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Managing Technological Hazards:
Success, Strain, and Surprise
ROBERT W. DATES
In the past decade and a half, citizens of most industrialized countries have
become concerned about the hazards of technology, have created a new set
of institutions and activities to control them, and have profoundly changed
the ways in which technologies are designed, produced, and used. Over the
next decade and a half, more subtle hazards will confront us, strains and
contradictions will emerge in the new institutions, and we will still be
surprised at the strange ways in which our technologies unintentionally
. .
nJure us.
Fifteen years after Earth Day 1970, much progress has been made in the
United States in controlling air end wafer pollution, somewhat more with the
former than the latter (Conservation Foundation, 1984~. At the same time,
the hazards that we cope with today have changed markedly. There has been
a shift in emphasis from visible problems of automobile smog and raw
sewage to less visible problems posed by low concentrations of toxic pollu-
tants (Ruckelshaus, 19854. We are less concerned with the acute conse-
quences of a hazardous technology such as the automobile (which are mea-
sured well by the National Safety Council) than we are with the chronic
consequences of a hazardous technology such as toxic chemicals (which are
not measured well), either because we do not understand the causation or
because the effects are still latent. Our concerns have shifted in temporal
scale as well. We are less worried about the daily recurrence of common-
place accidents than about confronting the frightening possibility of rare but
catastrophic accidents. And in spatial scale we are shifting attention from the
local to the regional and global: from local improvement in water or air
206
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MANAGING TECHNOLOGICAL H~Z~RDS
207
quality, achieved In almost every industrialized country, to regional frustra-
tion in dealing with acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, and tropos-
pheric ozone enrichment, and to global uncertainty about carbon dioxide,
trace gas enrichment, and nuclear winter.
This shift from better-understood hazards to less understood hazards has
placed an enormous burden on science to identify hazards and to assess their
risks. Scientists often fluctuate between humility and hubris, and scientific
risk assessment has manifested these fluctuations as well. Currently, humil-
ity appears to be in ascendance as the limits to knowledge emerge and
experts routinely contradict each other in the press or the courtroom. But it
should be equally recognized that while the media, the public, or the courts
may demand more of science than it can give, some scientists have promised
more than they can deliver. Scientists have implied that they know the
significant ways in which technologies fail; that they are close to understand-
ing the fundamental causes of cancer and arteriosclerosis; and that hazard-
ous waste can be safely collected, transported, and stored. Thus, while some
scientists could limit the burden on science, others continue to extend it,
either from hubris, from a desire to reassure the public, or because they
relish the challenge and opportunities for further research.
INSTITUTIONS OF HAZARD MANAGEMENT
As we shift our focus to more elusive hazards, the institutions of hazard
management become more concrete. The institutionalization of government
regulation is well known. New technological hazards that are wholly unreg-
ulated are rare. Indeed, recently perceived hazards, such as those of genetic
engineering, come under regulation by at least five government agencies.
Despite occasional resistance based on ideological reflex, the principle that
hazards should be regulated is not seriously disputed. It is the wisdom,
magnitude, social cost, and implementation of the specific regulations that
fuel controversy.
The excessive focus on public regulation has obscured the institutionaliza-
tion of hazard management that has taken place outside of government. For
example, groups claiming to represent the public interest consistently moni-
tor most domains of hazard. Often underfunded, such public interest groups
have nevertheless established legal and scientific competence that enables
them to participate actively in public regulatory processes and to use the
courts to guarantee implementation of congressional intent or to obtain
compensation for injury. As these groups become more professional, they
increasingly join with their counterparts in industry in efforts to implement
regulations and to provide alternatives to regulation through voluntary
efforts, environmental mediation, and the like.
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ROBERT ~ KITES
Another set of hazard management institutions are judicial ones arising
from the remarkable innovation of contingency representation in class-
action compensation and liability cases. This institutionalization of repre-
sentation follows a long-term shift in both public attitude and legal prece-
dent, from concern with acts of God to acts of persons and from private risk
to public risk. Where a resigned public once hesitated to sue a steamship
company for injury from a boiler explosion, an indignant public now blames
the government for causing floods. In a time when lawyers routinely adver-
tise for clients, insurance and self-insurance reserves provided for hazard
compensation are being seriously strained.
