Why the perception of risk is is so important to how you look at environmental health and safety issues?

Answer 1

Most people evaluate risk on a nonscientific basis. Most risks are dealt with on the most efficient basis if addressed with a combination of a scientific basis of ranking threats from greatest to least adjusted with most easily addressed to most difficult to attain.

However people generally evaluate risk against internal criteria such as:

• familiarity (they are more afraid of the unfamiliar)
• control (if they think they are in charge whether true or false they are more comfortable)
• herd instinct (if everyone else seems to care, they care too)
• self censoring (if it is too scary they want to ignore it)
• can't be seen (if its to small or too far in the future it isn't there)
• too difficult to comprehend (if it is too complex they either over react or ignore the issue)

As a consequence environmental issues are often ignored because they require a lot of knowledge to understand (climate change, are hyped by pundits and fear mongers (nuclear power), too scary (extermination of marine life) etc.