For most people, "risk" and "hazard" are virtual synonyms, although conventional risk analysts assign them somewhat different meanings. A sharp knife blade, they will tell you, is an example of a hazard, while risk is the probability that the knife will actually hurt someone. Businesses, however, are accustomed to thinking of risk as an economic reality. "Risk analysis" of chemicals and other potential environmental and health risks is derived from "cost-benefit analysis," which in turn derives from simple profit-and-loss accounting used by private companies.
"Risk analysis is a subtle discipline," observes Ian Stewart, a mathematics professor at Warwick University in England. "It is an elaborate and rather naive procedure that can be abused in several ways. One abuse is to exaggerate benefits and tone down risks. A particularly nasty kind occurs when one group takes the risk but a different group reaps the benefit." Risk management is not merely a technical discipline. Psychology, economics, politics, and the power of vested interests all lurk beneath the seemingly objective language of "balancing risks against benefits."
The question of which risks are acceptable depends ultimately on where the person passing judgment stands in relation to those risks. Under our current regulatory system, the risk of chemical exposures is usually passed on to the people who suffer those exposures. If ten or twenty years later they come down with cancer or their children suffer health problems, identifying the cause — let alone proving it in a court of law — is virtually impossible. Companies find this arrangement profitable, and it certainly encourages technological innovation, but the cost to others can be considerable, as the tobacco industry and the makers of leaded gasoline have tragically proven.
"Risk assessment is a decision-making technique that first came into use during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who was trained as a nuclear engineer," says Peter Montague, the editor of Rachel’s Environment and Health Weekly, a newsletter that offers weekly investigative reporting and opinion on issues of ecology and public health. "At its best, risk assessment is an honest attempt to find a rational basis for decisions, by analyzing the available scientific evidence. In theory it is still an attractive ideal," Montague says. "However, twenty years of actual practice have badly tarnished the ideal of risk assessment and have sullied the reputation of many a risk assessor." It arose, he says, in response to the growing realization that, "many modern technologies had far surpassed human understanding, giving rise to by-products that were dangerous, long-lived, and completely unanticipated." The same technologies that have created unparalleled wealth have also created unparalleled problems with municipal and industrial wastes, agricultural chemicals, auto exhausts, smokestack emissions, and greenhouse gases.
As government regulators and pollution-producing industries came under pressure in the 1970s to address these problems, they began devising quantitative measurements to assess impacts, to weigh risks against benefits, and to establish numerical thresholds that would distinguish between dangerous and safe exposure levels. The effort to develop these quantitative standards, however, is fraught with difficulties. The natural environment is quite different from a laboratory, and laboratory studies cannot hope to duplicate the myriad conditions and environments into which chemical compounds are being released.
Financial realities also limit the quality of the information that can be generated through laboratory research. To determine whether a chemical causes cancer, for example, researchers typically take a relatively small number of mice and pump them with large quantities of the chemical in question, because the alternative approach — using tens of thousands of mice and subjecting them to lower exposures — would cost a fortune. The effect of low-dose exposures is estimated by statistical extrapolation from the high-dose exposures. When one set of researchers set out to assess the accuracy of high-dose to low-dose extrapolation models, however, they found that the predicted low-dose results vary by a factor of 106. This, they note, "is like not knowing whether you have enough money to buy a cup of coffee or pay off the national debt."
In 1995, three well-known and respected risk assessors — Anna Fan, Robert Howd, and Brian Davis — published a detailed summary of the status of risk assessment, in which they pointed out that there is no scientific agreement on which tests to use to determine whether someone has suffered immune system, nervous system, or genetic damage. In other words, the best available science lacks the tools with which to provide definite, quantitative answers to the questions that are at the heart of risk assessment.
"There are other problems with risk assessments," Montague observes. "Science has no way to analyze the effects of multiple exposures, and almost all modern humans are routinely subjected to multiple exposures: pesticides, automobile exhaust, dioxins in meat, fish, and dairy products; prescription drugs; tobacco smoke; food additives; ultraviolet sunlight passing through the earth’s damaged ozone shield; and so on. Determining the cumulative effect of these insults is a scientific impossibility, so most risk assessors simply exclude these inconvenient realities. But the resulting risk assessment is bogus... .
"Risk assessment, it is now clear, promises what it cannot deliver, and so is misleading at best and fraudulent at worst. It pretends to provide a rational assessment of‘risk’ or‘safety,’ but it can do no such thing because the required data are simply not available, nor are standardized methods of interpretation."
