ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the nature of risk and on the ways humans respond to risk and the corresponding vulnerability, in particular on the phenomenology of being-vulnerable to environmental risk. It analyses the existential and cultural dimension of risk and vulnerability, and explores its implications for hinking about environmental health risk. The chapter considers the phenomenology of modern technological-environmental risks, and then it becomes clear that there is a kind of 'experiential distance' in risk situations. It argues that in modern technological culture there is a gap between the production of risk and the experience of risk, which has political consequences with regard to the power of persons and communities. Modernity has a specific way of understanding and coping with risk. Sociologist Ulrich Beck famously used the notion of 'risk society' to describe how modern society responds to risk.
