It Is the Safest of Times

Proponents of the view that this is the safest of times² point out that the best overall measure of health and safety risk is average life expectancy. They note that during this century there have been dramatic increases in life expectancy even as the society has increased its use of the chemicals and other hazardous substances that are the subject of intense debate about risk. The increases have been marked for women and men and for blacks and whites (see Table 3.1). While much of the increased longevity is due to declining infant mortality and is probably unrelated to environmental and occupational health hazards, improvements in life expectancy of young adults have also been striking. Thus medical science, improved nutrition, water purification, and other advances have combined to give each person a good chance at living a full life span. The data offer no indication that epidemics of chemical-induced cancer or other technologically borne scourges are increasing the risk of fatality.

TABLE 3.1

Life Expectancies in the United States, 1900–1984.

Proponents of the view that risk is decreasing point out that many of the hazardous substances now in the environment decrease overall risk by replacing more dangerous substances. For instance, chlorinated hydrocarbon solvents, which cause cancer in animals and possibly humans as well, have replaced flammable ones, which caused death by fire. Many other hazardous substances decrease risk by reducing more serious preexisting hazards. Pesticides and herbicides may cause cancer, but, in some parts of the world at least, they have helped prevent famine. Water chlorination increases exposure to carcinogens but decreases exposure to typhoid-causing bacteria and other infectious agents.

Proponents of the view that technology improves safety conclude that many people are becoming more and more concerned about smaller and smaller risks. They see the gains from past technological change as outweighing the new risks by a large margin, and they see no reason the trend will not continue.

It Is the Riskiest of Times

Proponents of the view that this is the riskiest of times see modern technology as generating new threats to society and the earth's life-support systems and as doing so at an accelerating pace. They argue that because of the technological advances that have increased life spans, population growth threatens more devastating famines than the world has ever seen. They also note that the long-term biological and ecological effects of rapid increases in the use of chemicals are still unknown. To illustrate the reason for concern, they note that serious hazards continue to be discovered—a recent example is the hazard to the earth's ozone layer from manufactured chlorofluorocarbons. They point out that the synergistic effects of technological hazards remain almost entirely unstudied even though people are rarely exposed to one hazard in isolation from others. They point to a range of global environmental threats whose ultimate implications for humanity are unknown but potentially catastrophic: the rapid rate of extinction of species and the destruction of their habitats; deforestation and decreases in biological diversity in the tropics; the possibility of major climatic change due to human activity; and, of course, the possibility of nuclear holocaust.

Proponents of the view that technology is increasing risks do not see advances in life expectancy as a convincing counterargument. They point out that many of the new risks are unlikely to be reflected in current life expectancy data because they are so far only evident in indicators of ecosystems and the geosphere. They note that the new low-probability catastrophic risks that they consider important cannot appear in life expectancy tables because the catastrophes have not yet occurred. And they suggest that progress in raising life expectancy, which has slowed since 1950, might have been greater if it had not been for the new risks. Thus those who see risk as increasing call for tighter control over technology, introduction of more environmentally benign technology, and abandonment of some technologies considered particularly risky.

Understanding the Conflict

Although each of these views has some valid and convincing evidence on its side, the dispute cannot be resolved by available evidence. In fact, it may not ultimately be about evidence. At a deeper level it is about what kinds of risks people want most to avoid, what kinds of lives they want to lead, what they believe the future will bring, and what the proper relationship is between humanity and nature. Reviewing the evidence will not resolve the dispute— in fact, debates over technology framed in this way seem only to increase anger and frustration. But understanding the conflict may be a necessary first step toward improving dialogue, that is, toward making better risk communication possible.

To understand the conflict, it helps to begin by asking what has changed in the relation of technology and society and what has not. As we noted in Chapter 2, the existence of technological hazards is nothing new. Whether such hazards present an increased net risk is, of course, a matter of dispute. There is little doubt, however, that the extent and intensity of conflict about technological hazards have increased substantially over the past 30 years. This can be seen in the pressures that culminated in a flurry of environmental legislation in the late 1960s and the 1970s, in evidence of increasing public opposition to nuclear power since the early 1970s (Ahearne, 1987; Freudenburg and Rosa, 1984; Hively, 1988), and in the continuing strong public support for environmental regulation during the Reagan years in the face of the administration's commitment to deregulation (Dunlap, 1987).³ The following sections elaborate on the major factors contributing to intense conflict over technology and on the nature of that conflict.

