Citizen experts in environmental risk

In the last two decades, public administrators have increasingly faced groups of people with opposing views about the risks of exposure to environmental contaminants. Because of a series of intriguing studies on risk perception, the situation is frequently seen, by scholars and administrators alike, as a conflict between experts and citizens, and risk communication guidelines are based on this interpretation. But the citizen-expert dichotomy appears fallacious when it is examined in light of the ways citizens actually participate in environmental policy making. The dichotomy overlooks the fact that citizens express their perception of risk largely through organized citizen groups, and that these groups employ and have access to many experts. This essay uses a mainstream environmental group and a number of grassroots environmental groups to illustrate the point. It concludes that the more important conflict is between experts who find environmental pollution safe and those who find it hazardous.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45451/1/11077_2004_Article_188495.pd

Environmentalism, pre-environmentalism, and public policy

In the last decade, thousands of new grassroots groups have formed to oppose environmental pollution on the basis that it endangers their health. These groups have revitalized the environmental movement and enlarged its membership well beyond the middle class. Scientists, however, have been unable to corroborate these groups' claims that exposure to pollutants has caused their diseases. For policy analysts this situation appears to pose a choice between democracy and science. It needn't. Instead of evaluating the grassroots groups from the perspective of science, it is possible to evaluate science from the perspective of environmentalism. This paper argues that environmental epidemiology reflects ‘pre-environmentalist’ assumptions about nature and that new ideas about nature advanced by the environmental movement could change the way scientists collect and interpret data.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45449/1/11077_2005_Article_BF01006494.pd

The politics of public health ideology and disease causality

Bibliography: leaves [175]-184.Microfiche.v, 184 leaves, bound ill. 28 c

Reducing Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: Paradoxes of Environmentalism

Abstract: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is likely to continue for a long time, despite the efforts of the Brazilian government and of Brazilian and foreign non-governmental organizations to halt it. This paper argues that among the reasons for this unhappy state of affairs is the framing of deforestation as an environmental issue. It discusses three kinds of environmental framing that, while promoting respect for nature, distort policy options. One frame simplifies an extraordinarily complex situation, thus disregarding critical policy questions. A second frame endorses weak but politically acceptable solutions to the deforestation problem. A third plays into the hands of a politically conservative Brazilian agenda that identifies forest protect with threats to national sovereignty.discourse