SECTION C: PROPOSAL DESCRIPTION
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL HAZARD:
PLUTONIUM ON BOARD THE CASSINI-HUYGENS SPACECRAFT
(narrative for a proposal resubmitted to the
Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program
National Science Foundation
14 January 1999)
Christine M. Rodrigue, Ph.D.
Center for Hazards Research (530) 898-4953 -- FAX -6781
California State University crodrigue@oavax.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929-0425 rodrigue@jps.net (attachments)
The proposed study focuses on the social construction of plutonium hazards
aboard the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moon, Titan. Cassini-
Huygens culminates the vision of the Joint Working Group (of the Space
Science Committee of the European Science Foundation and the Space Science
Board of the American National Academy of Sciences) to "...study possible
modes of cooperation between the United States and Europe in the field of
planetary science" (Spilker 1997). The Cassini-Huygens mission to the
Saturn planetary system is physically the largest, scientifically the most
ambitious, and organizationally the most international project ever
undertaken by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) or
by its partners, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Agenzia Spaziale
Italiana (ASI). NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) were responsible
for the Cassini orbiter and for launch, the ESA for the Huygens Titan
probe, and the ASI for the high gain antenna and various instruments.
Due to the sheer mass of the Cassini Saturn orbiter and Huygens Titan probe
combination, the duration of the cruise to Saturn (seven years) and tour at
Saturn (four years), the orbiter's repeated movement through the ring
system, the need to minimize moving parts that can fail, and the extreme
distance of Saturn from the sun (1.4 billion kilometers), NASA dismissed
solar power for mission instrumentation and temperature maintenance needs.
Instead, it decided on the compact radioisotope thermoelectric generator
(RTG) and radioisotope thermal unit (RHU) design. The RTGs and RHUs
generate heat and, in the case of the RTGs, electrical power through the
alpha radiation emitted by ceramicized plutonium-238 dioxide. Because the
5,655 kg mass of Cassini-Huygens and its navigational fuel is close to the
5,760 kg launch limit of the largest American expendable launch vehicle
(Titan IV/Centaur combination), NASA further opted for a Venus-Venus-Earth-
Jupiter Gravity Assist (VVEJGA) trajectory to give Cassini-Huygens the
velocity it needed to reach the Saturn system during the careers of its
science teams (NASA 1995, 1992; Spilker 1997). The plutonium and the
VVEJGA exploded into controversy by 1996, however, resulting in concerted
efforts to stop or postpone the October 1997 launch and, now, to abort the
earth flyby in August of 1999. The purpose of the proposed study is to
analyze (1) expert and activist perceptions of the plutonium hazard aboard
Cassini and of the risk assessment done for the mission; (2) the
representation of this controversy in the media; (3) the recruitment of
activists from the larger public; and (4) the linkages between this
controversy and public policy towards technological risk management,
especially in the space program.
PRIOR WORK
This controversy speaks to the concerns of at least three distinct
literatures. These include the relationship between risk assessment and
risk management, the perception of hazard, and media criticism.
Risk Assessment and Risk Management
Risk assessment specifies hazards to humans, generally in terms of the
expected probabilities of given types and magnitudes of damage. Risk
management is the development and implementation of policy to minimize
hazard. The distinction, while clear in concept, is complex and
contentious in application (Brown and Goble 1990; Cranor 1990; Harman,
Harrington, and Cervey 1998).
Risk assessment entails the development and application of methods grounded
in science to delimit probabilities of specified consequences to society in
the event of hazard exposure. To come up with defensible and replicable
results to inform risk management, risk assessment experts commonly focus
on easily quantified measures of hazard exposure, such as expected
mortality and morbidity rates (Hohenemser and Kasperson 1982; Shrader-
Frechette 1995). These measures, while explicitly prioritizing human life
and health, do not thereby automatically confer social legitimacy on risk
assessment even so (Berglund 1998; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Jasanoff
1991; Shrader-Frechette 1995). Attempts are often made to specify economic
or ecological losses as well, in the again quantifiable cost-benefit or
cost-effectiveness framework, with equally contested results (Douglas and
Wildavsky 1982; Harman, Harrington, and Cervey 1998; Morgall 1993; Palm
1990).
Risk assessment entails a number of unavoidable epistemological and
communications problems. These are particularly acute in the case of
technological, as opposed to natural, hazards. The epistemological
problems include sampling issues, cross-species and dose extrapolation
issues, and issues of control over confounding variables in epidemiological
and prospective studies on human groups (Cranor 1997, 1990; Giere 1991;
Harman, Harrington, and Cervey 1998; Henderson-Sellers 1998).
The unavoidable uncertainty in risk assessment and the dissension it breeds
among experts can result in problems communicating findings to risk
managers and policy makers (not to mention the public), particularly if the
latter do not have a strong grounding in science and statistics (Breyer
1998; Clarke 1998; Friedman 1994; Henderson-Sellers 1998). The choice of
risk assessment presentation depends on the prior communication of policy
preferences on the part of risk managers: Do they prefer to err on the
side of conserving human life and health at all costs, or do they prefer to
err on the side of minimizing regulatory burdens on companies and agencies
until risk assessment provides more accurate and precise answers (Harman,
Harrington, and Cervey 1998; Jasanoff 1991)?
The ideological orientation and political milieu of risk managers can slant
risk assessment (Heiman 1997; Mayo 1991; Silbergeld 1991). Anti-regulatory
sentiment among risk managers can demand they hear only the
epistemologically most defensible science. This enables an attitude of
denial or psychological minimization of a potentially risky situation,
which, therefore, raises the probability of Type I failures (e.g., the NASA
approval of a launch that fails catastrophically). Conservative risk
sentiment among risk managers can demand hearings for even the least
defensible extrapolations, in order to err on the side of safety, which
then raises the probability of Type II failures (e.g., the costly scrubbing
of a launch that would safely have resulted in a significant enhancement of
scientific and technological knowledge). Measures to conserve human life
(minimize Type I errors) raise the probability of Type II errors, of
foregoing the benefits of an action; minimizing regulatory burdens
(minimizing Type II errors) raises the probability of Type I errors, of
tragic failure of a wrongly approved action (Heiman 1997; Mayo 1991;
Shrader-Frechette 1998).
Only risk managers can decide whether Type I or Type II errors have the
graver consequences morally and politically (Heiman 1997; Hollander 1991;
Mayo 1991). It is this sort of policy choice that determines whether the
epistemological problems inherent in risk assessment delegitimate its
findings or not (Hollander 1991). Creating a firewall between risk
assessment and risk management to protect scientists from political
pressures, however, poses the danger of risk managers being overwhelmed by
risk assessment controversies they do not understand, concluding that all
science is arbitrary, and cherry-picking those findings that rationalize
policy choices formed independently of science (Clarke 1998; Mayo 1991;
Silbergeld 1991).