Increased Understanding of Human Influence on Hazards

Advances in science and technology have made clear that humanity has much more to do with its own health and longevity than was once believed. Many illnesses and deaths that were once seen as inevitable, random, or divinely caused are now known to have human origins. Modern science can detect anthropogenic toxic substances at increasingly low concentrations and can trace their biological effects with animal experiments and epidemiological studies. Modern techniques of detection and analysis can connect events over great distances and through complex pathways, revealing the human causes of hazards.

People are also increasingly aware that human action can avoid or reduce risks. Individuals have learned that they can increase their life expectancies by wearing seat belts, avoiding tobacco use, and controlling their diets. Governments and firms can reduce human health risks with pollution controls and improved safety measures in industrial processes and consumer products. And, of course, medical science continues to develop ways to prolong life. It is an irony of progress that each success in prolonging and enhancing human life brings increasing awareness that human action—or inaction—can also be responsible for death.

Awareness of the human influence over life and death makes technological choices into moral issues. In most modern societies harm to a person readily becomes a moral issue if a responsible party can be identified. Thus people feel morally obligated to donate blood or bone marrow when they are made to understand that their particular type is needed to prolong life (Schwartz, 1977). Similarly, people who believe industrial firms are responsible for some cancers tend to see them as morally obligated to ameliorate the harm (Stern et al., 1986). From such moral feelings comes the widespread sentiment for using extraordinary, risky, and expensive measures to prolong lives when nothing else is likely to work. By the same reasoning, reports that the burning of coal in Ohio is killing fish in New York and may be threatening human health can lead people to see the pollution of air as immoral.

In the U.S. and other legal systems, awareness of human influence calls into action fundamental norms about responsibility, rights, and due process. When people who are perceived to be innocent are put in jeopardy, discussions about intent, justice, blame, and punishment are almost inevitable. What is at issue is no longer only whether an activity makes people better or worse off but whether the changes are fair and whether the responsible agent has the right to affect other people's well-being.

Worsening Worst Cases

Modern technology, by making it possible for humans to alter natural processes at the level of the geosphere, has made possible disasters that could not even be fantasized a few generations ago. Already, deforestation is disrupting huge ecosystems, and there is evidence that it, combined with the burning of unprecedented quantities of fossil fuel, is altering the earth's temperature and threatening to raise the level of the oceans and disrupt the patterns of temperature and precipitation on which world agriculture depends. Although deforestation leading to climatic disruption is not new—it is responsible for the present aridity in much of the Middle East and China—human alteration of climate has never before been possible on a global scale. There is dispute over the probability of a climatic catastrophe, but little dispute that global climatic changes of historic proportions are now possible as a result of human activity (Jaeger, 1988). Similarly, the threat to the earth's ozone layer suggests the possibility of human-generated environmental damage on an unprecedented scale. And, of course, the possibility of devastation of whole nations by nuclear weapons is unprecedented.

Most of the unprecedented catastrophes scientists have described have a very low probability of occurrence, but because the outcomes are so undesirable the risks are worth considering carefully. However, the low probability makes them hard to analyze. An example is major disasters from nuclear power plant operation. The industry is too young for the probability to be estimated accurately from experience; yet indirect methods of estimation are highly uncertain. Thus people are left with huge disasters to contemplate but no reliable guidance about how seriously to take them.

With worsening worst cases, it makes sense to pay attention to smaller and smaller probabilities and to smaller differences between probability estimates. But most people have difficulty understanding very low probabilities (see, e.g., Fischhoff et al., 1981b). They tend to think in the categories of language (such as “never,” “rarely,” “occasionally,” “often,” and so forth) rather than along the continuous dimensions of mathematics (cf. Starr and Whipple, 1980). For very low probability events, nonexperts tend to use two categories, “possible” and “effectively impossible.” Thus the changes that have made nightmares into possibilities may drastically alter many people's thinking by making a qualitative change—by making them aware of a hazard where they had perceived none. People may pay more attention to the size of the consequences and ignore both the magnitude and the uncertainty of very low probability estimates. The result would be a much-increased concern about catastrophic risks and a corresponding increase in opposition to technologies that pose them.

