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

这个博士后研究项目将评估环境正义活动家如何通过推动环境健康研究和政策制定的民主化来挑战监管现状。将采用案例研究方法来探讨以市场为基础的污染管制方法的出现所引起的有争议的政治和科学问题，重点是空气污染交易。社区发起的抗议如何促进科学家和政策制定者之间关于传统环境科学研究和监管方法固有缺陷的讨论，将通过解决以下问题进行研究：1)风险评估和“可接受风险”的技术官僚理性主义的冲突；2)处理科学的不确定性和监管倾向于拒绝环境因果关系；3)政策制定者对“良好科学”的强调与阻碍有效监测和执行基于市场的减排计划的科学不确定性和数据差距的现实之间的紧张关系；4)将阶级和种族等结构变量纳入环境污染物的生物易感性评估；4)如何评估交易计划是否会通过将补品集中在已经受到严重污染影响的社区而造成或加剧现有的“热点”情况；5)需要将风险评估从传统的逐化学品分析转向考虑不同人群暴露现实的累积暴露方法。最后，将评估环境正义话语和组织是否能够成功地将环境决策从污染控制框架转移到预防框架的问题。

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.