Science, Environmental Justice, and Contesting the Rhetoric of Risk: The Impact of Anti-Toxics Struggles on Public Health Research and the Politics of Market-Based

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This Post-Doctoral Research project will assess how environmental justice activists challenge the regulatory status quo by pushing to democratize environmental health research and poliey-making. A case study approach will be used to explore the contentious political and scientific issues raised by the emergence of market-based approaches to pollution regulation, with an emphasis on air pollution trading. How community-initiated protest promotes discussion among scientists and polieymakers about inherent short-comings of traditional approaches to environmental science research and regulation will be examined by addressing the following issues: I ) conflict over the technocratic rationalism of risk assessment and 'acceptable risk;' 2) treatment of scientific uncertainty and regulatory tendency to err on the side of rejecting environmental causation; 3) tension between policy-makers' emphasis on 'good science' versus the reality of scientific uncertainty and data gaps that hinder effective monitoring and enforcement of market-based emissions reduction programs; 4) incorporating structural variables such as class and race into assessments of biological susceptibility to environmental pollutants; 4) how to assess whether trading programs create or aggravate existing "hotspot" situations by concentrating tonics in communities already severely impacted by pollution; 5) the need to move risk assessment beyond traditional chemical-by-chemical analysis toward a cumulative exposure approach that accounts for the exposure realities of diverse populations. Finally, the question of whether environmental justice discourse and organizing can successfully move environmental policy-making from a pollution control to a prevention framework will be assessed.