Our Hazardous Environment

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Abstract
With this issue Environment begins a series of articles on hazards and hazard management. The hazards of technology are nothing new to readers of this magazine. Discussions of the risks from energy production, pesticides, nuclear weapons, and transportation have formed a steady diet over the years. What is new in this series is the integration of risk assessments with a coherent discussion of hazard management. This is highly appropriate since in the last fifteen years the industrialized countries have developed an immense and growing hazard management bureaucracy. Also new in the present series is the inclusion of hazards arising from nature. These, though no major threat in the United States, are a major burden to developing countries. Risk assessment and hazard management inevitably involve a combination of scientific understanding and social judgment as to which risks to accept, which to reduce (and by how much), and when to forego or limit the use of a technology or natural location, in practice, we marshal our science and make our judgments one at a time, addressing a specific hazard or class of hazards, in this series of articles, we address the entire range of hazards, and focus sharply on the technological ones that confound our industrialized society. To offer needed perspective, we begin with an interim report on our current best estimates of the scope of the technological hazard burden in the United States. In a companion article we review some of the problems that currently confound hazard management. Later in the series we will return to most of these problems in the context of specific case studies, both of natural and technological hazards. Much of the work to be discussed has been or is being done at Clark University, by the Hazard Assessment Group or by individuals and organizations associated with it.

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