But the most remarkable institutional change and one receiving the least
formal study-has occurred within industry itself. For the last two years, I
have been part of a modest research effort seeking to learn more about how
corporations manage hazards. ~ Our studies are limited; the corporate world
appears reluctant to allow external inspection or to encourage internal self-
examination. But even our limited studies suggest that a remarkable set of
changes has taken place over the last 15 years in corporate goals and in
resources devoted to the management of hazardous technologies.
Since 1970, when General Motors established its public policy commit-
tee, U.S. industry has institutionalized the social responsibility movement,
creating codes of ethics in many corporations, and board of directors' com-
mittees in some of them, and, most important, establishing specific policies
and operational guidelines in major corporations, such as Dow, Du Pont,
and Monsanto, that produce hazardous products. Common elements in these
operational guidelines include intensive efforts to screen for potential toxic-
ity; attention to worker health and safety; concern that consumers are pro-
tected and that company products are used safely; protection of the environ-
ment by waste reduction, pollution control, effluent cleanup, and safe waste
disposal; and disclosure and dissemination of correct product information.
Industry has also committed resources. A recent Chemical Manufacturers
Association survey in which about half the industry responded found that the
mean firm surveyed had 84 health and environmental specialists, or about 2
percent of its U.S. employees, and spent almost4 percent of annual sales on
toxicity testing and environmental pollution control (Peat, Marwick, Mitch-
ell and Co., 1983, pp. 51-741. One industry leader that our group studied
had a 125-employee headquarters health and safety unit, including an epide-
miologist and a risk-assessment unit, a toxicology lab with 20 toxicologists,
and 30 industrial hygienists assigned to plants resources probably exceed-
ing those of most state governments.
The resources of an industry leader may be misleading. Our limited stud-
ies have focused on large and prosperous corporations, and even within this
set there are large variations in commitment and resources. Nonetheless, the
major changes in approach and staffing since 1970 are widespread. Indeed,
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AGING TECHNOLOGICAL HAZARDS
209
we have found that a corporate health and safety regulatory system exists
that matches that of the public sector. This shadow government employs a
variety of standards. Generally, these include the relatively few standards
that are mandated by government, the many more industry consensus stan-
dards, and some internal corporate standards developed for new products
and facilities or to maintain a higher standard of workplace health and safety.
This standard-setting process is replete with many of the conflicting roles
and motivations found in the public process, and in some corporations it is
based on an extremely sophisticated risk-assessment process. As with the
governmental process, it is easier to set standards than to enforce them. But a
genuinely committed firm may be able to enforce its own standards more
easily than the government can regulate that firm.
Underlying the institutionalization of hazard management is a vital
change in public attitudes. In the late 1960s three powerful movements
those concerned with the environment, consumerism, and, more recently,
personal health began to overlap and coalesce. The strongest of the three,
the environmental, is founded on deeply held values and strong, persistent
attitudes. Polls have consistently shown that concern with air and water
pollution, support for strong government regulation, and sympathy for the
environmental movement claim favor with two-thirds of the population
despite the full range of liberal-to-conservative political affiliations and
fluctuations (Mitchell, 1984~. The more recent and somewhat amorphous
personal health movement can only reinforce these concerns about hazards.
Although techniques and institutions vary, a commitment to the manage-
ment of technological hazards is deeply entrenched in most industrialized
countries. The costs are substantial. Modern industrialized countries com-
monly devote between 1 and 2 percent of their gross national product (GNP)
just to the prevention and reduction of pollution. Our study group calculated
that in 1979 the social cost of coping with hazards associated with technol-
ogy in the United States was equivalent to between 7 and 12 percent of GNP,
with about half devoted to hazard management and the remainder incurred as
damages to people, material, and the environment (fuller, in press). These
expenditures reflect the stable commitment to environmental values forged
over the last two decades and its implementation in major political and
economic institutions. Coping with the emergent issues of the next 15 years
begins on that base, and the maturation of nonfederal institutions offers new
opportunities.
THE PERSISTENCE OF SURPRISE
One goal of professional risk and hazard assessment is to minimize sur-
prise. Notwithstanding the substantial resources now devoted to the man-
agement of technological hazards, one of the distinguishing features of the
last 15 years is that surprise persists and, paradoxically, grows.