Given the natural interest of the NASA Cassini team in its own mission,
then, risk assessment performed for it could conceivably err on the side of
minimizing the regulatory burden on NASA, thus lessening emphasis on the
consequences of a Type I failure. This possibility was anticipated and
mitigated by NASA through a system of multiple external and independent
reviews designed to uncover and rectify it (Dawson 1998). Risk assessors
at NASA were aware that there could be public controversy over the
RTGs/RHUs, and the independence of the review system was meant to create
defensible responses against that possibility. Congress in its risk
management capacity, however, seems to have been jarred by the advent of a
well-organized and highly active movement among the public disputing the
results of the risk assessment, claiming that the risk of a Type I failure
was either inaccurately minimized or still unacceptably high (Weldon 1997).
Now, long after the risk assessment was done, NASA finds itself struggling
to defend its findings to a hostile risk management audience, both public
and elected.
Hazard Perception
Hazards perception literature has developed a number of themes relevant to
technological risk and, by extension, to the Cassini controversy. Much of
this literature focuses on individuals in a mostly undifferentiated lay
public, often with an eye to improving public education on hazards.
Perhaps the major finding is that lay perceptions differ markedly from
expert perceptions, for example, exaggerating certain hazards and
trivializing others far from the expectations of risk assessors (Douglas
and Wildavsky 1982; Friedman 1994; Fritzsche 1995, 1996; Kasperson and
Kasperson 1991; Palm 1990; Shain 1989; Slovic 1991). With the assertion by
NASA that the risk of plutonium exposure from launch or flyby accidents is
negligible and its opponents' claim that NASA is covering up the extent of
the risk, the Cassini controversy becomes a classic exemplar of the expert
and lay division in perception.
Much effort has gone toward explaining these discrepancies between expert
and lay perceptions. A common interpretation is that the public is
patently ignorant (Augustine 1998; Fischhoff 1994; Friedman 1994; Johnson
1993; McGarity 1990; Shrader-Frechette 1990a). Its involvement in
decisions concerning technological risks is, therefore, essentially
valueless, if not counterproductive. This interpretation has been tested
by comparing laypeople's estimates of the probabilities and mechanisms of a
risk with experts' estimates, the latter serving as a sort of baseline,
which is presumed to be "objective." Results have been contradictory,
perhaps partly due to insufficient differentiation of the general public
from the activist public. In some studies, the more knowledge members of
the public have about certain technologies (notably nuclear), the less
concerned they are about them, yet activists against the technologies often
are well-informed. In other studies, for example, of groundwater
pollution, greater levels of public understanding creates heightened
opposition to a hazardous technology (Johnson 1993). The ignorance
hypothesis sometimes cited by exasperated experts, therefore, seems too
contradictory to promote understanding of the opposition to Cassini.
Another line of inquiry has focused on the processes by which people
process information in general, as they apply to hazards. Fairly
consistently, people tend to overestimate the frequency of low probability
but dramatic hazards (e.g., nuclear power plant accidents or airplane
crashes) as compared with expert estimates. Similarly, they tend to
underestimate high probability hazards that are less dramatically
memorable, such as certain lifestyle-mediated diseases or automobile
accidents (Slovic 1991). Again, the general public and the activist public
are not clearly distinguished. Even so, this dynamic may be directly
relevant to the Cassini controversy, since the chances of failure are
miniscule according to risk assessment experts (less than one in a million,
NASA 1995), but a failure, should one happen, would be extremely dramatic,
politically, if not epidemiologically.
Another finding relates to conceptions of exposure. There is some evidence
that mediations between toxic releases and health effects are poorly
understood in lay perception (Johnson 1993). That is, release equals
exposure equals injury. This issue may be relevant to the Cassini
controversy, in which opponents imply that Cassini has a large probability
of hitting Earth or its atmosphere and that the plutonium on board would
then vaporize into inhalable particles to which millions if not billions of
people would be exposed. Furthermore, plutonium is characterized as the
single most dangerous substance known (Anderson 1997; Grossman 1995;
Kalupson 1997), implying that those exposed to it are under sentence of
cancer. Estimates of fatalities in the opponent literature range from over
200,000 (Kaku 1997) to 20,000,000 (Sternglass, cited in Anderson 1997 and
Kalupson 1997). The multiplicative reduction in risk probabilities at each
point in the chain of events producing plutonium exposure seems lost in
opponent literature.
Related to this is a finding that people often make up their minds about an
issue before being exposed to an adequate array of facts and arguments
about it, often taking the position of a reference group they trust
(Johnson 1993), and then become very confident in their opinions (Margolis
1996; Slovic 1991; Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein 1982). Once the
pattern gels one way or the other, new facts and arguments are fit into the
framework in a way that further solidifies it, in order to avoid the
cognitive dissonance of entertaining two mutually exclusive
interpretations. That is, someone who decides that there is a significant
risk in a situation or technology will dismiss data that counterindicate it
as faulty or from a corrupt and self-interested source (Covello, Sandman,
and Slovic 1991). Someone who has decided that there is no significant
risk will equally dismiss data suggesting the risk is greater with similar
denial mechanisms.
By shaping individual choice of those few among all possible hazards that
deserve personal attention and concern, ideology and culture may account
for some of the disparity between expert and lay (including activist)
opinion. Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) have proposed a division of any
culture into a center subculture and a border subculture. The center is
the hierarchical core of social power and, according to Douglas and
Wildavsky, tends to be rational and confident in the conventional protocols
of risk assessment. The border consists of those people peripheral to
social power, suspicious of the center, fearful of corruption and pollution
of the natural environment by the self-serving activities of the power
elite, unimpressed by a rationality seen as serving central interests, and
generally egalitarian in social values and oppositional in politics.
Basically, expert opinion is centrist and lay opposition to technology is
borderer in character, and the division between the two is yet another
facet of a culture war of fundamental values. This argument has drawn many
criticisms. First, there are many counterinstances between attributed
center-border status and individuals' and organizations' actual behavior
(Schrader-Frechette 1991). Second, different typologies have been
proposed, together with different psychological mechanisms linking typology
with behavior (Margolis 1996; Fritzsche 1995). Third, Douglas' and
Wildavsky's argument implies that real and significant risks that can and
do kill people can be dismissed as mere social constructs rather like
aesthetic judgments. The center-border typology may be relevant to the
Cassini controversy, and basic attributes of proponents and opponents will
be collected for comparison with the expectations of the typology.