Publicly, industry and government remain committed to risk assessment, but defectors are increasingly willing to admit that it is an art rather than a science. Different risk assessors, using the same evidence, can easily come up with radically opposed conclusions as to the costs and benefits of a course of action. Where uncertainty reigns, spin doctors rush in to fill the information vacuum. People are encouraged to suspend their own judgment and abandon responsibility to the experts (who have already surrendered their responsibility to their paymasters).
One expert approach seeks to quantify everything in the analysis, assigning dollar values to such unquantifiable, qualitative things as human lives and environmental beauty, along with genuinely quantifiable factors such as corporate profits and wealth created. The analyst then totals up the sum of various alternatives, and whichever one costs the least is deemed the most "acceptable" risk.
Another approach relies heavily on comparisons between different types of risks. If the risk to health posed by the use of a technology or chemical is questioned, the analyst calculates the likelihood of someone dying from exposure to that chemical and shows that it is less likely than the risk of dying from other events such as a car crash or drowning in a flood. Since people choose to drive cars and live downstream from dams, those risks must be acceptable to the public, the analyst concludes, and therefore this chemical must be acceptable too.
"If a person is horrified by the consequences of a carcinogenic pollutant, he is reminded that every day he takes greater risks driving to work," Noble observes. "The appealing thing about such methods for the analyst aside from the fact that they reinforce his prerogatives is that they so often yield counter-intuitive results; the answers come out in ways one would not have anticipated (unless, of course, one were the analyst). The happy consequence of this, for the promoters of the techniques, is that the naiveté of the nonspecialist is forever being revealed; the public is thus further cautioned about relying upon their experience and intuition and encouraged instead to rely upon the wisdom of the expert who alone can put things in perspective."
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The Vagaries of Expert Opinion |
Question Authority
When psychologists have explored the relationship between individuals and authority figures, they have found that it can be disturbingly easy for false experts to manipulate the thinking and behavior of others. One of the classic experiments in this regard was conducted in 1974 by Stanley Milgram, who tried to see how far people would go in following orders given by a seemingly authoritative scientist. His subjects were seated at a machine called a "shock generator," marked with a series of switches ranging from "slight shock" to "severe shock," Another person was designated as a "learner" and was-hooked up to receive a jolt each time he gave the wrong answer on a test. A third individual, the "scientist," stood over the experiment giving instructions and supervision.
Unbeknownst to the real subjects of the experiment, both the "learner" and the "scientist" were actors, and no actual electricity was used. As each fake shock was administered, the "learner" would cry out in pain. If the subject administering the shocks hesitated, the "scientist" would say something like, "Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on," or "It is absolutely essential that you continue." The result was that many subjects continued to administer shocks, even when the "learner" claimed heart trouble, cried out, or pleaded to be set free. "With numbing regularity," Milgram observed, good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe.
In another famous experiment, known as the "Doctor Fox Lecture," a distinguished-looking actor was hired to give a meaningless lecture, titled "Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physical Education." The talk, deliberately filled with "double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements," was delivered before three audiences composed of psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, educators, and educational administrators, many of whom held advanced degrees. After each session, audiences received a questionnaire asking them to evaluate the speaker. None of the audience members saw through the lecture as a hoax, and most reported that they were favorably impressed with the speaker’s expertise.
Activate Yourself
In understanding the hold that experts have on our lives, we should consider the role that we ourselves play as consumers of information. Of course, there is no way that anyone can be active and informed about every issue under the sun. The world is too complex for that, and our lives are too busy. However, each of us can choose those issues that move us most deeply and devote some time to them. Activism enriches our lives in multiple ways. It brings us into personal contact with other people who are informed, passionate, and altruistic in their commitment to help make the world a better place. These are good friends to have, and often they are better sources of information than the experts whose names appear in the newspapers or on television. Activism, in our opinion, is not just a civic duty. It is a path to enlightenment.
Activists and whistle-blowers come from all walks of life. Emelda West, a great-grandmother in her seventies, helped campaign against toxic releases in low-income communities in Louisiana. In Pensacola, Florida, Margaret Williams heads Citizens Against Toxic Exposure, a group formed in 1991 to battle the Environmental Protection Agency’s digging on a toxic site near her home. When residents — most of them elderly and not well-off financially — began suffering eye and skin irritations and breathing problems, she quickly learned about the poisonous effects of dioxin. Although her group lost the battle to stop the digging it recently persuaded the federal government to pay for the relocation of all 358 families.
Terri Swearingen had activism thrust upon her in 1982. "I was pregnant with our one and only child," she recalls. "That’s when I first learned of plans to build one of the world’s largest toxic waste incinerators in my community. When they began site preparation to begin building the incinerator in 1990, my life changed forever.