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ROBERT ~ KITES
While the partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant on
March 28, 1979, was within the range of uncertainty postulated by some
assessors of the risk of nuclear accidents, the public and most scientists were
surprised by the event. Other examples of major surprises include acquired
immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), the Bhopal disaster, Legionnaires'
disease, natural carcinogens, the nuclear winter scenario, suicide truck
bombs, toxic shock syndrome, and poisoned Tylenol. Hazardous surprises
seem to occur at a frequency of about twice a year worldwide.
Paradoxically, success in managing hazards fuels our surprise. The con-
quest of many common infectious diseases makes the outbreak of new
infectious diseases surprising, not only because of the complexity of the
pathogens involved but also because of the mix of social behavior and
technologies involved in their transmission: conventions, homosexuality,
blood distribution networks, superabsorbent tampons, and air conditioning
systems. The remarkable record of purity in our food and drugs heightens the
impact of a mass poisoner. Our vaunted military strength makes ourvulnera-
bility to the truck bomber seem astonishing.
But there are also genuine scientific surprises. Forty years after Hiro-
shima, nuclear winter, a major new consequence of nuclear war, is hypothe-
sized (National Research Council, 19859. Long after the identification of
natural carcinogens such as aflatoxins in peanut butter, we are still surprised
by their extent and potential toxicity (Ames, 1983~.
Surprising hazards are an inevitable outgrowth of technological change.
One of the positive developments of the past 15 years has been the growing
public understanding that all technology is hazardous and that some technol-
ogies are substantially more hazardous than others. I believe that the demand
for totally safe technologies has diminished. Technological innovation will
surely produce new hazards, and many of these will prove quite surprising
despite the successful institutionalization of the processes of ensuring early
hazard identification and product safety.
Identifying potentially hazardous technologies may become more diffi-
cult because of a troubling characteristic of the so-called high technologies.
Since 1939, three major high technologies have dominated the innovation
process: nuclear engineering, solid-state electronics, and biotechnology. A
characteristic of the development of these technologies has been the blurring
of the roles of the basic scientist, the technologist, and the entrepreneur a
blurring hailed by many as leading to quicker innovation, application, and
use. This pattern began with the atomic bomb, when Albert Einstein wrote
to President Roosevelt about the military implications of atomic energy and
a generation of physicists worked as technologists to make it a reality. It is
most evident today in the development of biotechnology, in which leading
scientists assume all three roles. What is troubling is that this blurring of
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MANAGING TECHNOLOGICAL HAZARDS
211
roles denies to hazard management one of its strongest sources of early
hazard identification-knowledgeable but independent basic scientists.
Such scientists, knowledgeable about a technology but independent of its
development or production, are society's best bulwark against technological
surpnse.
Finally, it appears that it is intrinsically more difficult to predict the
hazardous nature of some technologies than of others. Scientific theories of
comparative degrees of hazard are just being developed. My own research
group recognizes five distinguishing characteristics of extremely hazardous
technologies (Hohenemser et al., 1983~: intentional design as biocides
(chemical pesticides); the combination of latency and long potency in mate-
rials (asbestos); the potential for catastrophic effects (jumbo jets); the persis-
tent, ubiquitous capacity to inflict harm (motor vehicles); and the as-yet-
unquantified capacity to cause damage of global extent (acid rain). But high
hazardousness is not necessarily surprising. Rather, the surprise or unpre-
dictability of some hazardous technologies may lie in the qualities Charles
Perrow (1984) identifies as high hazard-the combination of technological
complexity, the tight coupling of components so that the failure of one
component starts a process that cannot be arrested, and catastrophic poten-
tial. Or, the surprise may reside in the complex dynamics of biological and
technological systems that C. S. Holling (1984) and his colleagues have
studied, and in which there is great potential for serious, unwanted, and
hazardous surprises (for example, in the interaction between pesticides and
pesticide-resistant insects).
LIMITS TO HAZARD MANAGEMENT
The capability and competence of the hazard management system that has
evolved in recent years is substantially limited. Without major break-
throughs in our fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of low-level
effects of toxic chemicals and radiation, for example, there are clear limits to
our ability to quantify these effects. Similarly limited is our ability to antici-
pate and to prevent catastrophic accidents. And society as a whole cannot
reduce all hazards or reduce any hazard to zero risk.