In defense of the public, there has been some intriguing research
suggesting that the public may not be in fact so irrational and ignorant;
rather, laypeople may simply be judging hazards along multiple axes, not
just the quantifiable probability of mortality or morbidity (Covello 1992;
Shrader-Frechette 1990b; Slovic 1991). Perceived control is one of these
other axes of judgment. People seem to judge hazards differently on the
basis of the degree of perceived control they have over the exposure: If
they can choose the exposure (driving fast, snowboarding, smoking), they
often will accept substantial risks; but, if this is a risk they feel have
no choice in, they may become very upset over the imposition of even the
smallest risk. Of importance here is learning whether loss of perceived
control is a factor in instigating opposition to Cassini.
Familiarity is another closely related axis repeatedly emerging as
important to lay response to a given hazard (Slovic 1991). Familiar
hazards are tolerable; if a hazard arises from an unfamiliar technological
source, it seems to evoke more concern than mortality and morbidity
statistics would seem to warrant. Cars and cigarettes are tolerable;
nuclear power, food irradiation, and recombinant DNA provoke tremendous
concern. Cassini entails, by definition, a plutonium technology, which by
its very nature is not a familiar part of everyday environments.
Another axial theme in technological hazards literature is lay sensitivity
to fairness issues (Margolis 1996; Shrader-Frechette 1995). The public
seems concerned to learn who gains and who loses from the deployment of a
risky technology and, especially, whether the gainers and the losers are
the same people. If a corporation gets the profits from a hazardous
installation and people in a given neighborhood get the health risk,
concern in the neighborhood well out of proportion to the statistical
probabilities of mortality and morbidity seems guaranteed. The Not In My
Back Yard (NIMBY) effect is one variation on this theme. The relevance of
this theme to the current controversy may turn on the perception that the
benefits in human knowledge to be gained from Cassini may devolve mainly on
"nerdy," elite scientists with their obscure and poorly understood research
agendas, while the hazard of plutonium contamination may fall on average
citizens and taxpayers in the event of a launch or, now, flyby accident
(Meshkati 1997).
A prominent dimension consistently emerging in technological hazards
literature is sometimes called the dread factor: Does a given hazard have
the potential, no matter how small, of creating a really huge loss of life
or particularly fearful diseases (e.g., cancer or AIDS), or can it have
effects that might be passed down through the generations? Is it linked
with past incidents of overpowering horror? If so, such a hazard evokes
sheer dread and, even if the probability of an accident is negligible, it
will create concern and agitation far beyond the probabilities of mortality
and morbidity (Covello 1991; Slovic 1991). Anything nuclear evokes dread,
because the atomic age was ushered in by the appalling effects of the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, because nuclear testing has been reported
to result in cancer clusters near testing sites, and because plutonium has
been popularly characterized as the single most dangerous substance known
to humanity (Grossman 1995). The opposition to Cassini may be driven more
by this single factor than any other, an assertion that will be evaluated
in the proposed study.
Another issue occasionally raised in hazards literature is public trust of
institutions responsible for risk assessment, risk management, and
emergency response (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Fritzsche 1995; Jasonoff
1991; Kunreuther, Slovic, and MacGregor 1996; Margolis 1996). Public trust
of governmental institutions in general seems to have hit a decades-long
slide. This decline in trust has extended even to such agencies as the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and NASA itself in the wake of
conspiracy theorizing from both left and right and from a pervasive "X
Files" mentality. As entertaining and as easy to discount as the more
extreme products of the popular culture are, they are relevant to the
Cassini controversy in creating an atmosphere of mistrust if not actual
fear of government agencies, very explicitly including NASA. The proposed
study will attempt to evaluate the extent to which suspicion of NASA itself
has inspired mistrust of its process of risk assessment in the case of
Cassini.
Much of this hazards perception literature is dominated by a focus on
individual perception and behavior. Such atomistic research poses the
analytical hazard of an aggregative fallacy, an assumption that the whole
(the public) is merely the sum of its parts (individuals). Structures
within the whole and their evolution are bypassed. In contentious issues
of technological hazard, the public differentiates itself into a more
passive and uninvolved fraction and an activist component, highly engaged
and organized. The degree of overlap among activists on one issue and on
others is unclear: Is there an activism-prone personality that looks for
such controversies and jumps in, or is there predominantly a pattern of
activism by ad hoc activists? The structuring of the public and the social
reproduction of an activist vanguard will be one contribution of the
proposed study.
If the claim by some researchers that the public, activist or uninvolved,
may not be irrational is sound, one implication is that expert opinion is
narrow and, in its own way, as distorted as public, including activist,
opinion (Shrader-Frechette 1990a). This is often expressed in the
deconstructionist and postmodernist schools in many disciplines today,
which basically delegitimate any claim for scientific objectivity
whatsoever: The whole enterprise is claimed to be riddled with emotional,
cultural, and economic biases from one end to the other (Haraway 1990;
Merchant 1990; Soja 1991). While the present study can take on neither the
whole postmodernist/deconstructionist agenda nor the philosophical
justifications for the scientific method, it can critically evaluate NASA's
risk assessment documents and the recollections of risk assessors for signs
of tunnel-vision and one-dimensional privileging of expert opinion. Such
shortsightedness may have led to NASA's failure fully to address broader
public concerns and thereby triggered recruitment of its own opponents to
the current controversy over Cassini.
Media Criticism
Related to the theme of hazard perception, there have been a number of
studies of media roles in constructing hazard awareness and tolerance. A
common criticism is of the sensationalism many media bring to hazard
stories, which can raise public concern about minimal risks or can hamper
efforts to respond to a disaster (Elliott 1989; Mazur 1998, 1994; Scanlon
1989; Smith 1992). Some efforts have been made to compare media coverage
with objective measures of damage or danger (Rodrigue and Rovai 1995;
Rodrigue, Rovai, and Place 1997; Sandman 1994; Singer and Endreny 1994;
Smith 1992) or exhort media to bring their coverage closer to such measures
of accuracy (Elliott 1989). Others argue that such comparisons are not
fair: The media are not there faithfully to reproduce in print, radio, or
images the exact probabilities or estimates approved by experts. Rather,
they are to provide helpful information for people to evaluate and reduce
their risk (Mazur 1998). In emergency situations, Quarantelli (1989)
characterizes this risk education function as mass communication, as
opposed to the simple reportage or critical investigation functions of
interest here, which he designates as mass media. Others concerned with
the mass media functions argue that they are to report on possible
breakdowns in institutional protections for people, and, most importantly,
they are to provide a public forum or arena for debate on issues that might
not be well encompassed by official statistics (Ledingham and Walters 1989;
Peters 1994; Wilkins 1989). This is relevant to the current controversy,
because opponents often argue that NASA's process of risk assessment
resulted in statistics designed to protect the mission more than the
public.
