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MANAGING TECHNOLOGICAL HAZARDS: SUCCESS, STRAIN, AND SURPRISE 206 original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. Managing Technological Hazards: Success, Strain, and Surprise Robert W. Kates 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 injure us. Fifteen years after Earth Day 1970, much progress has been made in the United States in controlling air and water 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 pollutants (Ruckelshaus, 1985). We are less concerned with the acute consequences of a hazardous technology such as the automobile (which are measured 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 commonplace 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