The incinerator, owned by a company called Waste Technologies Industries (WTI), was sited in East Liverpool, Ohio, just across the border from her home in West Virginia. It was situated in a floodplain, with homes nearby and an elementary school just 400 yards away. Worse yet, it was located in a valley that experiences frequent air inversions, which trap the air and prevent the escape of pollution. In short, it is about the worst place you could imagine building a giant hazardous waste facility that emits dioxins, acid gases like hydrogen chloride, and heavy metals, including mercury, lead, and chromium.
"I’m a registered nurse," Swearingen says, "so I’ve actually seen the effects of lead poisoning in young children and the types of behavioral or developmental problems that it produces. One of the first things I learned about WTI was that the government was going to let them emit 4.7 tons of lead annually. I thought, how can the government do this? How can they let them emit lead? Lead never breaks down. It never degrades. It just accumulates. When you know a little bit about the effects of lead, the rest is just common sense. That’s all you need to know to realize that they should never even consider building this thing next to a school."
When Swearingen first began trying to fight the incinerator, she says she was "at ground zero." She picked up Rush to Burn, a 1989 book about waste incineration by reporters at Newsday magazine. "I read the book twice and highlighted sections with the people involved. Then I just started calling them up and asking for help. They said,‘You’re going to have to deal with this yourself.’"
She learned to tap the expertise of people such as Paul Connett, a professor of chemistry at St. Lawrence University whom Swearingen calls "our secret weapon." Connett helped translate complex scientific data into information that the community could understand. Other advice came from Herbert Needleman, the University of Pittsburgh researcher who has studied the neurotoxicology of lead in children, and David Ozonoff, chairman of Boston University’s School of Public Health. To help challenge a risk assessment from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, she called on EPA whistle-blower Hugh Kaufman.
Swearingen herself led more than twenty civil disobedience protests against the incinerator and even testified before the U.S. Congress. She helped make the incinerator such a high-profile issue that in 1992 Al Gore, then a candidate for vice-president, promised to stop the project if he were elected. "The very idea of putting WTI in a flood plain, you know it’s just unbelievable to me," Gore said. "For the safety and health of local residents rightfully concerned about the impact of this incinerator on their families and their future, a thorough investigation is urgently needed."
Like many politicians’ promises, this one turned out to be worth less than the air in which it vibrated. Once in office, Gore backed down — not surprisingly, since Little Rock investment banker Jackson Stephens, the Clinton-Core campaign’s biggest financial backer, was involved in financing the incinerator.
But even though the WTI incinerator was not stopped, it became a turning point against the construction of new incinerators. Swearingen’s dogged protests — including her willingness to get arrested for the cause — gained enough attention to prompt Ohio Governor George Voinovich to halt future incinerator construction. The day after she was jailed for a demonstration in front of the White House, the Clinton administration declared a national moratorium on new incinerator construction and revised its rules to require stricter limits on the release of dioxin and heavy metals. In April 1997, she received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in recognition of her leadership.
"I am not a scientist or a Ph.D.," Swearingen said upon accepting the award. "I am a nurse and a housewife, but my most important credential is that I am a mother.... We know what is at stake. We have been forced to educate ourselves, and the final exam represents our children’s future. ...Because of this, we approach the problem with common sense and with passion. We don’t buy into the notion that all it takes is better regulations and standards, better air pollution control devices and more bells and whistles. We don’t believe that technology will solve all of our problems. We know that we must get to the front end of the problems, and that prevention is what is needed."
She recalls talking about WTI recently with a fourteen-year-old girl. Upon learning that the incinerator was located next to a school, the girl blurted out, "But that wouldn’t take any research to know it’s wrong!" Swearingen marvels at a teenager’s ability to grasp in a single sentence the point that eluded the EPA in its four-year, 4,000-page risk assessment.
"We have to reappraise what expertise is and who qualifies as an expert," Swearingen says. "There are the experts who are working in the corporate interest, who often serve to obscure the obvious and challenge common sense; and there are experts and non-experts who are working in the public interest. From my experience, I am distrusting more and more the professional experts, not because they are not clever, but because they do not ask the right questions. And that’s the difference between being clever and being wise. Einstein said,‘A clever person solves a problem; a wise person avoids it.’ ...Citizens who are working in this arena — people who are battling to stop new dump sites or incinerator proposals, people who are risking their lives to prevent the destruction of rainforests or working to ban the industrial uses of chlorine and PVC plastics — are often labeled obstructionists and anti-progress. But we actually represent progress — not technological progress, but social progress. We have become the real experts, not because of our title or the university we attended, but because we have been threatened and we have a different way of seeing the world."
Excerpted with permission from the book
Trust Us, We’re Experts!: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, published by Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc. New York, NY 10014. Copyright © 2001 by The Center for Media and Democracy.