Until now only sporadically linked to hazards literature is a large body of
generic media criticism mostly targeted to an educated lay audience with
progressive political sympathies (e.g., Bagdikian 1997; Cohen and Solomon
1995, 1993; Faludi 1991; Gans 1989; Herman and Chomsky 1988; Lee and
Solomon 1991; McChesney 1997; Philips 1997; Schechter, Browne, and
McChesney 1997; Steinem 1990). This body of literature identifies a
variety of filters operating to bias media selection of newsworthy items
from the chaos of daily events, of which the most often cited are capital
concentration in media and media dependence on advertising revenue.
One of the most prominently cited of these filters is the intense capital
concentration in the media. It is argued that such capital concentration
can limit critical public debate on issues involving parent corporations or
others having close ties with the parent firms (Bagdikian 1997; Cohen and
Solomon 1995, 1993; Dunwoody 1994; Herman and Chomsky 1988; Lee and Solomon
1991; McChesney 1997; Stevens 1998). This filter has already been brought
up in the anti-Cassini literature with statements that NBC may not have
covered Karl Grossman's stories, "Don't Send Plutonium into Space" (1996a)
and "Risking the World: Nuclear Proliferation in Space" (1996b), because
its parent corporation is General Electric, which manufactures turbines for
many nuclear reactors, and CBS may have failed to provide coverage, because
it is owned by Westinghouse, which provides engineering services for over
forty percent of the world's nuclear reactors (Florida Coalition for Peace
and Justice n.d.). This argument generates testable predictions of
effects, which can be evaluated using the Cassini controversy. Another
posited effect of the capital concentration filter is that it may encourage
sensational coverage likely to increase circulation and the profits of the
parent corporations holding media subsidiaries (Herman and Chomsky 1988;
Schechter, Browne, and McChesny 1997). This criticism has been echoed in
the hazards literature itself by a number of authors concerned about
sensationalism, blame-seeking, and human drama in hazards coverage,
whatever its origins (Johnson 1993; Mazur 1998; Peters 1994; Singer and
Endreny 1994; Smith 1992; Stallings 1994).
Some authors cite dependence on advertising revenue as a second filter on
media coverage (Bagdikian 1997; Herman and Chomsky 1988; Steinem 1990).
This dependence is held to constrain serious and critical discussion of
anything that could upset the income flow of the advertisers. Conceivably,
coverage of anti-Cassini activities and arguments could affect the
willingness of nuclear and aerospace companies and their subsidiaries from
advertising in the offending media. This is a testable expectation, in the
event significant differences turn up among different media companies in
the amount of coverage they afford Cassini.
A unique contribution of the proposed study is its integration of this
progressivist body of general media criticism with hazards. This
integration focuses on the relationship between the media and public,
expert, and activist perceptions of the plutonium aboard Cassini-Huygens.
This complex interaction can result in pressure exerted on policy-makers by
activists and experts, through changes that media coverage may produce on
public perceptions and recruitment of activists. Past work on media and
hazards has not theorized this relationship and the pressure it generates
as necessary components in the analysis of the relationship between risk
assessment science and risk management policy.
ELEMENTS OF A MORE COMPREHENSIVE MODEL OF RISK ASSESSMENT AND MANAGEMENT
The proposed project will bring elements from these three literatures into
a more comprehensive model of the risk assessment and risk management
relationship, particularly in the arena of technological hazards. Prior
work in hazard perception has detailed individual-level cognition of and
behavior towards risky situations. It has, however, generally avoided a
more structural examination of organizations, classes, and interest groups,
other than some work on the social construction of natural hazards in the
developing world (e.g., Blaikie, Cannon, Davis, and Wisner 1994). This
project will examine the process of structuration of activism around a
technological hazard, specifically the process by which uninvolved
individuals adopt positions and then the individual and societal influences
that lead some of them to affiliate into organized groups or campaigns,
there to constitute a perception dilemma for elected Congressional risk
managers.
Progressive media criticism has certainly raised issues of corporate
influence and control of media and made predictive statements of probable
bias in media coverage of a variety of issues, including environmental
issues. Little work has explored the implications of this literature as
they may manifest in hazards, however, which is one contribution of the
proposed project.
The risk assessment and management literature has conceptually
differentiated these two functions and the tensions in their relationship
inherent in their different foci and concerns. Much attention has been paid
to political ideologies of regulation or laissez-faire as influences on
that relationship. This project will focus on the specific channels through
which ideology and politics impact that relationship by bringing in media
analysis and the recruitment of individuals through their mediated perceptions
into more or less structured pressure campaigns.
These channels of political influence run through and among three complex
categories of interacting players. The proposed project will model these
players and their internal and external interactions in the technological
hazard arena, using the controversy around Cassini. Past work has
developed certain sets of these relationships (e.g., risk assessors and
risk managers within an agency, media coverage and the influences running
between corporations and politicians, and media and individual perceptions)
but they have not all been brought together in the area of hazard
assessment and policy. This framework will be a useful contribution of the
proposed project and should prove fruitful in framing other hazards, both
technological and natural.
The first of these internally fragmented players is the Federal government
broadly conceived, which has both risk assessment and risk management
responsibilities towards its public distributed in its various branches,
departments, and agencies. The second is the public itself, for the sake
of which Federal risk assessment and risk management are conducted and
which in a democratic society holds at least latent responsibility for the
ideological milieu within the Federal government. This responsibility is
actualized through individual voting and willingness to participate in risk
management decisions through varying levels of activism. The third player
is the private sector with a multiplicity of elite influences on Federal
government risk management responsibilities and, through media and
employment, on the public. In a controversy of the sort examined here,
each of these three categories of players can be further subdivided along
lines of internal tension as structures in contradiction.
The Federal Government: Risk Assessment and Risk Management
First, the Federal government includes both the organs of governance, which
sets and reviews policy, and agencies constituted to carry out policy.
These latter are answerable to the branches of government for the
performance of their designated missions and depend on the executive and
legislative branches for funding. In the area of technological hazard, the
three branches of government are responsible for risk management, while
such agencies and departments as NASA, EPA, DOE, FDA, DOD, and the NRC
carry out risk assessment incident to the conduct of their missions. These
missions can include the deployment of potentially risky technology (e.g.,
NASA) or the regulation of risks (e.g., EPA). Going forward with projects
related to their missions can create a conflict of interest within such
agencies, if their activities pose a technological or other risk. The
understandable desire within the agencies to pursue their missions might
create a bias toward downplaying such risk during the risk assessment
science phase. In other words, the risk assessors themselves might feel
the agencies' preference for epistemological rigor, a preference for
results unlikely to forestall the deployment of a technological project
except under the most severe standards of demonstrated risk. The results
of risk assessment conducted under such subjective constraints might then
limit the full range of often contradictory information presented to risk
managers in the organs of governance. In the case at hand, NASA
acknowledged this internal tension and contracted out a variety of risk
assessment projects to independent institutions. Whether risk assessors
hired under contract to such an agency thereby actually feel relieved of
the pressure to downplay the extent of their client's risk remains unknown.
