Interview by Ella Haley

Trained as a political scientist, Sylvia Tesh is presently a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Political Science and in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University.

Her latest book Uncertain Hazards: Environmental Activists and Scientific Proof builds upon earlier research into scientific debates about the toxicity of Agent Orange in Hidden Arguments: Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy. Tesh makes the case that the scientists conducting scientific research are influenced by values that orient the framing of research questions and analysis of data.

Uncertain Hazards became a finalist for the C.Wright Mills Award for 2000 as a book that critically addressed an issue of contemporary public importance, brought to the topic a fresh, imaginative perspective, advanced social scientific understanding of the topic, displayed a theoretically informed view and empirical orientation, evinced quality in style of writing, and explicitly or implicitly contained implications for courses of action.

In Uncertain Hazards, Tesh reviews cases of contaminated communities where it was difficult for researchers to document the health effects of pollutants, in part because environmental scientists and science were influenced by “pre-environmentalist” assumptions. Nevertheless, Tesh finds that the grassroots movement and the ideas of environmentalists have begun to alter the practice of scientists and their understanding of exposure to industrial pollutants and the health problems faced by communities and individuals. She finds the role of the citizen activist key to exposing the cultural and moral dimensions of scientific disputes about pollution.


"Political Science": Uncertainty and "Caution"

Aurora: Sylvia, you write about caution in your first book - two types of caution: protecting people (now called the precautionary principle) versus protecting products. Could you elaborate on that?

Tesh: It's about being very careful when you have uncertain science. Everybody agrees you must be very careful and this is not contested, but it took a while for people who were engaged in this dialogue, to realize that they meant quite different things. Some people mean, “Be very, very cautious and don't do anything that going to upset the industrial productive process” Other people mean “Be very, very careful to protect health”. This dialogue has been going on for some time, though, and people are fairly sophisticated about it. They no longer jump to the conclusion that they are all talking about the same kind of precaution. The precautionary principle became popularized in 1992, during the Earth Summit in Rio. It was one of the principles that came out of it.

Aurora: Let's examine a specific issue with respect to the application of the precautionary principle. European and North American policy makers take a very different approach to the use of growth hormone in beef cattle. Canada and the US have successfully launched a complaint to the World Trade Organization to force the European Union to allow hormone treated beef on their markets. The European Union's directive is based upon more rigorous standards, which reflect the precautionary principle. The North American policy is based on the less rigorous industry- based Codex standard, which minimizes the risk of consuming hormone treated beef. So, we're struggling with this debate over caution even now as we look at trade policies related to the marketing of meat with growth hormone residues in it. Trade standards are being invoked to prevent governments from trying to enact the precautionary principle.

Tesh: Well, the example that you provide illustrates that it's a fairly hollow claim that we are basing policies on clear science, rather than partly on politics. The science depends on what kind of evidence you use. Everybody says “We don't want to have a politically based policy, we want to have a scientifically-based policy.” But this doesn't take into consideration, as you point out, the different criteria that scientists use to say that something is safe and that something is not safe.

The Growing Global Environmental Movement

Aurora: You write about environmental movements. Where do the environmental protests at Seattle and Quebec City fit in?

Tesh: This definitely is a global movement. It's been a global movement almost from the beginning. Every country in the world has an environmental movement of some sort. Environmental ideas are becoming common sense and taken for granted, in all countries of the world. Policy related to environmental issues will be contentious, but the idea that nature is endangered and something needs to be done to save it, or to preserve it, or to conserve it is now widely accepted.

This global movement took a great leap forward with the Seattle protest at the end of 1999. The way it has spread around the world is an enormously exciting and positive step. I wish there were more reports about this in the media. What is so exciting about this worldwide movement now is that it is about much more than the environment. It's also about the struggle for democracy and for less centrally controlled decision-making. So it has a tremendous potential for a long, long time.

Aurora: You sound very optimistic. I'm more pessimistic when I see Canadian policy makers being thwarted from making environmentally sound policies. Here in Canada under the Free Trade Agreement with the US, even though it is widely acknowledged that MMT, the gasoline additive is a neurotoxin; our government cannot block its use. In fact Canada had to pay a fine for temporarily imposing a ban on MMT. In another trade dispute, Canada has been forced to allow the import of PCBs, a banned substance, into the country. Many Canadians are frustrated because they don't see our trade policies reflecting common scientific knowledge on the toxicity of a substance. Another problem with these trade agreements is that any disputes are negotiated in private, in secret.

