Course: BIS 105 Environmental Biology

Unit 7 Learning Module

Environmental Risk Management

The Beginnings of Modern Risk Management

The beginnings of environmental risk management can be traced to the fields of public health, industrial hygiene, and sanitary engineering, which came into prominence in the latter decades of the 19^th century and beginning of the 20^th. The spread of disease was a particularly troublesome problem as the country continued to urbanize. For instance if you lived your life in, say, Chicago during the period 1850-1900 (a typical lifespan of the day), you had about a 1 in 100 chance of dying of cholera (and a 1 in 2000 chance of dying of typhoid), of which there were periodic epidemics spread by contaminated drinking water. Chicago's solution was to cease polluting its drinking water source (Lake Michigan) by reversing the flow of its watercourses so that they drained into the adjacent basin (the Mississippi). The widespread chlorination of municipal water after 1908 essentially eliminated waterborne outbreaks of disease in all major cities (with some notable exceptions—the outbreak of chlorine-resistant Cryptosporidium parvum in Milwaukee's drinking water in 1993 resulted in the infection of 403,000 people with 104 deaths).

Parallel work on the effects of chemical exposure on workers (and poor working conditions in general) were pioneered by Alice Hamilton (1869-1970), who published the first treatise on toxic chemical exposure "Industrial Poisons in the United States" in 1925. Hamilton is considered the founder of the field of occupational health. In 1897 she was appointed professor of pathology at the Women's Medical School of Northwestern University, and in 1902 she accepted the position of bacteriologist at the Memorial Institute for Infectious Diseases in Chicago. Dr. Hamilton joined Jane Addams's Hull House, in Chicago, where she interacted with progressive thinkers who often gravitated there, and to the needs of the poor for whom Hull House provided services.

Environmental Contamination and Risk

Events during the period 1920-1950 took an unfortunate turn. Global conflicts and economic uncertainty diverted attention from environmental issues, and much of what had been learned during the previous hundred years, for example about soil conservation and sustainable forestry, ceased to influence policy, with resultant mismanagement on a wide scale.

Dust storm approaching Stratford, TX in 1935.

Clear Cutting, Louisiana, 1930. Typical cut-over longleaf pine area, on Kisatchie National Forest.

In the aftermath of the World War II, economic and industrial activity in the United States accelerated, and a consumer-starved populace sought and demanded large quantities of diverse goods and services. Major industrial sectors, primary metals, automotive, chemical, timber, and energy expanded considerably; however there were still few laws or regulations on waste management, and the ones that could and often were invoked (e.g. the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899) were devised in earlier times for problems of a different nature.

Photograph shows a local zinc smelter in a small valley town in Pennsylvania with, essentially, uncontrolled emissions.

If there were any doubts among American society that the capacity of the natural environment to absorb human-caused contamination with acceptably low risk was indeed infinite, these were dispelled by a series of well-publicized incidents that occurred during the period 1948-1978. The above photograph shows a local smelter in the small valley town of Donara, Pennsylvania. There were virtually no regulations at this time and the smelter operated with, essentially, uncontrolled emissions. During periods of atmospheric stability (an inversion), contaminants became trapped, accumulated, and caused respiratory distress so extraordinary that fifty deaths were recorded. The photograph shown below, Noon in Donora, illustrates the dramatically poor air quality, in the form of reduced visibility, during this episode. Such incidents were not uncommon, nor were they limited to small American towns. A well-documented similar episode occurred in London, England in 1952 with as many as 12,000 deaths, and 100,000 illnesses resulting.

Noon in Donora. This photograph, taken in the middle of the day onOctober 29, 1948, illustrates the extremely poor air quality in the Pennsylvania town at the time.

The generally poor state of air quality in the United States was initially tolerated as a necessary condition of an industrialized society. Although the risks of occupational exposure to chemicals was becoming more well known, the science of risk assessment as applied to the natural environment was in its infancy, and the notion that a polluted environment could actually cause harm was slow to be recognized, and even if true it was not clear what might be done about it. Nevertheless, people in the most contaminated areas could sense the effects of poor air quality: increased incidence of respiratory disease, watery eyes, odors, inability to enjoy being outside for more than a few minutes, and diminished visibility.

Photograph illustrates a fire on the Cuyahoga River, one of many fires during the mid 1900s.

Environmental degradation of the era was not limited to air quality. Emissions of contaminants to waterways and burial underground were simple and common ways to dispose of wastes. Among the most infamous episodes in pollution history were the periodic fires that floated through downtown Cleveland, Ohio on the Cuyahoga River, causing considerable damage, and the discovery of buried hazardous solvent drums in a neighborhood of Niagara Falls, NY known as Love Canal. Residents became alarmed at the high rate of miscarriages and birth defects. A survey conducted by the Love Canal Homeowners Association found that 56% of the children born from 1974–1978 had at least one birth defect.

Risk Management as a Basis for Environmental Policy

Environmental scientists of the day were also alarmed by the extent and degree of damage that they were documenting. The publication of Silent Spring in 1962 by Rachel Carson (1907-1964), about the impact of the widespread and indiscriminate use of pesticides, was a watershed moment, bringing environmental concerns before a large portion of the American, and global, public. Carson, a marine biologist and conservationist who initially worked for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, became a full time nature writer in the 1950s. She collected scientifically documented evidence on the effects of pesticides, particularly DDT, heptachlor, and dieldrin, on humans and mammals, and the systemic disruption they caused to ecosystems. Silent Spring is credited with bringing about a ban on the use of DDT in the United States, and setting in motion a chain of events that would ultimately result in the transformation of environmental public policy from one based on the problems and attitudes that brought about nineteenth century conservation, to one based on the management of risks from chemical toxins. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, just eight years after the publication of Silent Spring; the same year Earth Day was created.

The National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA) provides a legal basis for U.S. environmental policy, and lays out its terms clearly and unambiguously. NEPA established a national goal to create and maintain "conditions under which [humans] and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans [emphasis added]." Further, NEPA saw the need for long term planning, to "fulfill the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations," for equity "to assure for all Americans safe, healthful, productive, and esthetically and culturally pleasing surroundings," and for economic prosperity as we "achieve a balance between population and resource use that will permit high standards of living and a wide sharing of life's amenities." Although the exact word "sustainable" does not appear, NEPA is in all major respects congruent with the goals of the Brundtland Report (written 17 years later, see Unit 1), retains the character of American conservation, and anticipates the need to integrate environmental quality with social and economic needs.

Every four to six years the U.S. EPA releases its Report on the Environment, a collection of data and analysis of trends on environmental quality. It is quite comprehensive; reporting on an array of measures that chart progress, or lack thereof, on human impacts on the environment and, in turn, the effects of our actions on human health. It is difficult to summarize all the information available in a concise way, however most measures of human exposure to toxic chemicals, dating in many cases back to the late 1980s, show clear downward trends, in some cases dramatically so (for example DDT in human tissues, lead in blood serum, exposure to hazardous wastes from improper disposal, exposure to toxic compounds emitted to the air). In addition, many of other indicators of environmental quality such as visibility, drinking water quality, and the biodiversity of streams, show improvement. These are success stories of the risk management approach to environmental quality. On the other hand, other measures, such as hypoxia in coastal waters, quantities of hazardous wastes generated, and greenhouse gases released are either not improving or are getting worse.