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This chapter discusses how within political systems, there are important linkages among many health, safety, and environmental risk regulations. Their public issue life cycles overlap and they often follow parallel or convergent political trajectories. Each regulatory decision or non-decision has distinctive and multiple causes, and no single theory can adequately account for all the policy outcomes that have taken place in both Europe and the United States since 1960. The chapter then establishes an explanatory framework that focuses on the role and interaction of three factors: the extent and intensity of public pressures for more stringent or protective regulations, the policy preferences of influential government officials, and the criteria by which policy makers assess and manage risks.

This chapter reviews research on the potential for knowledge exchange and participative approaches in making risk communication more effective. It focuses particularly on examples of communication concerning ‘chronic’, persistent risks associated with environments that are known to be contaminated, as well as ‘potential’ sources of environmental contamination, such as industrial facilities, in their normal operation and decommissioning.

The concept of environmental risk is pervasive in contemporary environmental policy, and there are legions of experts, within and outside of government, who conduct, communicate, interpret, and debate studies designed to influence decisions on myriad environmental risks that we face today. Such use of risk analysis is likely to continue for the indefinite future. The chapter focuses on the key conceptual innovations that lie behind ideas about environmental risk, the practical implications of using environmental risk assessment and risk evaluation in governmental decision making, and the role that environmental risk concepts may play in the future. As sustainable development becomes the long-term goal of environmental policy actions, citizens and policymakers will have to search for new ways to think about, measure, compare, and act on both new and old environmental risks.  

This chapter begins by explaining why the complexity of health-related science often makes it susceptible to manipulation. It then shows what some special interests do when they literally “buy” private-interest science through front groups, think tanks, and “hire education” (“hire education” refers to industry funding of academic research that serves its corporate goals). The chapter surveys how private-interest science is done — with incomplete data, contraindicated models, inadequately sensitive tests of pollution damage, and so on. Finally, the chapter shows how and why private-interest science often leads to death, injury, and flawed ethics.

This chapter outlines the principles of risk management. Topics discussed include risk evaluation, factors affecting the perception and acceptance of risk, prevention and control of exposure to environmental hazards, risk monitoring and use of indicators, special problems in managing environmental health risks, and cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis on interventions.

This chapter lays out the basic approach to risk assessment. Topics discussed include epidemiological methods, hazard identification in the field, the relationship between dose and health outcome, human exposure assessment, health risk characterization, and health in environmental impact assessment.

This chapter focuses on how scientific assessments of environmental risks neglect minorities, and how community participation can help in their inclusion, in the process. The Madison Environmental Justice Organization (MEJO) highlights the differences in environmental risk assessments associated with subsistence fish consumption. The chapter describes how knowledge and communication disparities associated with fish consumption are created and ignored by institutions responsible for addressing them. It also focuses on the challenges that MEJO faces in highlighting these issues in institutional risk assessment processes. The experiences of MEJO reveal that extensive efforts are transforming power-sharing relations among groups involved in and influenced by environmental risk assessments. These interactions are also encouraging scientists to induct specific cultural and local knowledge of different community members into such risk assessments and communication strategies.

This chapter assesses Westway's defeat, starting with an examination of the consequences, then looking at the outcome both under the law and facts relevant to the Westway proposal and as a lens to critique the law's attributes in modern regulatory wars, especially over environmental stakes. While commentators included many who bemoaned Westway's defeat, others praised the result and the process that allowed citizens, politicians, and agency scientists to oppose and defeat a project supported by many powerful interests. Hence part of this clash of views hinged on whether Westway's defeat revealed legal or political dysfunction, even if it was a sound result under the law. Westway's lengthy war and defeat also offer lessons about the law, especially in complicated regulatory wars involving all branches and layers of government, citizen activists, and clashes over environmental risks and urban priorities.

This chapter explores the explanatory power of the approach this book has labelled the Corporate Actor (CA) model in accounting for the differences in the climate change strategies adopted by the oil companies in this study. It explains that the CA model suggests that differences in the companies' climate strategy choice are explained by differences in the companies themselves. This chapter analyses three company-specific factors that may have an impact on strategy choice in relation to an issue such as climate change. These include the environmental risk associated with current and future corporate operations, the company's capacity for organisational learning, and the environmental reputation of the company.

This chapter assesses Westway's defeat, starting with an examination of the consequences, then looking at the outcome both under the law and facts relevant to the Westway proposal and as a lens to critique the law's attributes in modern regulatory wars, especially over environmental stakes. While commentators included many who bemoaned Westway's defeat, others praised the result and the process that allowed citizens, politicians, and agency scientists to oppose and defeat a project supported by many powerful interests. Hence part of this clash of views hinged on whether Westway's defeat revealed legal or political dysfunction, even if it was a sound result under the law. Westway's lengthy war and defeat also offer lessons about the law, especially in complicated regulatory wars involving all branches and layers of government, citizen activists, and clashes over environmental risks and urban priorities.

This introductory chapter considers the problem of investment project selection, i.e. which projects should be implemented to maximize intergenerational welfare. To address the challenge of allocating present sacrifices for the future in the way that maximizes the increase in welfare of future generations, the chapter introduces the cost-benefit analysis (CBA). The CBA is a set of valuation techniques that enables priorities to be put on the set of investment opportunities to be compatible with maximizing intertemporal welfare. The focus here is on how to compare temporally distributed valuations of different projects’ impacts, once these valuations have been made. One key ingredient in the CBA toolkit is the discount rate, which can be interpreted as the minimum rate of return required from a safe investment project to make it socially desirable to implement.

This chapter concludes by presenting a number of arguments supporting to tilt the balance in favour of environmental concerns. It explains that the directing principles have a common denominator which is the battle against environmental risks. It stresses that these principles could be best described using three distinct models representing three paradigms of protection: a curvative model, a preventive model, and an anticipatory model. This chapter also clarifies that directing principles represent the interface between modern and post-modern law. It discusses that at the EC level, the directing principles specify that ‘Community policy on the environment shall aim at a high level of protection’. It argues that while concentric circles are taking shape around environmental interests, each of those interests still provides evidence of a certain fragility. Yet they must be strengthened for the environmental directing principles to succeed and come to maturity.

This chapter explains how the gas mask became an environmental icon that warned of the risks to fragile, ecological bodies. Antipollution groups began using the gas mask as a protest prop in the 1950s and 1960s, in campaigns that called upon local governments to combat smog and clean the air. As Earth Day 1970 approached, the gas mask moved beyond the local contexts of air pollution activism to represent environmentalist claims that the federal government needed to broaden its regulatory powers to protect the health of the citizenry. For the most part, gas mask imagery focused on white Americans as archetypal members of the national community and therefore as universal emblems of environmental danger. The apparently placeless ubiquity of air pollution, together with the repeated focus on white bodies, obscured the specific geographies of environmental risk and the social processes that produced environmental injustice. The gas mask acted as a sign of universal danger, of the white ecological body under assault. The story of this environmental icon thus reveals the limits of mainstream imagery: even as the gas mask normalized fear of the environmental future, its depiction of universal vulnerability obscured the vastly unequal experience of environmental risk.

This chapter focuses on water and sanitation. Topics discussed include the importance of water quality; water quality, sanitation, and health; adequacy of freshwater supply to meet the world's needs, drinking-water quality criteria, drinking-water supply and monitoring, sanitation, water pollution control, recreational water guidelines, and ensuring safe and sufficient water supply.