The proposed project on the Cassini controversy will seek recollections of
such pressure on the part of those who performed independent risk
assessments for NASA, with an eye to evaluating the adequacy of directly
"farming out" the risk assessment for mitigating internal bias toward
minimizing Type II risks.
Public: Uninvolved Masses and Activist Vanguard
Second, the public can be a powerful influence, particularly on elected
risk management policy-makers. With respect to any single technological
hazard, the public can be divided into a largely inert and uninterested
mass, a somewhat concerned but uninvolved sector, and a small politically
active constituency taking individual or concerted actions. Perhaps
because of the focus in past hazard perception literature on the state of
individual and public hazard understanding, often as a baseline for public
education campaigns, there has not been a lot of attention paid to
structuring the public along degrees of activism. As argued in the hazard
perception literature, most of the public is likely ignorant of the
technical issues involved and unengaged in the debate. A very small number
of people, however, will learn about a given hazard enough to become
aroused on one side or the other and then take time out of their lives to
undertake citizen action over the issue.
Some portion of these activists may be persons who easily adopt causes:
the activism-oriented personality. Others may become involved in a single
issue because of important personal impacts. The differentiation of
activists in this way has not been essayed in the hazards literature
before, and evidence on this characterization should be a significant
addition to the hazards literature.
Politically active individuals may act on their own or they may act in
concert with organized campaigns. Organized campaigns can make it easier
for people to become active in a debate at far lower thresholds of concern,
by providing simple actions, such as signing petitions, forwarding e-mail
messages, or sending form letters to their representatives or the media.
At this point, this element of the public becomes an influence on risk
management policy-makers (and, sometimes, through published letters to the
editor, on the rest of the public).
The degree of influence they exert may reflect elected officials'
perception of how widespread activist sentiment is and how that sentiment
may affect voter turnout, above and beyond their own core political values
and personal interests in an issue. Gauging the appropriate level of this
influence entails estimates of both the number of communications and the
threshold of concern that can trigger the various forms of communication
enumerated above. The politician thus faces a political hazard, entailing
judging the probabilities of Type I and Type II errors in responding to
constituent opinions or not responding. As with any risk assessors,
politicians must estimate the worst political consequences of responding or
not responding on a given issue and try to minimize the type of error that
produces the most dreadful consequences (i.e., failure to be re-elected or
elected to higher office).
Hazard perception literature has identified some of the factors that govern
individual hazard perceptions, such as various perceptual biases, trust in
technology or in institutions creating or regulating risk, trust in
individuals or organizations taking stances on a given issue, control and
fairness issues, and general political orientation. The proposed project
will attempt to test these factors as they affect the movement of people
from the uninvolved public to the politically active public. It will also
trace out the impacts of such recruitment on elected risk management
policy-makers, as they face their own political risk assessment dilemma.
The Private Sector: Contractors, Lobbyists, and Media
Third, the private sector includes a complex mix of often conflicting
interests. Some private concerns enter the arena of technological risk as
creators and users of hazardous chemicals and technologies, and certain of
these are contractors for Federal agencies, such as NASA. They interact
both with the organs of governance through political contributions and
lobbying and with Federal agencies, lobbying for contracts on projects that
may result in risk. They, thus, try to exert suasion both on risk
assessment and risk management.
A key set of private concerns in this arena is the media. As developed in
the media criticism literature, media enter the technological risk debate
with their own interests in sensation, human drama, and access to corporate
and political elite decision-makers, which can affect public perception of
hazards issues. A complicating factor is the increasing ownership of media
by corporations themselves involved in generating technological or chemical
risks in the course of manufacturing or distribution activities. Some of
these parent corporations are themselves among the companies doing or
bidding for contract work with Federal agencies, including NASA. Also,
private concerns involved with government contracting can have a great deal
of influence on the public (and on local and state level government)
through their roles as employers, quite possibly shaping public perception
of and acceptance of risk.
Risk Production, Assessment, and Management and the Three Players
In short, in this and other technological risk debates, risk assessors in
(or hired by) Federal agencies and risk managers in the three branches of
Federal government (particularly the legislative and executive) communicate
with one another across the conflicted terrains of the lay public and the
private sector. Past theorization of the risk assessment and risk
management relationship has examined political ideology as an influence on
that relationship but has not integrated the whole set of players and their
interactions in this communication. Past work on hazard perception has
focused on the perceptions of individuals in the undifferentiated lay
public. Needed now is an understanding of the process by which public
perceptions trigger activist recruitment and how activists deal with the
cognitive dissonance of risk assessment results at variance with their own
beliefs. Also useful would be analysis of the frameworks by which
politicians assess the resulting political hazards (risk assessment for
political hazard?). To what extent do politicians' assessments of the
political risks of acting or not acting in response to constituent
communications affect their ideologies of the reasonable balance between
minimizing Type I and Type II errors in managing inherently uncertain
technological hazards? How is that sense of proper balance communicated to
and understood by agency personnel as they compete to propose mission goals
and designs and then establish risk assessment guidelines? Does agency
direct subcontracting of risk assessment effectively protect risk
assessment from agency and Congressional biases? A critical and still
underdeveloped part of the picture is the role of the media as they are
used by parent corporations, agencies, and activists to affect public
opinion, activist recruitment, risk management policy-making, and
ultimately risk assessment.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
In the context of the controversy over the plutonium dioxide RTGs/RHUs on
board Cassini-Huygens, the proposed study will focus on the relationship
between risk management policy-makers in the Federal government
(particularly Congress) and risk assessment science in or for NASA. It
will also delineate the perceptions of activists on both sides of the
Cassini controversy and their recruitment into the debate. The proposed
study will also examine media coverage of the controversy. Specific
questions and hypotheses include the following.
First, risk assessors will be asked about their sense of where their risk
assessment should fall on the Type I/Type II error minimization continuum
(epistemological rigor versus risk conservatism). The purpose of having
outside scientists perform risk assessment for NASA was to mitigate the
possible conflict of interest entailed in risk assessment by a mission-
committed agency. One measure of success in this strategy would be the
finding that outside scientists report enough concern with minimizing
potential risk to humans that they would be willing to sacrifice
epistemological rigor to ensure the largest estimates of such risk.
Conversely, a self-reported emphasis on the logical and evidentiary
soundness of analysis could indicate a desire to safeguard against the risk
of forgoing a sound launch. Respondents will be asked directly which
decision error type they felt was of greatest concern to NASA and whether
they experienced this perception as pressure. The purpose of this line of
inquiry is elucidation of the intra-governmental communication of tacit
risk management preferences, from Congressional endorsement of a major
international mission and its geopolitical ramifications, through NASA as
the American coordinating body, to risk assessors in and contracted by
NASA. Can risk assessment contracted out directly from a mission-committed
agency avoid contamination by that agency's natural desire to carry out its
mission? Is there a more effective way of engaging risk assessors in
technological hazards?
