Environmental Decision-making: Risk and Harm at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant

• In Event: Ethics in Practice: New Research on Prosecution, Environmental Decision-Making, and Cultural Preservation

Abstract

Environmental regulations in the United States are decided by the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) acceptable risk range. When regulators use measurements of risk and decide what is and is not an “acceptable risk,” environmental regulations are not made with the consideration of harms to communities beyond high mortality rates. These harms are obfuscated by the focus on risk management in environmental regulations. I present a study on the Radford Army Ammunition Plant (RAAP), its environmental regulators –the EPA and Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ)-- as well as community members living near RAAP. Specifically, I will examine the regulations for the “open burning” of hazardous waste at RAAP in tandem with an ethnographic content analysis (ECA) of a documentary on RAAP’s community impact called Fallout. By studying RAAP and its stakeholders, I can contextualize how risk-based environmental decision-making has social and harmful implications. I will analyze environmental regulations via RAAP through the lenses of environmental justice, risk studies, environmental sociology, and green cultural criminology. Key suggestions include applying qualitative, interdisciplinary harm research to inform regulations, applying harm reduction, and increasing community influence on decision-making. By highlighting harm over risk, we may focus on victims rather than reinforce power structures.

Author

• Shaylee Hodge, University of Tennessee