Environmental Justice
The environmental justice movement started with Robert D. Bullard, Dean at Texas Southern University Houston. Bullard’s 1987 book “Dumping in Dixie,” identified dozens of African American communities in the Southeastern US that had become sites for landfills, hazardous waste storage dumps, coal-fired power plants or other risky industrial activities. As Bullard noted, the prevalence of asthma is much higher among African-Americans, and there is a reason for that.
The protest movements over environmental justice issues tended to take place on a community-by-community basis, but were animated in large part by the old Civil Rights movement network. Press coverage tended to be more and more sympathetic between the 1990s and the 2010s, slowly reflecting the general societal recognition of the perils of racism.
The need for environmental justice was also expressed by the US EPA through a presidential order signed by Bill Clinton in 1994. Although there are formal legal mechanisms for addressing environmental justice issues, activists believe that major corporations and the government tend not to be responsive unless they are fully exposed to public outrage through the national mass media.
Example: The situation in Flint, Mich, in 2015-16, is an example of a widespread problem that is illustrated by a national focus on a single community. Flint is a low-income, high minority population community where decisions about drinking water were made without appropriate respect for public health. Criminal indictments have followed.
Risk Communication
The field of risk communication emerged in the 1980s and 1990s when psychologists started searching for an explanation to a difficult question: Why did the environmental advocates become outraged over risks that were relatively small, when they faced much bigger risks every day without feeling that outrage.
The typical example was that a drive to the local grocery store was far more hazardous, statistically, than living next to a nuclear power plant. And yet, given the choice, most people feel far more comfortable heading off to the grocery store. Why is that?
Slovic, P. Perception of Risk. Science 236:282. AAAS, 1987.
Psychologists recommended that we begin to view major scientific, technological and environmental questions through more human perspectives. Driving to the grocery store involved taking on risks that were mostly controllable, voluntary, and well known. Nuclear power plants involved risks that were not voluntary, not controllable, not known, and dreaded.
So the “heuristics” (or psychological lenses) through which we view and understand risk are important in understanding the dynamics of public policy questions. One researcher, Paul Slovik, used this map in 1987 to identify the risk perception heuristics associated with modern living conditions.
On the left are controllable, well known, individual risks — like riding a bicycle. On the right are dreaded, collective risks like nuclear weapons. At the top are risks that are not well known or understood, and at the bottom are well known risks like fireworks and auto accidents. By placing a particular kind of risk within this grid, the potential for outrage is perhaps better perceived.
At the time, many people felt that this approach encapsulated very real human dilemmas within an all-too-easy political context. Rather than “explaining away” the reasons for concern, burden should fall more on industry and government to address the concerns in ways that were more equitable for the publics who were being asked to shoulder the risk.
Ethical public relations and the two-way symmetrical approach
Why do people become concerned in the first place? Why do they begin to anticipate risk, to seek information and to get involved? Three initial factors are problem recognition, constraint recognition, and level of involvement. (See the “situational theory of publics.”) Once a person or community understands a problem, is somehow involved in the problem, and overcomes initial constraints, they begin actively communicating about it, and this can lead to public controversy.
The response from government and industry is, all too often, to dismiss public concerns. To over-simplify here, public relations is often seen as just “manufacturing consensus” based on the public’s vulnerabilities. The “soft soap” approach is what journalists call it, when they are being polite.
An alternative approach was proposed by U. of Maryland prof. James Grunig, who saw a need for a more ethical approaches by companies and government. Using the two-way symmetrical model, an institution’s public relations staff would anticipate problems with public perception and would help guide a company towards an ethical position. So the “two-way” part meant that they would actively seek out opinions about their work, facilitating public meetings and taking other reasonable steps to represent public opinion within a company board room. The “symmetrical” part was harder. That would mean giving up power to the publics, for example, funding independent scientific expertise for risk analysis. This would allow meaningful communication about risk since the power to analyze the problem would be symmetrically distributed.
(For more about the Grunig and the two way model, see this site)
Risk = Hazard + Outrage
Peter Sandman at Rutgers University took Risk Communication to a professional level with his research and outreach in the 1990s and 2000s, and his book Responding to Community Outrage is available, free, on the web.
Sandman’s basic point is that sometime we really do want to scare people into safer behaviors like quitting smoking, using seat belts, getting their well water tested, and so on. Other times it can be counter-productive, for example, in situations where low-risk problems turn into political battles.
The idea that the worst human and ecosystem risks are not very well correlated with public outrage is not the end of the story for Sandman. The question is WHY people are frightened by risks the experts may consider small. As Sandman notes:
The environmental activist’s answer is that the experts cannot be trusted, that the people know better. This view deserves respect because it embeds a number of truths: • There obviously are interest groups with a huge financial stake in “proving” that the risks that upset us are small, whether or not they are. • There are plenty of historical examples—from radiation to DDT—where the consensus has been wrong, where the public and a minority of experts were rightly concerned early and most experts caught on only later. The science that tells us which risks we ought to be worried about—quantitative risk assessment (QRA)—is a new and inexact science, vulnerable to both manipulation and honest error. • Some environmental risks are gradual, delayed, geometrical, rare but cataclysmic, or made much worse by other risks; in such cases it might be appropriate to take action before the evidence of damage is strong….
The problem is complicated by the fact that justified outrage often masquerades as unjustified views about hazard. Hazard is enshrined in our laws and our customs as the only appropriate standard for risk decision-making. I might want to argue that it is morally wrong to let you put an incinerator in my neighborhood against my will, especially since you kept your plans secret until the last minute and did not even answer my calls when I telephoned to complain. But if I want to defeat the incinerator, I have to argue instead that it threatens my family’s health (and eventually I come to believe it). This encourages you to argue in return that the threat to health is minimal. Health becomes the ground of the debate; morality, coercion, secrecy, and courtesy become underground issues.
Usually, controversies with a lot of public outrage go through four stages, Sandman says: Stonewalling, Missionary, Dialogue and Organizational. This represents a shift from ignoring the public, to trying to educate the public, to an attempt to have a dialogue with the public, to possibly changing the organization’s point of view. In other words, a shift from one-way, asymmetrical public relations to two-way symmetrical public relations.
In the end, according to Sandman, it’s just as important to treat the outrage factors as seriously as the engineering hazards and to share the power to evaluate risks with the public.