Risk Avoidance, Cultural Discrimination, and Environmental Justice for Indigenous Peoples
Author:
Catherine A. O’Neill
Date Published:
2003
Description:
There appears to be increasing tolerance among environmental decision makers and commentators for risk avoidance--strategies that call upon risk-bearers to alter their practices so as to avoid the harms of environmental risks--in lieu of risk reduction--strategies that look to risk-producers to prevent or eliminate contamination in order to reduce these harms. Under risk avoidance approaches, risk-bearers might be forced to move from their homes or homelands to avoid exposure to soils or waters contaminated with lead or polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs); they might be admonished to refrain from certain pursuits or ways of *3 living, such as fishing in and consuming fish from lakes and rivers contaminated with mercury; or they
might be called upon to take certain medications to counter the severe respiratory distress they experience during acute exposure to sulfur dioxide. Part I of this Article defines risk avoidance strategies and distinguishes them from risk reduction strategies. It then presents examples of the increasing regulatory reliance on risk avoidance. It next addresses potential confusion between risk avoidance strategies and informational or educational strategies. Finally, it notes several respects in which a regulatory approach that relies on risk avoidance might be perilous as a general matter. Having registered this general concern, the balance of the Article addresses the implications of this reliance for environmental justice.
Part II explores injustice in contemplating risk avoidance. It first observes that we are not all equally likely to be required to undertake risk avoidance measures and marks the distributive implications of this point. It next observes that we are not all likely to value similarly the practices that, because of environmental contamination, have come to entail risk, nor to perceive similarly the ease or anguish with which we might undertake various risk avoidance measures. By way of example, it considers the likely differences between the dominant society’s and various indigenous peoples’ understandings of the importance or necessity of basketweaving and fishing. Finally, this Part argues that, as agencies and other decision makers have contemplated various risk avoidance measures, they have for the most part either failed to inquire *4 who is likely to be burdened and what those burdened consider to be at stake, or failed to register this information and acknowledge its implications for environmental justice. It explores this claim in the context of agencies’ reliance on fish consumption advisories and the effects of this reliance on the various fishing peoples of the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere.
Finally, Part III identifies several elements of a proposed inquiry that attempts to ensure that risk avoidance strategies are not evaluated and employed at the expense of indigenous cultures. It briefly sketches these elements, invoking a conception of environmental justice that acknowledges the need to redress cultural discrimination, particularly in the case of indigenous peoples.
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