ABSTRACT
The incorporation of community values into environmental decision making has become somewhat of a battle cry in the environmental regulatory and risk management community. Ironically, the codification of the quantitative risk assessment process in the 1983 National Academy of Sciences “red book” may have contributed to a departure from the consideration of public values in environmental decision making. The public health approach offers a valuable model for the integration of values, perceptions, and ethics into environmental decision making. The common misinterpretation has led to an isolated approach to risk characterization and contributed to a departure from traditional public health methods. The trend away from the public health approach is seen not only in the organizational charts, but also in the budget. Quantitative risk assessment seeks to identify the toxicological properties of a specific substance, while public health assessment is based upon an evaluation of the prevalence of disease and the health status of a population.
