ABSTRACT
In sociological company it does not need to be argued that ‘the global environment’ is a social and cultural construct, into whose multivalent articulation are poured many complex and conflicting anxieties and commitments. The discipline of scientific knowledge is seen as the one superordinate discourse which can lend coherence to this incipient anarchism, to identify and describe the real natural problems, account for the underlying processes, and to define reliable and realistic options for societal response. Thus the social authority of science becomes a central issue, and ever more sharply so that the environmental and geopolitical arena over which it is supposed to reign expands to literally global proportions.