Unintended Side Effects

Technological activity has probably always had effects on people who were not directly involved in it, but knowledge of the extent of such effects has increased dramatically in this century. Technological changes are accelerating, as are the materials and energy transformations that can disturb preexisting physical and biological systems and affect human well-being. Although people have always been exposed to the side effects of other people's activity, they are now aware of being exposed to much more and at greater distances. There is increasing evidence that technological activities can now affect people around the earth by altering air quality, exposing them to ultraviolet radiation, or changing climate.

When side effects spread more widely and when that change is recognized, collective action often follows. The risk bearers tend to take up common interest against the risk givers. And when the effects extend across the boundaries of communities and then of nations, the conflicts of interest often enter formal political and diplomatic arenas or, if those are not available, find informal ways of gaining wide attention. Thus increasing technological conflict is due in part to the widening range of technology's effects and the greater social awareness of the change.

Changing Portfolio of Hazards

The hazards society confronts today are different from those of the past. As noted in Chapter 2, the principal threats to health, especially among the more educated and politically active segments of the public, are now from chronic diseases rather than acute illnesses and from illnesses now known to have long latency periods. Sometimes decades pass between exposure and effect; sometimes the effect manifests itself only in later generations. Whereas infectious diseases can be convincingly linked to microorganisms in the body, cancer and many other chronic diseases cannot, in general, be conclusively linked to causative agents.⁴ People are often unsure what caused such illnesses. Moreover, if they are exposed to a hazard, they cannot know whether they will become ill. People spend more of their lives under a cloud: whenever they are exposed to a “probable carcinogen” or other hazard with delayed potential effects, they may worry about whether it will eventually harm them. If they become ill, they can consider a range of hypotheses about human actions that might have been to blame: past occupational exposure, dietary practice, air pollution, and so forth. Some people agonize over whether they are guilty of causing their own illness; others conclude that they are innocent victims of greed or negligence. The former conclusion produces anxiety; the latter, whether correct or not in any particular instance, motivates lawsuits and other forms of social conflict.

Hazards have also changed in that there is more knowledge—and more widespread awareness—of hazards to which people are exposed but over which they have no control as individuals. Individuals on their own are helpless to reduce the risks of nuclear war, depletion of the ozone layer, and global climatic change. Media accounts make people acutely aware of other hazards that strike more or less at random, such as airplane hijackings and releases of toxic substances such as at Bhopal or radioactivity such as at Chernobyl. People have learned that some industrial chemicals are toxic but that for many chemicals now widely used in commerce in the United States little is known about whether they threaten human health (National Research Council, 1984). The anxiety that comes from awareness of apparently uncontrollable risks derives in large part from a sense of uncertainty. People may get the sense that past experience— including longevity tables—may not provide a reliable estimate of the risks they face.

For highly uncertain risks it is difficult to refute extreme estimates of their magnitude. Concerns may persist precisely because of the uncertainty. An example is the concern that AIDS may be transmitted by mosquitoes. While technical experts agree that mosquito transmission is too improbable to worry about, a skeptic can maintain that it has not been proven impossible. Additionally, highly uncertain risks generate special conflicts about their management, with decision makers disagreeing widely about how large a margin of safety should be allowed to protect against the occurrence of disastrous consequences that they agree are unlikely.

Increasing Affluence

For most of those who participate actively in American politics, economic security has allowed certain basic human concerns to recede from awareness and to be replaced by other more indirect threats to personal well-being, including concerns about technology and risk. More and more people have attained a level of economic security that allows them to take up concerns beyond those of feeding and housing themselves and their families, securing basic health care, and providing for these security needs for their old age. And, regardless of socioeconomic level, people whose chief personal values extend beyond personal security are more likely to be concerned with environmental problems than the average citizen (Dunlap et al., 1983; Inglehart, 1977). Thus it is not surprising that affluence has brought increasing concern about the risks of technology.

