must accept a lower rate of economic growth in order to protect our environment” (28). In September 1979, Harris (29) reported that, while 59% favored new industrial growth in their communities, and 49% would continue to favor it if it only made the air “a little dirtier”; if industrial growth turned out to “make the air a lot dirtier,” 80% of the American people said they would oppose it.
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