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Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms

University of California Press

Guerrilla action and political unrest are not limited to places like El Salvador, Nicaragua, or Angola. In Michigan, for example, local residents put nails and tacks on their highways to prevent the state from burying cattle contaminated by polybrominated biphenyls. In New Jersey, citizens took public officials hostage when they were excluded from decisionmaking regarding a hazardous waste facility in their neighborhood. And in Illinois, townspeople halted the operation of a landfill by digging trenches across its access roads.1

Citizen protests such as these have resulted, in part, from the perceived failure of government and industry to protect the health and safety of the people. Acts of civil disobedience, in turn, have also helped to mobilize public awareness of a variety of environmental risks. For example, 75 percent of residents recently surveyed in Santa Clara County, California, charged that their water was "unsafe to drink" after they discovered chemical contamination in three local public wells.2 More generally, a recent poll sponsored by the Council on Environmental Quality and funded by Resources for the Future found that only 10 to 12 percent of the U.S. population would voluntarily live a mile or less from a nuclear power plant or hazardous waste facility.3 As a result, some communities are trying to discourage the establishment of treatment or storage facilities for chemical wastes; they are charging up to $100,000 for permit application fees.4

Hazardous waste facilities are not the only environmental risks repeatedly rejected by the public. In Delaware, Shell Oil was forced to leave the state in order to find a refinery site. And Alumax abandoned Oregon after a ten-year controversy over the siting of an aluminum-smelting plant. Likewise, Dow Chemical Company gave up its proposed petrochemical-complex site on the Sacramento River in California, after spending $4.5 million in a futile attempt to gain the required ap-

provals. In fact, in the last ten years, approximately 50 percent of attempted sitings of oil refineries have failed because of public opposition. Likewise, no large metropolitan airport has been sited in the United States since the Dallas-Fort Worth facility was built in the early 1960s.5 In a similar vein, there have been no new U.S. commercial orders for nuclear plants since 1974.6 Although the government predicted in 1973 that the United States would have one thousand commercial reactors by the year 2000, citizen opposition and rising costs make it unlikely that the country will have even two hundred of the plants.7

Aversion to Risks:Public Paranoia or Technological Oppression?

Industry spokespersons attribute the blocking of oil refineries, nuclear reactors, and toxic waste dumps to public ignorance and mass paranoia. They charge that misguided and irrational citizens have successfully delayed so many technological facilities, driving up their costs, that wise investors now avoid them.8

Pete Seeger, however, has another story. He and the members of the Clamshell Alliance, as well as many other environmental and consumer activists, would claim that, just as the people created the moral victories won by the civil rights movements and the Vietnam protests, so also the people have successfully challenged potential technological oppressors. In their view, just as the people rejected a war fought without their free, informed consent, they also are rejecting public environmental risks likewise imposed on them without their free, informed consent. For them, to delay or stop construction of risky industrial facilities is a great moral triumph for populist democracy.

Industry sympathizers do not agree. They claim that laypersons' aversion to societal risks stems not so much from any real or apparent danger, such as toxic waste contamination, but from group attitudes that are anti-industry, antigovernment, and antiscience. They charge that the paranoid, neo-Luddite baby boomers who now dominate the environmental movement cut their political teeth during the Vietnam-era protests and then went on to become Yuppie lawyers, professors, and social workers. Holding their earlier political beliefs, they have merely transferred their activism from military to environmental issues. Thus, Pete Seeger now sings about "nukes," not "Nam." And Seeger's hair has turned gray, while the baby boomers long ago cut theirs, probably for an important job interview.9

Who is right? Is public aversion to societal risks caused by mass

paranoia and ignorance of science? Or by yet another form of oppression inflicted by "big industry," "big technology," and "big government"? Not surprisingly, I shall argue that the correct answer lies between these two extremes. Despite a regrettable and widespread ignorance of science, nevertheless environmentalism is not merely the product of an irrational "construct." Despite rampant technological illiteracy, irrationality is not the sole explanation of typical public aversion to involuntarily imposed societal risks. Likewise, it cannot account for widespread distrust of technologies having the potential to cause catastrophic accidents and increased cancers.

The main purpose of this volume is to sketch a middle path between the industrial charges of scientific illiteracy and the populist charges of technological oppression. In so doing, I shall argue for an alternative approach to contemporary, societally imposed risks. My focus is not on personally chosen risks, like diet drinks or oral contraceptives, since each of us is able to avoid such hazards. If my analysis is correct, then we need a new "paradigm," a new account of when the acceptance of public hazards is rational. We also need to recognize that laypersons are often more rational, in their evaluation of societal risks, than either experts or governments appear to have recognized.

The Rise of Risk Assessment and Evaluation

As Chapter Four will explain in greater detail, government and industry experts perform most risk or hazard assessments. Their analyses include three main stages: (1) identification of some public or societal hazard; (2) estimation of the level and extent of potential harm associated with it; and (3) evaluation of the acceptability of the danger, relative to other hazards.10 (Most of the discussion in this volume will focus on the third stage,risk evaluation. ) Once assessors have completed these three assessment tasks, policymakers then determine the best way to accomplish risk management of a particular public threat—for example, through regulation, prohibition, or taxation.

As a specific tool for societal decisionmaking, risk or hazard analysis is relatively new. Although Mesopotamian priests, before the time of Christ, regularly evaluated the impacts of proposed technological projects, risk assessment as a "developing science" did not arise until the late 1960s and the early 1970s.11 Public concern about the human and environmental risks of thousands of technologies arose in part because of tragedies like Love Canal and because of works like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. 12 Another important milestone in raising environmental consciousness...