Increasing Dependence of the Economy on Technology

The U.S. and world economies have come to depend increasingly on advanced technology for the production of food (petrochemicals); health care (drugs and other medical technologies), communication (computers and information transmission technology), transportation (jet aircraft), manufactured goods (automation and electric power technologies), and, of course, military security. Such technologies have increasingly been controlled by large, politically and economically powerful organizations with vested interests in discovering, developing, and implementing them. They are also supported by individuals who benefit from them economically or in other ways. The new technologies offer great benefits to their sponsors in money or political power and potential benefits and risks to society that may also be large—but poorly understood. The sponsoring organizations need public acquiescence to achieve their technological aims, but for the reasons discussed below that acquiescence has become more difficult to achieve. At the same time proposals to restrict technologies typically meet intense opposition from powerful proponents.

Distrust of Institutions

Public opinion polling data indicate that there has been a “sharp decline of public faith in government, business, and labor since the mid-1960s” (Lipset and Schneider, 1987:40). The decline was especially rapid between 1964 and 1975. Other polls have shown similar results, but the decline has been partially reversed more recently (Lipset and Schneider, 1987). The decline in trust in major institutions was in sharp contrast to the especially low level of criticism, distrust, and rebellion in the 1950s (Schudson, 1978). It was, no doubt, influenced by a series of formative political events of the 1960s and early 1970s. The civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam and the protest against it, the assassinations of three major national leaders, and, finally, the Watergate scandal all forced attentive people to look at the dark side of our national character and national institutions.⁵ A climate developed in which major decisions by government and industry, including decisions about technology, were increasingly open to question.

The Environmental Movement

A social movement concerned with environmental protection developed in the 1960s in the United States and has since become a regular participant in technological debates. Influenced by new scientific knowledge conveyed in works like Silent Spring (Carson, 1962), large numbers of ordinary people saw for the first time that their personal interests or values were affected by the way society used and regulated technology. They expressed their concerns through environmental and related organizations and by direct pressure on government for action. Although environmental organizations were not new on the American scene, those that had existed before the 1960s, such as the Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy, and the Sierra Club, had focused mainly on the conservation of wildlife and wilderness. The new organizations, and to some extent the old ones through changes in their political agendas, advanced a new brand of environmentalism concerned with threats to ecosystems and global and regional life-support systems and with the protection of people from technologically based threats to health and well-being (Hays, 1987). The new environmental organizations and their political allies gained widespread public support and raised funds to lobby, to conduct independent scientific analyses of technological issues, to participate in regulatory decision processes on matters of concern to their supporters, and to challenge government and corporate decisions in court. They have became an institutional presence in opposition to a range of efforts by industry and government to implement controversial new technologies and to further spread existing ones.⁶

New Public Institutions

During the 1960s and 1970s national institutions were being restructured to pay more attention to social goals, including improved management of societally shared risks. Beginning with passage of the National Environmental Protection Act in 1969, several new government bodies, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (1970), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (1972), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (1975), the Office of Technology Assessment (1972), and the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (1984), were created to promote and protect public safety and health in specific areas of risk. Courts began to require that medical professionals provide patients with better information to guide their decisions about their treatment, and formal procedures for “informed consent” came into being (Applebaum et al., 1987; Faden and Beauchamp, 1986). Federal agencies, for their part, began to make more information about risk available to the public, for instance by requiring recordkeeping of the life histories of toxic substances. These changes created new public institutions whose purpose was to make technological decisions in the public arena and that resulted in new settings for conflict.

Concepts of Regulation

Changes in federal law in the mid-1960s transformed the judicial concept of public interest as used in administrative law in regard to regulatory agencies. Regulatory proceedings were opened to more than just the parties who suffer direct legal injury from government action (Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ v. Federal Communications Commission, 1966; Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference v. Federal Power Commission, 1965). The New Deal notion of a regulatory agency as the embodiment of the public interest gave way to a concept of the regulatory agency as a political, quasi-legislative forum for the meeting of competing interests (Ackerman and Hassler, 1977). It is no wonder, then, that the EPA faced a rapid rise in the number of civil lawsuits challenging its regulations, from under 20 in 1973 to nearly 500 in 1978 (O'Brien and Marchand, 1982:80).