A second set of limits is institutional. Ten or more years after most regula-
tory agencies were created, considerable doubt remains about whether they
can carry out their legislative mandate to set standards and to force compli-
ance with them. Federal air pollution standards exist for only a few of the
hundreds of known airborne toxic substances. There are even greater doubts
as to the judicial system's capacity to deter negligence and to compensate
efficiently and justly for injury. Insurance companies and other risk-sharing
institutions linked to thatjudicial system appear to tee in crisis, overwhelmed
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ROBERT ~ K'ES
by the legacies of old hazards such as asbestos, changing concepts of respon-
sibility, and the potential for future Bhopal-like catastrophes. Finally, our
exemplary tradition of voluntary action, public interest initiative, and corpo-
rate good citizenship seems inadequate in the face of such overwhelming
tasks as the cleanup of thousands of existing hazardous waste sites.
A third set of limits relates to moral choice-the perennial conflict
between efficiency and equity. Hazards pose special and subtle problems.
These include the separation in space and time of those who receive the
benefits of technologies from those who experience the risks; the wide
differences in hazard susceptibility between individuals, ages, sexes, and
ethnic groups; and the uncertainty as to both cause and responsibility when
compensating for injuries inflicted by substances such as asbestos or Agent
Orange.
These limits are hardly absolute; their boundaries still need to be explored.
Some believe that the effectiveness of the hazard management system,
recently created in this country and still in flux, has yet to be thoroughly
tested. Nonetheless, an interesting search for alternatives is already under
way. It includes a search for ways to finesse the uncertainty imposed by the
limits to our scientific knowledge, to diminish the catastrophic potential of
technology, and to choose an agenda of hazards that pose the greatest threat
to our society. It seeks alternatives to government regulation and litigation
and new ways to link equity and efficiency in compensating victims of
hazards. It is a search for technological and behavioral fixes.
TECHNOLOGICAL AND BEHAVIORAL FIXES
I served my apprenticeship in hazard science 25 years ago at the Univer-
sity of Chicago under the leadership of Gilbert F. White, whose work
involved analyzing the failure of the major engineering works that had been
used since 1936 to reduce riverine flood hazard in the United States (White et
al., 19581. As engineering projects they worked well, but as social engineer-
ing efforts they had a perverse effect. While they reduced the frequency and
magnitude of flooding, they also encouraged the development of flood-
plains. Thus, there were fewer floods but greater damages. A behavioral fix
was needed to complement the prevailing technological fix, and we sought
to develop one with a broad program of management innovations in the form
of scientific information, floodplain regulation, insurance, emergency evac-
uation, and incentives for floodproofing individual buildings. I started my
career, therefore, skeptical of technological fixes and with a bias toward
behavioral fixes.
Like the engineering projects that reduce the numbers of floods while
amplifying potentially catastrophic floodplain development, there are simi
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MANAGING TEClINOLOGlC~L HAZARDS
213
tar perverse combinations of factors found in many hazard management
situations. For example, students taking driver training courses in high
school have somewhat safer driving records than untrained ones. However,
because the institution of such courses has been accompanied by a wide-
spread lowering of the age of licensing, the number of young drivers, as well
as their overall accident toll, has increased (Robertson, 1983, pp. 92-941.
Confidence in single fixes- technological or behavioral- is usually mis-
placed. The projected diminution in risk or consequences from the single fix
is often overestimated, partly because ofthe energetic advocacy of its propo-
nents. More often, however, the single fix overlooks some process else-
where in the chain of causation that either increases the releases, exposures,
or consequences of the hazard or introduces a new chain of hazards. Thus,
even the most successful of recent simple technological fixes, the childproof
drug container that has substantially reduced child-related deaths, creates
painful frustration for elderly arthritics and annoyance for all of us. On the
other hand, well-managed hazards, exemplified by commercial aviation,
employ a spectrum of fixes at every stage in the chain of hazard causation.
They combine both behavioral and technological fixes better crew training
and better aircraft. In what follows, I suggest some alternative fixes for
coping with technological hazards, but with the warning that, although they
could be useful, they are not universally applicable.
One desirable class of technological fixes inherently safe processes
depends on immutable laws of nature rather than on the intervention of
humans or electromechanical devices (Weinberg, in this volume). Two such
systems have been proposed for nuclear reactors, and suggestions for similar
processes are available in chemical engineering. Inherently safe waste dis-
posal is also possible where pretreatment, high-temperature incineration, or
constant recycling reduce the toxicity of waste by many orders of magni-
tude. It is clear that efficient hazard reduction poses as great an engineering
challenge as efficient product production.
