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Biological materials such as infectious agents, recombinant DNA molecules, and genetically modified organisms can cause serious health risks if they are not contained properly. Therefore, the federal government has established a series of rules, regulations, and best practices for proper containment of hazardous materials. Federal guidelines classify the health hazard of biological agents and their containment facilities based on the different levels of risk associated with their use in research. To ensure compliance, the federal government requires the appointment of an institutional biosafety committee and a biological safety officer to review all recombinant DNA research, including agricultural research using genetically modified organisms. Select agents are any biological organisms or toxins that potentially pose a severe threat to human, animal, or plant, health. Any institution that uses select agents must register with the federal government, and the researchers must undergo a federal security risk assessment. The federal government has also established licensing procedures for radioactive material that regulate exposure limits and permissible possession amounts. The broad license requires the appointment of a radiation safety committee and a radiation safety officer to monitor institutional regulatory compliance. Likewise, all hazardous waste must be handled according to rigid federal and state regulations.

Using case studies focusing on how developed nations impose environmental risks on developing countries, the chapter reveals how the U.S. and other nations ship banned pesticides or hazardous waste to developing nations. The chapter analyzes the concepts of equal protection and moral heroism or supererogation. It argues that most indigenous people do not give genuine informed consent to such risks and that it is not paternalistic to protect native people. Extending and developing arguments of Peter Singer, the chapter also argues that ordinary citizens have duties (that are not heroic) to help protect innocent victims from first‐world exploitation, even though there are many economic incentives that lead nations to exploit the poor of the world.

This chapter examines the formation of a cross-movement coalition involving labor, environmental, and community organizations in New Jersey during the 1980s. The New Jersey Right-to-Know Coalition developed in response to community and worker concerns about the risk of contaminant exposure from New Jersey's sizeable chemical industry. Building on the political momentum from a related campaign in Philadelphia, environmental and labor activists in New Jersey made a crucial decision to join forces in their push for regulatory reform of the state's hazardous-material management system. Through this collaboration, they achieved a more sweeping reform than either movement could have achieved on its own. However, this cross-movement coalition experienced significant political challenges when some members attempted to expand the discursive frame and policy goals from the right to know to the right to act.

This chapter draws together the evidence of the last three chapters to consider the emergence of global standards as a driver of improvements in the environmental performance of industry. Our particular focus is the growing importance of firm-based global environmental standards as an alternative to the more widely recognized state-centered approaches to setting and implementing environmental standards. Increasing numbers of multinational firms (MNCs) are adopting uniform approaches to environmental management across all of their facilities worldwide, including in some cases process and performance-based environmental standards. Such intra-firm standards have even broader reach when they are also applied to the suppliers of the MNCs as part of standardized supply chain management. In this chapter we examine the rationale behind the adoption of firm-based approaches to global environmental standards, and whether such firm-based approaches add value to traditional state-centered environmental regulation and governance. Why are firm-based global standards being adopted by MNCs, and do these standards constitute a novel and effective approach to improving the environmental performance of industry? The chapter addresses the issue of global standards and the environment from the perspective of recent research within economic geography on issues of economic globalization. We take this starting point precisely because much of the recent interest in global environmental standards among politicians and policy makers is a reaction to economic globalization and to the likely environmental and social consequences of intensified flows of capital, technology, and information on a global scale. The growing force of neoliberal trade and investment regimes, and the rapid growth in foreign direct investment and international trade within the world economy, has led many to call for a new global governance of economic processes that will ensure more positive development outcomes (Rodrik et al. 2002; UNDP 2003). What Rodrik and others have in mind in this regard is some combination of supra-national institutional capability and strengthened state-based regulation to match the growing global reach of MNCs.