Tort Law

Tort law has changed, broadening the ability of different kinds of people and groups to bring legal action and creating new ways for plaintiffs to sue successfully even when there are formidable difficulties involved in determining who is responsible for an injury to the plaintiff. In the past 30 years private-law adjudication has moved away from caveat emptor and related rules to permit greater access to the judicial arena and to apply more flexible doctrines regarding compensation for environmentally caused damages to health and safety (O'Brien and Marchand, 1982). In the California Supreme Court decision in the case of Sindell v. Abbott Laboratories, for instance (a decision the U.S. Supreme Court let stand in 1980), the court allowed mothers whose children had suffered injury because of the mother's use of diethylstilbestrol (DES) to recover damages without being able to identify a particular manufacturer as responsible for the injury. The plaintiffs were allowed to recover by suing those manufacturers who collectively represented a major share of the market for the product that caused the injury (O'Brien and Marchand, 1982).

Regulatory Procedures

Regulatory rule making over the past two decades has evolved a set of procedures that guarantees a variety of interested parties the opportunity to comment on proposed rules and that makes it increasingly likely that regulators will have to address those comments as they justify their decisions (Schmandt, 1984). Federal agencies are required by the courts to prepare detailed scientific analyses in support of regulatory actions. These changes occurred in response to increasing conflict about risk and created a channel for the expression of opposition to government agencies' positions. They imposed some limits on what opponents could legitimately raise as objections, but at the same time the new procedures gave the opponents predictable access to the decision process and new opportunities to challenge decisions in court.

Politically Potent Symbolic Events

A number of incidents have received widespread attention and have become cognitive markers of danger for many people. Just as “Watergate” is synonymous for many with governmental malfeasance, so “Three Mile Island” has come to represent the dangers of high technology. “Bhopal,” “Chernobyl,” and “Love Canal” are other such symbols. These reach out beyond the immediate media coverage they receive to become part of the cultural consciousness of many people, even those who know little of or paid little attention to the original incidents (Slovic, 1987). As a result, the mere mention of these incidents can be a trigger for argument.

Increased Focus on Science in Technological Debates

The laws and procedures that control governmental decisions about technology in the United States have come increasingly to demand scientific and technical knowledge. Some regulations require government to determine whether a particular risk exists and to act accordingly; others require a determination of the “best available technology”; and others explicitly require a weighing of costs and benefits. The National Environmental Policy Act requires the preparation of careful assessments of the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of major technological choices. All these developments put science and scientific disagreements at the center of technological debates. Because of the difficulty, as discussed in Chapter 2, of gathering and interpreting all the scientific knowledge relevant to modern technological decisions, there is considerable room for scientists to disagree. When a decision that may have major political effects by altering the distribution of money, power, and well-being in society is made through procedures that emphasize scientific judgment, scientific disagreements tend to become proxies for political disagreements, and political adversaries often express their positions in the language of science (Dickson, 1984; Mazur, 1981; Nelkin, 1979a). In this way the inherent difficulty of understanding technological choices combines with the political importance of their effects to multiply the intensity of conflict.

Institutionalization of Scientific Conflict

Partly because regulatory decisions now rely so heavily on the evaluation of scientific knowledge, divisions in the scientific community have become increasingly public. Conflicts that might once have been contained within professional societies now appear occasionally as front-page news. Some environmental organizations and groups of scientists, such as the Federation of American Scientists, whose members share common concerns about controversial technologies, have built scientific resources that allow them to advocate political choices in the technical language of risk and benefit analysis that statutes and regulatory procedures often require. Not to be out-done, industry-based groups have increased their capability to do “regulatory science” in support of their positions on the same issues. Thus disagreements between scientists have gained an institutional place in the political debate, with scientists whose analyses support particular positions presenting their judgments on behalf of groups advocating those positions (Schmandt, 1984).

Differential Knowledge

One source of conflict about risk is that experts and nonexperts know different things about the risks and benefits of technology. In particular, technical experts have specialized knowledge about the nature of both the hazards and their benefits that nonexperts, lacking this knowledge, may dispute. Conversely, nonexperts sometimes have local knowledge about exposures or the practical operation of a hazardous activity that technical experts do not share. When conflict arises mainly from differential knowledge, risk messages focused on information, which promote the sharing of knowledge, can improve the risk communication process. This realization underlies proposals to design messages that would explain to nonexperts in a clear and simple format what scientists and technologists know about particular risks. It also provides justification for the flow of informational messages from nonexperts to experts. In conflicts that arise from differential knowledge, better sharing of knowledge may also help reduce the conflict. However, when a conflict is in large part based on other factors, sharing of knowledge may not resolve it. It may even adversely affect the risk communication process if it is perceived as a diversion from the real issues.