I would also offer a second class of technological fixes the inherently
simple fix. I have cited one example, the childproof drug container. Related
to it are the post-Tylenol sealed containers. Innovations in chain saw safety
following the epidemic of accidents that resulted from greater use of fire-
wood during the recent energy crisis are another example. Inherently simple
fixes require a well-understood hazard, some motivation to cope with it, and
a bit of old-fashioned ingenuity.
Now that government has attempted to regulate almost every hazard, it is
clear that there are real limits to regulation. These limits stem from ideologi-
cal distaste for government regulation and, more pragmatically, from the
inherent shortcomings of rule-making processes and compliance efforts.
These limits suggest a need for behavioral fixes changes in human
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ROBERT ~ KITES
behavior using the recently created resources of industry and public inter-
est groups in hazard prevention and reduction.
Theoretically, the hazard makers should be the best hazard managers. If
they can be persuaded to do so, those who design and manufacture products
are in the best position to identify potential hazards and to correct or control
them. Much of the persuasion has been accomplished already. Controversy
over the grim legacies of the past or the safety of existing products has
obscured the real progress made in the design of new, less hazardous prod-
ucts. Novel reporting requirements, such as the so-called squeal law provi-
sions of the Toxic Substances Control Act (requiring manufacturers to report
any knowledge of substantial risks), attempt to use industry's own consider-
able scientific resources. Many more voluntary and creative experiments
using industry, public interest groups, and the scientific community are
needed.
Let me illustrate one such possible effort. Recently, the Board on Toxicol-
ogy and Environmental Health Hazards of the National Research Council
completed a shocking study on available toxicity data (National Research
Council, 19841. Based on a sample of some 53,500 distinct chemical enti-
ties, the board found that minimal toxicity information was available for
only one-third of the drugs and pesticides, one-quarter of the cosmetics, and
one-fifth of the chemicals in commerce. In contrast to the virtues of the de
minimis approach that proposes to ignore very low levels of hazard, our
society seems to have adopted a de ignoramus approach that avoids knowing
about many hazards.
Industry may well quibble with the standards of minimal knowledge that
require new chemical compounds to be tested for toxicity by rodent studies
that are expensive and time-consuming. But the National Research Council
study employed and, for the most part, was limited to publicly available
data. Industry conducts an extraordinary amount of proprietary testing of
new chemical products, the results of which may be withheld if the corpora-
tion does not develop the product further. Corporate executives are reluctant
to disclose these data because screening tests are a significant business
expense and they do not wish to reveal to competitors their search strategy
for new chemicals. Given the cooperation of industry, it should be possible
for an independent scientific body, such as the National Research Council,
to review these test data confidentially and prepare a composite list of
mutagenic chemicals to be issued annually, with the proprietary sources held
in confidence.
The final form of the procedure is not important, but the principle is. As a
society we need to use our collective hazard management resources in ways
that avoid the ponderousness of the regulatory system and the competitive-
ness of the marketplace.
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MANAGING TECHNOLOGICAL H~Z~RDS
215
Similarly, we need some new behavioral fixes in our procedures for com-
pensating the victims of hazards. Compensation itself is a failure of hazard
management, usually inadequate to match the loss, pain, and suffering
incurred. Our current system is in crisis and extremely costly. Insurance
premiums continue to rise; some malpractice insurance costs are prohibi-
tive; and corporate failures, including those of major liability insurance
companies, are likely. As physicians and the producers of vaccines can
attest, malpractice and product liability suits threaten both innovation and
useful institutions. But worst of all, the system with all its high costs-
provides neither compensation nor fairness to large numbers of victims.
A vigorous national search is on for alternatives, including no-fault envi-
ronmental compensation programs or caps on liability. This search has been
encouraged in part by widespread reaction to media pictures of liability
lawyers descending on Bhopal in search of clients. As the tragedy of Bhopal
slowly wends its way through the U. S. court system, it may be instructive to
examine a different way of handling an industrial tragedy for example, the
response of the Mexican government to the natural gas explosion on Novem-
ber 19, 1984, at San Juan Ixhuatepec. The disaster killed at least 500 per-
sons, injured more than 2,500, and displaced 200,000 or more. It was
marked by a restoration, reconstruction, and compensation process
unmatched by responses to natural and technological disasters anywhere in
the world. The response of the Mexican government, as chronicled by my
colleague Kirsten Johnson, was remarkably prompt.2 The delivery of rapid,
albeit rough and ready, aid and compensation in the San Juan Ixhuatepec
episode provides an example of an alternative to more traditional judicial
processes that may be exceedingly fine but are also exceedingly slow.