Second, surveys sent to active opponents and proponents will ask about their
own motivations for becoming active and their perceptions of the influences
moving them from an uninformed and passive state to a more informed and active
one. Their reports on motivation will be classified by type (e.g., romance of
space exploration, employment concerns, fear of genetic damage in an accident)
and ranked by intensity of statements of each (i.e., little intensity to
highly vehement statements). They will also be asked about whether they have
engaged in various levels of activism, from signing petitions to personal
participation in activist organizations, on issues other than Cassini. This
inquiry will shed light on the degree to which individual activism on an issue
is triggered by concerns particular to it or whether this issue is just one of
many that moves an already activist personality to take action. It is
expected that, in reporting influences on their transformation into activists
on this issue, they will cite particular media pieces, as well as
communications from individuals and reference groups they trust. The
reference groups, if offered, will be classified by general political ideology
on a right to left continuum. One purpose of this survey is to establish the
specific role of the media in recruitment of activists in competition with the
role of personal and reference group communications.
Third, the sensation and blame-seeking elements of newsworthiness
identified in past literature on media are likelier to result in a greater
number of stories, more column space, and higher-priority placement of
stories on the controversy over Cassini than about the design of the
mission and its target system. There should be more coverage of the former
than the latter, because the controversy more effectively generates
specific events that can initiate coverage than does the science involved,
including sensation, blame-finding, clarity and simplicity of message, and
human drama. The act of coverage, then, itself may help to motivate
disproportionate recruitment of the audience into opponent activism (as
self-reported by activists). On the other hand, it is possible that few
activists will cite media pieces. Media failure to cover an environmental
controversy could dampen recruitment to just that level obtainable by
direct personal and organizational communication with individuals.
Fourth, if the arguments of media criticism are justified, corporations
which both contract with NASA and hold media subsidiaries should experience
conflict of interest between the media subsidiary's need for focus on the
controversy and the parent corporation's need to avoid the oppositional
recruitment effects of such coverage. Response may entail direct or
indirect pressure on editors to kill such stories, a pressure not without
alleged precedent in other areas (Stevens 1998). Opponent literature on
this issue indeed claims that there has been just such a media blackout on
Cassini (Phillips 1997), which would prevent public outrage over the
RTGs/RHUs on board. The proposed study is in no position to estimate the
"right" amount of coverage for such a controversy nor can it demonstrate
that pressure to kill stories was applied by such conflicted corporations.
It can, however, propose and evaluate a prediction logically derivable from
the claim. That is, media with such corporate parents will generate
significantly fewer numbers of articles, less column space, and less
prominent placement on front pages or section front pages of articles on
controversial technological hazard issues. Because of the conceivable
existence of other factors that could produce such results, a finding in
accordance with expectation would be less definitive than heuristic, but
highly troubling for the democratic process in risk management.
Fifth, elected risk management policy-makers can be expected to report an
increase in concern about the political risks of supporting future non-
military missions involving RTGs/RHUs. As in any political controversy,
politicians must try to gauge whether a given issue will change the mix of
people likely to turn up at the polls in typical low-turnout American
elections, make political donations, or volunteer to get out the vote.
Reported opposition to a given technological hazard is, for reasons
elaborated above, likely to exceed support for deployment. It remains a
hazardous guess for a politician to estimate the relationship between the
mix of activist opinion and the mix of opinion on and the salience of such
an issue among those in the wider public likely to vote. The necessity of
decision-making under conditions of such uncertainty should elevate self-
reported concern about the consequences of such decisions. One
contribution of the proposed project is extension of risk assessment/risk
management theory into the processes by which key decision-makers deal with
their own political risk assessment conundrum!
Last, attempts by activists to affect the milieu of risk management policy
can be expected to focus on the legitimacy of the risk assessment reported
by NASA. Even as there might be a conflict of interest in risk assessment
done on behalf of an agency with a mission involving the deployment of a
potentially risky technology, so, too, activists might respond to a
conflict between their opinions and a risk assessment report by attacking
the report. Past literature on hazard perception has argued that people
often make up their minds about an issue before being exposed to enough
facts and arguments. If so, the cognitive dissonance produced by anti-
Cassini activists' opinions of RTG/RHU use and their confrontation with the
risk assessment, which concluded that the risk was vanishingly small, could
be resolved in one of three ways: (1) a softening of their opposition, (2)
a detailed criticism of the risk assessment for those with the technical
background to follow it, or, (3) for most opponents who deal with the risk
assessment, a search for another means of dismissing its conclusions. The
third option leads to a hunch that opponents of a technological application
will resort to conspiracy-theorizing to dismiss inconvenient conclusions,
tapping into Douglas' and Wildavsky's border culture tendency to suspicion
of rational analysis done by a centrist organization. Usually, opposition
to a given technology has come out of the political Left (e.g., nuclear
power, levees) or the Right (e.g., fluoridation, RU486) but rarely both.
The Cassini controversy has shown elements of both, and, if the expectation
that conspiracy-theorizing will be a common response to the risk
assessment, different conspiracies may be evoked for the purpose of
undermining the risk assessment science. An important part of the public
impact on risk management is necessarily a questioning of risk assessment.
Conspiracy-theorizing is a way by which an opinionated activist public can
step outside the normal rules governing the relationship between risk
management and risk assessment and force players in the Federal sector onto
a turf disempowering to them. Absurd conspiracy theories need exploration
as a politically powerful recruitment device due to their function in
blunting cognitive dissonance.
DATA AND METHODS
In order to pursue these research questions, the following types of data
will be collected:
1) Questionnaires will be sent by mail (with telephone and e-mail
follow-up to raise response rates) to the 22 individuals named as
contributing to the risk assessments at the end of the Final
Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini Mission (NASA
1995) and the four additional people named in the Final
Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini
Mission (NASA 1997). These structured qualitative questionnaires
will be in an open-ended format to elicit responents' feelings
about the standards of evidence needed to establish risk
probability ranges in a situation involving nuclear technology
(their sense of the proper trade-off between Type I and Type II
failures). It will also solicit their sense of the risk
management guidance from NASA and the ways this might have
affected their research designs. These questionnaires will be
analyzed with standard literature content analytic methods.