A second aspect of differential knowledge and conflict is the differences in the degree of understanding in various groups typically involved in risk issues. Information simply made available to the public through the mass media and other channels is typically taken up more readily by those with high, rather than low, socioeconomic status because the former usually have a higher level of education, enabling them to understand technical material more easily. This leads to what is called a knowledge gap. But the presence of a conflict can change this situation. In certain circumstances the presence of conflict might be seen as positive because it effectively increases the number of people who become informed about the issues involved.

Vested Interests

Those who bear the risks of a technology are not always the same people who gain the benefits, and, when the risks and benefits are distributed in unequal proportion, those holding different interests come into conflict. This kind of conflict is most clearly evident in decisions about the siting of locally unwanted facilities such as hazardous waste sites, power lines, and radioactive waste repositories, but it is characteristic of other conflicts about risk as well. When a conflict is based in large part on vested interest, risk messages can be helpful if they clarify what different groups' interests are and describe how the available options would affect each of those interests. Such messages improve risk communication by providing information relevant to the choices at hand. But they often do not resolve conflict. Even messages that simply describe scientific information can exacerbate conflict if the information helps clarify who stands to win or lose.

Value Differences

Differences in values also underlie conflict about risk. For instance, some people may believe that a potential catastrophe should be avoided by not adopting a technology that might produce it, while others may believe that potential problems could be solved after the technology is implemented but before the problems become too serious. In trade-offs between economic growth and threats to health and to esthetic, ecological, or community values, political participants who expect the same outcome may still disagree with each other because what they may gain or lose does not have the same value to each of them. The source of such disputes may lie in people's relative preferences for values (e.g., money versus beauty), their beliefs in society's ability to control technologies once introduced, or their predispositions about how much risk to take under conditions of uncertainty. When a conflict is based in large part on differences in values, the following types of messages can make risk communication more successful: statements identifying the values at stake, arguments about which values deserve the most weight, and analyses of how each available option would affect different values. As with conflicts based on different interests, messages that improve knowledge relevant to the choices at hand and that therefore raise the quality of risk communication can at the same time make the conflict more intense. Even messages describing scientific analysis can have this effect, by clarifying which values an alternative would advance or impede.

Mistrust of Expert Knowledge as Interest Serving

Public mistrust of information from government and industry sources also underlies conflict about technology. Many people are aware that experts can be found who will support nearly any position in a technological debate. They realize that industry groups tend to produce only those scientific arguments that advance their goals and that environmental groups do the same. They know that even the federal government has been subject to strong accusations that its scientific analyses have been influenced by political pressure from various interest groups (e.g., Nelkin and Brown, 1984; Smith, 1983). Thus the statements of scientific experts in risk debates are seen by the skeptical parts of the public as reflecting political positions rather than unbiased assessments. Particular types of messages cannot by themselves alleviate mistrust, although altered procedures for the design of risk messages may help (see Chapters 6 and 7). Rather, the effect of mistrust is to make communication more difficult in all contexts.

Note for Risk Message Designers

In most risk debates some participants are concerned with narrower issues of risk analysis, some with interests, some with value questions, and some with issues of trust. For this reason, different participants want to send and receive different kinds of risk messages, and the risk communication process includes the full range of types of messages mentioned here—scientific analyses, expressions of interest and value, and arguments about which values to favor. The designers of risk messages need to be aware that a program of messages that addresses one source of conflict may fail to address other sources. Thus someone who designs a message to eliminate differential knowledge may find an audience concerned with interests or values or one that mistrusts the message source—and the message may not have the desired effect. Such a message may even intensify conflict because the audience sees it as irrelevant or as a diversion from what it considers to be the main issue.

Risk communication is difficult in part because risk messages often seem to operate at cross-purposes. The next chapter distinguishes the major settings of risk communication and the major purposes for risk messages. It explores the issue of what techniques are appropriate for risk messages, particularly when the purpose is to influence the recipients' beliefs or actions.