Tesh: Well, this is the point of the movement. Decisions should be decided democratically. These decisions should be made in public so there will be some accountability, and of course, so the public can have some say. One of the problems, though, is that the public is not homogeneous and people in “the public” have a variety of ideas. So, opening it up to democracy doesn't mean that suddenly all our problems are solved.

Grassroots Organizing Against Exposure to Industrial Pollutants

Aurora: Could you tell us about your latest book, Uncertain Hazards: Environmental Activists and Scientific Proof?

Tesh: It's about grassroots organizing against toxins in the US. I start with the dilemma where you have a group of people who are organized against exposure to industrial pollutants on the basis that their health is affected, but where there is little scientific evidence to back up that claim. This is an extraordinarily difficult problem. Should policy-makers go with the scientists who didn't find any health problems? Or, do you say, “Well, the scientists must be all bought by industry and they must be wrong. We are not going to believe the science; we are just going to go with the people who live there. After all, they know what their health problems are”.

Aurora: This ties in with your discussion in your first book Hidden Arguments about the discrepancy in the scientific arguments used by the US government and Vietnam veterans about the health effects of Agent Orange.

Tesh: Yes, the clearest precursor to my second book is that chapter on Agent Orange. I became very interested in the scientific conflicts among scientists regarding the effects of possible exposures to toxins.

After that there was the Gulf War Syndrome, which was somewhat the same kind of claim. The soldiers came back with serious health problems and it was very difficult to be able to connect exposure in the Gulf War with a particular disease.

Aurora: Could you tell me about your latest research?

Tesh: I got a Fullbright to Brazil in 1999 for a year, with the idea of looking at grassroots organizing around industrial toxins in Brazilian cities. I learned shortly after I got there that there is almost no grassroots organizing specifically around toxics -- that Brazil does not have what we call an environmental justice movement, although there is a very large environmental movement.

So my next question was, why doesn't Brazil have much of this kind of local-level anti-toxics mobilization, and then I realized that a prior question was what do Brazilians think are environmental problems. I was living in Salvador which is a city on the coast, in the northeast of Brazil, of about 2 and a half million people. I did a public opinion survey of middle class and poor people to try and find out they think are the major environmental problems in Brazil, and what they think the environmental problems are in the city of Salvador, and also what they think the major environmental problems are in their own neighbourhoods. I got some very interesting answers to this and I've been working with what this means for the future of the environmental movement.

Aurora: In Uncertain Hazards, you suggest that that lay people are often treated as if they are not scientifically informed. With environmental organizing in Brazil, did you find this lay-expert dichotomy?

Tesh: In my book, I was really addressing the literature on risk communication. It's a literature that is more pertinent to what happens in the US. than in Brazil, because the United States has requirements that before new regulations can be written you have to have citizen input. There are also a lot of informal processes where people can have a say in public policy - for example, in whether or not to put in a nuclear power plant.

When people started participating in environmental policies they would often become extremely upset and emotional. Because of that response researchers began to do some studies on risk perception. They found that “experts” have one way of looking at risk, and the ordinary people have another way of looking at risk. But instead of concluding that ordinary people look at risk the wrong way, the scholars asked, “Why do people feel the way they do?” They came up with a theory that people are looking at different kinds of things than the scientists.

What we really want to know is how groups feel about risk because they are the ones trying to influence public policy. As individuals, citizens don't have very many effective avenues to affect public policy. We have to form groups.

The Environmental Movement as Educator

Aurora: You conclude that the environmental movement almost has to re-educate the public….

Tesh: Yes, that's what they do. They try very hard to introduce new values, a new sense of ethics, a new sense of what's right and wrong, good and bad. In fact that is their task.

Aurora: You discuss lay people and their understanding of living within a contaminated community - their experiential knowledge. You argue that people who work within the environmental movement have to help these people to make sense of these experiences. You talk about people playing different roles. Could you elaborate on that?