2) Activist messages will be collected from the following sources:
American newspaper and newsmagazine letters to the editor found
through Academic Universe (1995-1999); Usenet postings found
through Deja News (1997-1999); listserver postings sent to an
array of listservers subscribed to for the purpose with archive
searches on those lists providing that service (back to 1995, if
possible); and web pages posted by activists (1997-1999). These
texts will first be processed by simple counts of messages and
words by stance (oppositional, advocacy, and neutral) to
establish the balance of opinion among people taking the time to
communicate their thoughts on the issue. Sentences will be
further processed with literature content analytic methods
entailing categorization of statements and ranking of intensity
of statements by motivation (e.g., dread, mistrust of NASA,
enthusiasm for space exploration, concern about economic effects
of aborting the launch or fly-by). Opponent writings will be
further examined for their dealings with the risk assessment
performed for NASA. Proportions attacking it on technical
grounds and delegitimating it through conspiracy-theorizing will
be calculated and the kind of conspiracy evoked will be related
to political stance. The resulting nominal and ordinal data can
be further processed with non-parametric statistical techniques
to construct the images of the Cassini mission and risk
assessment process used by NASA, which is held by proponents and
opponents.
3) The most active proponents and opponents identified from activist
messages by frequency and/or volume of communications will be
sent an open-ended questionnaire asking them how they learned
about the plutonium RTGs/RHUs on Cassini-Huygens and what their
motivations were for becoming so involved in the issue. At least
30 individuals on each side will be approached by e-mail or mail
(after directory searches on WhoWhere, Bigfoot, and Netscape
people finders and telephone directories). They will be
specifically asked about the relative importance of various
media, friends and family, employers, and reference groups in
shaping their images of the program and their decisions to act.
They will also be queried about general political orientation as
well. Their interpretations of the risk assessment done for NASA
will also be elicited. A brief follow-up questionnaire will be
submitted after the flyby to see if its outcome changes their
attitudes towards the use of RTGs/RHUs. Returned questionnaires
will be processed by categorization and frequency counts and
ranking of intensity.
4) Articles on Cassini will be located in newspapers and
newsmagazines through Academic Universe. Attempts will also be
made to find television stories by searching national networks'
web page archives and ordering copies of any stories so
identified. Their prominence will be assessed by page (or show)
placement and length. Their foci will be placed on a continuum
between reporting on the purpose of the mission and the
environmental controversy over the plutonium RTGs/RHUs. The
specific images of Cassini in particular and technological hazard
in general will be constructed from standard literature content
methods for comparison with activist images.
5) The ownership structure of all national and nationally-important
regional print media will be described. The goal is to learn if
any prominent media are part of corporations that do contract
work for NASA's solar system exploration division. Number, size,
and prominence of stories on Cassini can be compared between
entities with NASA involvement and those without to test the
claim by Cassini opponents that there has been a media blackout
on Cassini and its plutonium load.
6) The impact of the controversy on elected risk managment policy-
makers is the target of the next type of data collection.
Interviews will be conducted with the staffs of the nine senators
on the Senate Committee for Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space and of the 25
members of the House Science Committee Subcommittee on Space and
Aeronautics. The purpose of these structured qualitative
interviews is to obtain estimates of the volume of constituent
communications on the Cassini controversy, the balance of opinion
among them, and staff and elected officials' beliefs as to the
representativeness of these communications. Additionally, these
interviews will ask about how politicians gauge the consequences
of acting in accordance with the majority opinion in the activist
communications or not. They will be asked how constituent
communications may have affected their opinions on the use of
RTGs/RHUs in future space missions, willingness to fund further
exploration of the solar system in competition with other social
goals, and beliefs concerning NASA's trustworthiness in the
assessment and deployment of potentially hazardous technologies.
If at all possible, interviews with the senators and
congressional representatives will be arranged to hear their
views on these issues from them directly. As with the activist
questionnaires, officials and/or staff will be approached again
after flyby to assess changes produced by the outcome of the
gravity-assist. These interviews should add to knowledge of the
specific ways the activist public impacts the risk management
responsibility of the legislative branch in a democratic society
and the effects of successful or disastrous outcomes on a
specific case of such risk management.
TIMELINE OF PROPOSED ACTIVITIES
Ongoing self-funded preparatory activities include continued reading in the
scholarly literatures most germane to the project (most recently, game
theory), reading the environmental impact statements prepared by NASA,
building my contacts within the Cassini team and among the most prominent
critics of the project, examining web sites created by NASA and its
critics, downloading Usenet postings for future analysis, attending
conferences to disseminate progress reports on the project and solicit
criticism, and organizing a special session on Cassini for the 24th Annual
Hazard Research and Applications Workshop. Other activities can be mapped
out for more discrete blocks of time.
By June of 1999, three students will have been selected, hired, and trained
for specific tasks. These will probably be master's students associated
with the Center for Hazards Research. Two will each be hired for fifteen
hours a week for a full year's duration, beginning in the summer of 1999,
and the third will be hired for ten hours a week for the summer and fall of
1999.
By July, the research assistants will have taken over the tasks of
following, downloading, compiling, and printing Usenet postings and they
will begin Academic Universe searches for articles and letters to the
editor on Cassini and the RTG controversy. Both the Usenet and article
searches will go on throughout the summer of 1999, when controversy over
the issue will be building to a peak expected around the flyby (scheduled
for the 18th of August). The controversy will ebb in the months after the
flyby, much as it did following launch, suddenly if all goes well and more
gradually if there is some kind of mishap. Usenet and article searches
will continue until December of 1999.
During early summer of 1999 before the flyby, open-ended questionnaires
will be developed and sent to at least 30 activists on each side of the
Cassini controversy. The questionnaires will be e-mailed to the identified
activists on Usenet and the WWW and mailed to others after searches in
Internet people finders and telephone directories. E-mail and telephone
follow-up will be performed to increase response rates. A brief follow-up
will be designed and submitted to the same individuals after the flyby to
assess the impact of the outcome of the flyby on their perceptions.
Analysis of the activist questionnaires will ensue toward the end of
October, 1999. All results will be presented in aggregated form and/or in
anonymous anecdotal form to preserve respondents' privacy.
Also during the summer of 1999, questionnaires will be developed for
administration to the 26 individuals listed in the Cassini environmental
impact statements as having responsibility for the assessment of the risk
from launch or flyby accidents involving the RTGs/RHUs. Administration of
the questionnaires will begin in the month before the flyby, with any
necessary follow-up continuing into October.
Summer of 1999 will also see correspondence with Federal elected office-
holders or their staffs. This correspondence will be to set up structured
qualitative telephone interviews with staff in the summer before flyby and
with the office-holders themselves if at all possible. They will be
queried again after the flyby, as well.
Content analysis of all print media articles collected from searches in
Academic Universe and on any television or radio coverage uncovered will go
on mostly during fall of 1999. Data entry and processing should occupy the
fall of 1999 and beginning of 2000.
The latter part of spring 2000 will be devoted to writing up findings.
Final results will be presented to the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, the Association of American Geographers, and a
panel in the 25th Annual Hazards Research and Applications Workshop in
Boulder, Colorado. The graduate students will be encouraged to present
individual facets of the project to regional professional associations.
