ABSTRACT
Risk is the most common theme of public debate about science and technology in the late twentieth century. It plays an essential role as a reference point for empirical detail about the nature, severity, and importance of a range of social problems, the most significant of which have to do with environmental health and safety. For instance, risk underlies all discussion of toxic pollution. As such, risk links human activity and the biosphere and helps hold economic activity accountable for its costs of production (Ridley, 1989). Operationalized through risk analysis, it also serves to connect knowledge and action, by performing what has been termed a "science as method" function (Schmandt and Katz, 1986). Risk analysis takes some of its characteristics from science (quantitative data that can only be used according to specified rules), and some from policy (a focus on timely action and the need to accept uncertainty and inevitable imperfections). But because it has one foot in each camp, risk analysis is controversial for all parties-at-interest. The scientific community expresses concern about the dangers of politicized science. Thus, it proposes the insulation of risk analysis from the policy process—by making a distinction between scientific and management (the political determination of acceptable risk) aspects. Industry, as the major source of risky technologies, supports this formulation, and presses for the incorporation of cost-benefit or risk-benefit frameworks. Environmentalists, suspicious of both initiatives, fear that the current approach is not sufficiently action-forcing (National Research Council, 1983; Mazur, 1985; Hattis and Kennedy, 1986). These are not rhetorical debates. Each of the major protagonists understands that environmental threat is part of the "reality of events" they now confront, and that their latitude for action is to some degree constrained as a result. Physical phenomena, those things that it is physically possible to do, increasingly generate obstacles as well as provide opportunities for social systems. Dramatic discoveries and accidents place pressures on all actors, who find themselves as limited by what is physically possible as by what is socially attainable. This is what William Ruckelshaus (1989, p. 174), twice administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has in mind when he says that, to allow growth and development to take place within the limits set by ecological imperatives:
[W]e shall have to redefine our concepts of political and economic feasibility. These concepts are, after all, simply human constructs; they were different in the past, and they will surely change in the future. But the earth is real, and we are obliged by the fact of our utter dependence on it to listen more closely than we have to its messages.
This chapter is about how the "earth's messages," communicated in the language of environmental risk, contribute to redefining political, social, and economic "human constructs."