In the beginning the relief effort was marred by the same misplaced
generosity that characterizes many disasters unwanted clothing and undis-
tributed food. But within three days of the disaster, large quantities of
building materials were delivered to the site to be given without charge to all
residents with damaged property. This led to an immediate spate of self-help
reconstruction and general neighborhood improvement. One section of the
explosion site was made into an instant park, ostensibly to commemorate the
victims but also to preserve the area as a buffer to separate residential areas
from land suitable for a future industrial site and to replace the scenes of the
disaster with greenery and games. A health facility was put in place and a
community center will follow, providing a minimal type of community
compensation. To provide housing to about 200 displaced families, part of a
newly completed housing development was acquired by the government,
and before the week was out the first homeless families received permanent
housing. Within another week 80 percent had been housed.
On Christmas Day five weeks later, the Mexican national oil corporation
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ROBERT ~ KITES
(PEMEX) denied liability but accepted responsibility for the disaster and
pledged to pay compensation of more than $10,000 per death victim. There
were no precedents for such payments, so the payment schedule was adapted
from the workmen's compensation code for the various classes of death and
injury. Less than three months after the disaster, almost all the victims or
their heirs were compensated.
Three months saw a community rebuilt, the homeless housed, and the
victims compensated. The speed of the settlement came at the price of an
authoritarian uniformity-all victims received the same housing. Some were
better off than before, others were surely worse off and removed from their
former community. Some nonvictims benefited from the free materials. An
occupational compensation scheme was adapted for public use that in litiga-
tion might have provided higher settlements. And the park was placed on the
destroyed living area and not on the industrial site as some residents
expected, thereby forcing the permanent removal of the homeless. But for
most victims and for the public at large, somejustice was done.
A final example of a behavioral fix needed for the next decade lies in the
development of third-generation ethics. The first generation of hazard man-
agement ethics was the ethics of nonmaleficence do no harm to person or
nature. These ethics were celebrated on Earth Day 1970, enshrined in regu-
lato~y law, and finally institutionalized in corporate codes of ethics indistin-
guishable from those of the Audubon Society all in the space of a decade.
The second generation of ethical issues attempted to weigh harms-to
consider both benefits and the value of lost benefits as well as risk. The
ethical underpinnings of this approach, an extension of cost-benefit analy-
sis, were dominated by principles of utility.
Third-generation issues concern equity, fairness, and distributive justice.
They are concerned not only with the overall balance of benefit and harm but
with their distribution to specific groups or individuals, with the fairness of
the process as well as the outcome. These issues are prominent in many
situations. Trying to avoid the exposure of women of reproductive age to
toxic chemicals poses complex questions of sex discrimination, invasion of
privacy, and protection of the unborn, as well as of establishing permissible
levels of exposure (Hunt, 19791. A pervasive and ethically unjustified dou-
ble standard in the protection of workers and the public exists almost every-
where. The standards of workers' exposure to toxic materials are 10 to 1,000
times greater then those applied to the general public (Derr et al., 1983) . The
Bhopal disaster illustrates still another double standard in safety perfor-
mance, that of industrialized and developing countries (Gladwin and Walter,
1985~. Hazardous waste disposal practices concentrate wastes gathered over
a large area in someone's backyard and pass on a legacy of care and risk to
future generations (Kasperson, 19834.
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MANAlGING TEClINOLOGIC~L [I~Z~RDS
217
All of these are third-generation problems requiring ethical analysis capa-
ble of illuminating policy choices in modern hazard management. Thus, it is
particularly troubling that the widely praised National Science Foundation
Program on Ethical Values in Science and Tetchnology (EVIST) may be
abolished or dismembered even though the work done under its aegis the
development of a competence for ethical analysis and technological
choice promises to combine rigor and compassion.