Publication in refereed national journals is also planned, and the project
is of a scale that may additionally result in a book as well.
THE BROADER RAMIFICATIONS OF THE STUDY
The whole Cassini controversy, particularly the risk assessment done under
the aegis of NASA, is likely to be understood, both by supporters and
opponents of the mission, as part of the growing delegitimation of science
in American cultural and political discourses. Science is a particular
approach to the production of reliable knowledge, which is undeniably
difficult to master, the more so when the phenomenon under study is
inherently uncertain. Education in science has been deteriorating for a
variety of reasons, undermining public understanding of technological risk
assessment. The scientific outlook is the product of years of
apprenticeship to a necessarily hierarchical guild, and yet science on a
daily basis transforms ordinary human life (Sagan 1996). The significance
of scientific impacts on human life implies the necessity of democratic
oversight, but that oversight presumes mastery of science, which is not
widespread. This gap engenders some public fear, frustration, and even
resentment of the intellectual elitism inherent in science, as much as
admiration for many of its products. Science as a process and its
practitioners are sometimes blamed for the abuses of some of its results,
notably in the military application of nuclear science, in this case, very
directly affecting Cassini. These questions of fairness in payment for,
control over, and benefits from science have led to academic attacks on the
very epistemological validity of science, in the form of the
deconstructionist and postmodernist movements presently sweeping the
humanities, arts, social sciences, and even some of the natural sciences.
This background of delegitimation of science, both popular and academic,
may weaken the hand of technology proponents and strengthen that of
opponents in the technology management issues to come. This broad cultural
trend is already producing further decline of the American space program,
and the Cassini controversy both illustrates and reinforces the general
trend. The proposed project will establish how this controversy will
impact future space missions involving RTGs/RHUs by the United States and
other space-faring nations.
Above and beyond the case of Cassini, this project contributes to risk
management theory in the following ways. At a general level, it will
holistically model the key players in a national technological hazard
controversy, their internal tensions, and the specific channels by which
they interact with one another in the risk assessment and risk management
policy relationship. More specifically, it will represent the interaction
of a mission-committed agency, its allies in the private sector, and
proponent activists, on the one hand, with opponent activists, on the other
hand, through the process of activist recruitment from the uninvolved
public, in order to bring pressure to bear on risk management policy-
makers. Part of that process is the shaping of public perceptions through
media coverage (or non-coverage), which is likelier to transform people
into opponent activists (or leave them in the uninvolved public) than to
transform them into proponent activists. Another key part is activist
resolution of cognitive dissonance in facing risk assessment analyses which
essentially dismiss the hazard -- technical deconstruction of the risk
assessment or conspiracy-theorizing -- both of which can be used for
recruitment. The result of this process of recruitment is pressure on
elected policy-makers, who must react to this pressure under their own
conditions of political uncertainty and risk. That is, to which extent are
the criticisms of risk assessment presented by opponents valid? To which
extent is an opponent campaign really representative of public opinion or,
more importantly, of probable voters? To which extent can failure to
respond to such pressure be offset by private sector political campaign
donations?
RELATIONSHIP TO PI'S OTHER WORK
The proposed project on social construction of the plutonium aboard the
Cassini-Huygens spacecraft carries forward my work in hazards over the past
five years or so. My earliest published work on hazards (Rodrigue 1993)
differentiated hazard risk from hazard vulnerability in the case of
chaparral fire hazard in montane Southern California. It specifically
addressed social differences in risk and vulnerability to this hazard.
Perceived differences in social vulnerability, of fairness, are one of the
key questions in the proposed project and in technological hazards research
in general.
Having been caught in the epicentral community of the "Northridge"
earthquake of 1994 (Reseda), I focused my growing interest in hazards on
that particular event. It is in this earthquake project that I first
developed an interest in media construction of a hazard and expanded my
competence in literature content analysis. With my collaborators, Eugenie
Rovai and Susan E. Place, I compared actual damage patterns in the Los
Angeles City Department of Building and Safety database with patterns of
media attention. Many communities were grossly undercovered or
overcovered, and there were sharp contrasts in the demographic attributes
of the two. These disparities were echoed in telephone surveys of local
residents' mental maps of the disaster and, disturbingly, in the patterns
of recovery from the disaster through time (Rodrigue and Rovai 1995;
Rodrigue, Rovai, and Place 1997). My work on this event left me with an
enduring concern for the interplay between media representation of hazard
in general and public environmental perception, and these are among the key
questions in the proposed project.
Another recent project was the examination of this general question in the
case of the 1998 El Niño-attributed floods and mudslides in Southern
California (Rodrigue and Rovai 1998b). This project entailed a short field
visit to Southern California on the part of Eugenie Rovai and myself, with a
team of graduate students (Adam Henderson, James Hotchkiss, and Stacy Potter).
The costs of the project (roughly $1,600) were reimbursed by the University of
Colorado, Boulder, as part of their Quick Response program. The QR program is
funded ultimately by NSF, under Grant No. CMS-9632458. Results of the study
were that the print media (Los Angeles Times) actually had spatially
well-balanced coverage compared to local residents' mental maps, an effect
that could not be accounted for. The media "hype" of El Niño did have
a number of salutary effects on local residents, such as raising expectations
of a very bad winter and encouraging maintenance of emergency kits. The
results of this field study cautioned me against automatic bias against media
representations of hazard as, in this case, one of them did a creditable job.
An impartial attitude can only enhance the proposed project.
I recently completed a California State University System Technology
Learning Productivity Project with Dr. Eugenie Rovai on coordinating two
different classes (my Natural Hazards course and her Advanced Cartography
course) to create student web pages on nine California disasters, featuring
clickable web map interfaces. The project amounted to about $25,000,
supported two graduate students at ten hours a week for an academic year
and involved a third through a credit internship. It eventuated in a
national professional presentation (Rodrigue and Rovai 1998a), a campus
workshop presentation, and a month-long web exhibition of the students'
work. A publication is under development, as well. As demanded by the
proposed project, I have experience supervising teams working on complex
problems with successful and well-disseminated results.
In short, the proposed project carries forward my dominant concerns over
the interplay between media and public hazard perception. It marks a new
development for me, however, in that the proposed project is concerned with
technological hazard, rather than the natural hazards that have occupied my
attention for the past five or six years. The proposed project also
demands of me a deepened understanding of hazard perception,
differentiating the perceptions of the public, of activists, risk
assessment experts, and elected risk managers/policy decision-makers. In
the future, I expect that, because of this proposed project, I will be
moving more into the area of technological hazards and risk communication,
as the latter affect public perception of such hazards and political
pressure on elected officials.
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© Christine M. Rodrigue,Ph.D., all rights reserved
first placed on web: 01/14/99
last revised: 01/22/99