Tesh: People say that they know that this toxic waste site endangers their health know because they're there, they see it. They see the sick people, they see the polluted air, and if scientists can't see the connection it, well, that's science's problem. I argue that this is not intuitive or experiential knowledge. This is knowledge shaped by the culture that people live in. In this case, you can see that their knowledge, their intuitive understanding, their clarity of mind about the effects on their health from exposure, comes from the perception of the world that the environmental movement has been propagating for the past 30 years.

This kind of experiential knowledge didn't happen before the environmental movement. For example, with DDT, trucks would spray up and down the street. People didn't like the smell very much, but they didn't have some intuitive understanding that the smell caused diseases.

Social Movements as “Injustice” Frames

Aurora: You state “all social movement frames are injustice frames”. Yet, can't there be social movements that are not about injustice?

Tesh: I choose to define social movements as those kinds of mobilizations that are based on injustice claims – on the belief that some principle of justice has been violated. The environmental movement did not happen until environmentalists had developed ethical principles about people's relationships to nature. Then there was a reason to say, “This is not right.” Earlier, you could talk about conservation and taking good care of national forests, but there wasn't a strong moral claim that went with it.

Public interest groups differ from social movements in that they just want to change some sort of policy, but they're not based on outrage that social justice has been violated.

Urban Environmentalism: The “Green” Versus “Brown” Agenda

Aurora: You've just finished in Brazil. Where would you like to go from here with your research? You seem to be following social movements.

Tesh: Yes, I'm particularly interested in urban environmentalism, particularly the brown agenda. A colleague and I are talking with about doing a three-city comparison of urban environmentalism around the world.

Aurora: Athabasca (Alberta), the home of Aurora, is a tiny community here, but we have quite a progressive council and they're trying to bring in a green agenda. Even on this campus, we're trying to do that. Could you just elaborate for the readers what you mean by a “green” versus “brown” agenda”?

Tesh: The green agenda is a World Bank term for problems that are concerned with natural resources, with rivers, with cutting down trees, with disappearing species, anything that happens out in the countryside.

The brown agenda has to do with industrialization, and industrial pollutants. It isn't very much of a hard and fast dichotomy because you can have industrial pollutants that are going to get into the rivers and affect the wildlife.

There are really two different kinds of foci within the environmental movement. There are people who are more interested in trying to preserve nature, and others who are trying to prevent pollution. When you think about organizations, usually community based groups are doing one or the other. They're either interested in preserving nature or in preventing pollution.

The larger national and international, like World Wildlife Fund, often take on both kinds of issues. But the green agenda is more popular.

Aurora: Is the green agenda more popular than the brown agenda because it's less stressful in a sense? You're working for a feel-good objective.

Tesh: The people who are working on the brown agenda are more likely to be working on issues that they themselves are living with everyday, and the people who are working on the green agenda are more likely to be working on issues that happen far away. They live in New York, but they're worried about deforestation in the Amazon. They live in Montreal, but they're interested in whaling in the Pacific. It isn't something that hits them in the face everyday.

The people who are more affected by industrial pollution are more likely to be poor people, they're more likely to be people of colour. And so, they're the ones that are more likely to be outraged, but there are certainly middle-class people and white people who are interested in the brown agenda.

Books by Sylvia Tesh

Hidden Arguments: Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Uncertain Hazards: Environmental Activists and Scientific Proof. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Ella Haley is Assistant Professor, Centre for Global and Social Analysis at Athabasca University



Related Links

See Tesh's article “Causal Debates in Environmentalism,” in RACHEL's Environment and Health Weekly #437.

Update

Gulf War veterans have long argued that their members are afflicted by unexplained illnesses collectively dubbed "Gulf War Syndrome.” On December 10, 2001, after years of denying any link between illness and service in the Persian Gulf War, military officials admitted that veterans of the conflict are nearly twice as likely as other soldiers to suffer the fatal neurological illness known as Lou Gehrig's disease. (Edmonton Journal, December 11, 2001.)

The film, Thanks of a Grateful Nation discloses the US government's cover-up of troop exposure to chemical weapons during the Persian Gulf War. Despite veterans' complaints of illness and unexplained deaths, the US government denies any connection between the Gulf War and any illness.


Citation Format

Haley, Ella (July 2001). Aurora Online With Sylvia Nobel Tesh. Aurora Online