Social rationality,risk,and the right to know: information leveraging with the Toxics Release Inventory

Abstract

Citizens endangered by toxic wastes and airborne pollutants have long been disadvantaged by a lack of information about the nature and extent of pollution, and their own limited ability to interpret what technical risk data was available. As a grassroots movement demanding the `right to know' about toxic emissions in their neighbourhoods emerged in the USA, federal legislation and the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) compelled certain facilities to document their yearly emissions of various chemicals, and made this information available to the general public through an online database. Publication of this relatively `raw' data successfully pressured industry to reduce emissions, but also raised predictable questions about the ability of `non-expert' public interest groups to interpret the data, even though in many cases industry itself was remarkably under-informed. This paper draws on Beck's notion of the `risk society' in exploring the tension that arises between narrow scientific rationality and more flexible `social' rationality in approaches to risk reduction, as information technologies open up public access to technical data. The TRI shows the potential for public information to upset traditional power relationships predicated on techno-scientific expertise and sustained by industrial privacy. A somewhat simplistic `rhetoric of numbers' (used by both sides) was at first fostered by the simple quantitative nature of the data, but concern about non-expert, `unscientific' use of such data is found to be premature, as skilled activists linked by computer networks become adept at interpreting the information while using it to point to critical yet untested assumptions underlying scientific risk assessment. Diversified usage and multiple, contested perspectives on the data upgrade its quality and can enhance the overall rationality of the industrial/social system in which risks are generated.