Environmental science as a social process

The felt need for better environmental information for planners and voters is based on maladaptive beliefs about the nature of knowledge and social order. Because there is not a meta-model which links the individual environmental sciences into a coherent whole, understanding complex environmental problems is necessarily a process of discourse between scientists from separate sciences—a process of gaining trust, building new patterns of thinking, and reaching toward new consensuses. By acknowledging the nature of the process, we can improve upon it and relieve the felt need for better environmental information.