I recently read through the most recent 24 issues of Environmental Health Perspectives—the National Institutes of Health journal of, among other issues, scientific research into how environmental contaminants impact animal and human health. It is a catalog of horrors from a public health perspective. Fish and frogs with their sex scrambled; deformed frogs with altered hormone levels in their blood; a nearly threefold increase in birth defects among Minnesota farm children exposed to pesticides; 2,4-D exposure reducing hormone levels in men; (...) insignificant levels of four environmental chemicals adding up to a significant dose; a third study reconfirming a 50% sperm decline in U.S. men, 1934–1996; phthalates elevated in the blood of Puerto Rican girls developing breasts before they are 8; some 6,000 chemicals declared candidates for study as hormone disrupters ; children living near incinerators having delayed sexual development; hypospadias linked to organochlorine levels in the blood of mink, otter, and polar bears; and “No living organism may be considered DDT-free.” Nothing definitive, but it all suggests that things are tending in a direction that is perfectly awful. (shrink)

Solving complex socio-technical problems, this paper claims, involves diverse knowledges (cognitive diversity), competing interests (social diversity), and pragmatism. To explain this view, this paper first explores two different cases: Canadian pulp and paper mill pollution and siting nuclear reactors in seismically sensitive areas of California. Solving such socio-technically complex problems involves cognitive diversity as well as social diversity and pragmatism. Cognitive diversity requires one to not only recognize relevant knowledges but also to assess their validity. Finally, it is suggested, integrating (...) the resultant set of diverse relevant and valid knowledges determines the parameters of the solution space for the problem. (shrink)