Sylvia Noble Tesh is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Political Science Department at Yale University. She
is the author of Hidden Arguments: Political Ideology and Disease-Prevention Policy.
Summary
Ordinary citizens frequently organize around environmental issues on which little scientific evidence exists
to back activists' claims. Should we then dismiss such claims as spurious? Or should we side with citizens against
the polluters?
Uncertain Hazards takes neither path. In exploring the all-too-common problem of scientific uncertainty about links
between pollution and public health, Sylvia Noble Tesh shows that much of the problem can be traced to the newness
of the environmental movement. The inability of scientists to find data corroborating citizens' claims stems partly
from the "pre-environmentalist" assumptions still influencing the environmental health sciences, Tesh
says. On the other hand, the conviction of activists that industrial pollutants threaten their health results from
the environmental movement's success in promoting new ideas about nature.
Tesh points to ways that environmentalist ideas have begun to affect science, thus making more likely the discovery
of links between exposure to industrial pollutants and a community's health problems. Those ways include the expansion
of diseases construed as environmental in cause, the study of society's most vulnerable citizens in determining
safe levels of pollution, and a new focus on the effects of exposure to chemical mixtures.
Using community activists' own words and experiences, Tesh argues against the familiar charge that activists are
naive about science. It is inaccurate, she says, to characterize debates over the hazardous nature of pollution
as debates between laypeople and experts Instead, they are debates between two groups of experts. It is also inaccurate,
however, to see the conflict over environmental pollution only in scientific terms. The conflict has culturally
important moral dimensions, and community activists draw heavily, although often unconsciously, on the lessons
taught by environmentalism.