As we eschew the single fix, be it technological or behavioral, we should
also avoid the choice of a single ethic. It is possible to create a process that
addresses the different needs of groups at risk, leading not to a perfect
resolution of ethical dilemmas, but to a fairer distribution of the risks and
benefits of technology. Scientific and technological fixes can also help by
reducing the overall risk or by identifying and protecting groups that are at
greater risk.
SHIFTING ATTITUDES, INSTITUTIONS, AND
ACTIVITIES
Two centuries after the beginning of the industrial-scientific revolution in
the design, production, and use of technology, modern societies began the
comprehensive management of the technological hazards created in its
wake. Whether one dates the beginnings of this effort with the popular
outcry of Earth Day 1970, as I have, or from the early warning of Rachel
Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, or from the classic paper of Chauncey Starr
(1969) that started the professional development of comparative hazard
management, the movement is less than a quarter of a century old. The real
changes in the way society handles technological hazards are less than 15
years old. But so profound has been the shift in attitudes, institutions, and
activities that, in retrospect, these changes may well be viewed as no less
revolutionary than the technological revolution that preceded them.
Over the next 15 years the changes will be less profound, but the problems
may be no less important. I foresee four sets of concerns. The first I have
discussed extensively the limitations, strains, and contradictions of the
first 15 years of activity and the search for alternatives to ease or resolve
them.
Another set of concerns relates to the major changes under way in the
design, production, and use of technology. New products will bring new
hazards. Old products and processes in new locales will bring new hazard
problems. The rapid restructuring of world industrial production will reduce
the hazards in places that have learned to cope with them and move hazards
to places where the knowledge and resources for control are not available. At
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ROBERT ~ KITES
the same time the potential for closed-cycle production, inherently clean or
safe processes, and robotics will provide new opportunities for hazard
.
ret .uctlon.
The new institutions and activities developed over the last 15 years to cope
with hazards in our own country have proved inadequate so far to cope with
the newer regional- and global-scale problems exemplified by the biogeo-
chemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur-the basic
elements of life. Research over the last 15 years has led to quantitative
estimates of the degree of human modification of these natural cycles
(Holdgate et al., 1982, p. 6234. The annual release of carbon dioxide to the
atmosphere from the consumption of fossil fuels equals about 10 percent of
that being used by plants for photosynthesis. The formation of nitrogen
oxides and nitrate in the course of fuel combustion and fertilizer manufacture
equals about half of what the biosphere produces naturally. The amount of
sulfur oxides released to the atmosphere, primarily from fossil fuel burning,
exceeds the natural flux from decaying organic matter. These seem to be
large alterations in natural cycles, but their long-term implications and
synergistic interaction are uncertain. Over the next 15 years we will surely
learn more about these fundamental processes, but our science is likely to
exceed our social and political capacity to act upon such understanding.
Finally, there will be surprises surprises that in turn will generate new
concerns and activities. There will also be other concerns and surprises
unrelated to technological hazards: international tensions, social change,
and resource needs. As in the past, these will replace technological hazards
on center stage, but the work in the wings will continue. The fundamental
attitudinal and institutional changes of recent years have acquired a momen-
tum of their own. The effort to compensate the past, make safe the present,
and protect the future will continue.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In preparing this paper, I have drawn extensively on the collective
research and insight of the Clark University Center for Technology, Envi-
ronment, and Development Hazard Assessment Group and particularly
Christoph Hohenemser, Kirsten Johnson, Jeanne X. Kasperson, Roger E.
Kasperson, and Mary Melville. In addition, I have had the benefit of
thoughtful comments from Jesse Ausubel, Meredith Golden, and Howard
Kunreuther. A slightly different version of this paper appeared in Issues in
Science and Technology vol. 2, no. 1 (Fall 1985~:46-58.
OCR for page 219
MANAGING TECHNOLOGICAL HAZARDS
1.
2.
219
NOTES
The research supported by the Russell Sage Foundation consists of a series of case studies
of plant, corporation, or trade association hazard management.
Kirsten Johnson, "State and Community During the Aftermath of Mexico City's Novem-
ber 19, 1984 Gas Explosion" (Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Center for Technol-
ogy, Environment and Development, unpublished paper, June 1985). This report was
made possible by a quick-response grant from the University of Colorado Natural Hazards
Research and Applications Information Center with support from the National Science
Foundation. I am solely responsible for the inferences drawn from Kirsten Johnson's
findings.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
technological hazards
