Cal/EPA’s Newest Hazard: Risks to Peace of Mind

After a 2 1/2-year study involving hundreds of people around the state, California has come up with a new and controversial method of evaluating environmental risk that downplays the traditional role of science and takes into account people’s values, opinions, fears and anxieties.

Intended to guide decision-making by the state’s Environmental Protection Agency, the new approach to risk assessment already is provoking an outcry in the business community. Critics argue that such broad, subjective criteria will create new layers of regulation and endless obstacles to development.

“It’s the most comprehensive, ambitious of its kind ever undertaken,” said James Strock, state EPA secretary.

Although similar efforts in other states have tended to prioritize risks on the basis of their effects on healthy adults, the California Comparative Risk Project would attach a higher priority to environmental problems that have a disproportionate effect on children or minority populations, or if they are seen as disrupting the social welfare of a community or even its peace of mind.

Peace of mind pollution? Yes, indeed. The 640-page report, expected to be released this month, defines peace of mind as: “Good mental health, trust of governing institutions, access to reliable information, personal security and healthy personal relationships.”

The report, obtained by The Times in advance of its release, takes its most subjective turn in a chapter that says an environmental problem can threaten people’s social welfare if it mars a view of a pleasing landscape or damages a child’s “view of their world as a safe and nurturing place.”

The project is based on the premise that science-based risk assessment is too uncertain given its heavy reliance on animal test results that may not apply to humans. While government regulators wait for the definitive studies on the dangers of agricultural pesticides or industrial emissions, pollution can run rampant, goes the thinking behind the project.

“This is the first major project of its kind in the country that basically owned up to the fact that totally relying on experts and technical data is too narrow an approach,” said John Moore, a Washington risk-assessment consultant who spent 20 years at the National Institutes of Health and the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Moore was a member of the project’s advisory committee.

According to the report, “Risk is the likelihood of harmful effects, including human disease or death, damage to ecosystems, property losses and anxiety about the future.”

“The study tells us to look at ‘hot spots,’ ” said Charles Shulock, the state EPA’s chief deputy director of environmental health hazard assessment.

“It tells us to look at farm worker communities exposed to high levels of pesticides, children who are more vulnerable to respiratory diseases, or subsistence fishermen who may ingest dangerously high levels of mercury because they eat more fish.”

The project divides environmental risks into three categories: human health, ecosystem health and social welfare.

The most serious hazards to human health include secondhand tobacco smoke, radon, ozone and an assortment of chemical contaminants, such as mercury and arsenic, found in fish and drinking water.

Cited among the highest risks to ecological health are greenhouse gases released from the burning of fossil fuels, clear-cutting of forests and diversion of water from rivers and estuaries, particularly in the San Francisco Bay delta system.

The social welfare category repeated several types of risks listed elsewhere and added pesticides, lead and particulate matter.

A collaboration of people representing government, business, environmental organizations, academia and community groups, the study has been a hot potato from the outset, with business critics frequently challenging the methodology.

A recent imbroglio has delayed the public release of the report, which had been scheduled for release Tuesday.

Last week, Michael DiBartolomeis Jr., an EPA toxicologist who coordinated the work of citizen volunteers and government technocrats, suddenly quit the project, citing interference by Strock.

DiBartolomeis objected to Strock’s decision to interrupt the printing of the study in order to append Strock’s views of the project, some of them critical. DiBartolomeis says that the cost of the study, about $350,000, will go up another $20,000 as a result.

Strock’s action aroused suspicions among some of those who participated that he was succumbing to pressure from business interests.

But Strock said he is only trying to explain how the study would be used. “This is in no way an attempt to undermine the independence of the report,” he said, noting that he was making no changes in the body of the study or its conclusions.

Strock said his memo does take issue with some of the project’s conclusions, but he said his disagreements do not lessen the value of the project, which he said would play a prominent role in setting future agency priorities.

He also denied that his memo, which he has not released, is in response to a lengthy critique of the project by an industry lobbying group, the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance.

Regarding the project as a recipe for runaway regulation of industry, the Council for Economic Balance said the work is rife with political rhetoric, its science of dubious value and its assertion that poor people and minority groups are at higher risk is never substantiated.

The project report admits that statewide data for minority “hot spots” do not exist and that “monitoring data to describe actual human exposures to most pollutants are also not available.”

Nevertheless, in a supplementary section on environmental education, the report says: “The fact that poor people and people of color tend to live in areas that are more heavily polluted should be addressed in the classroom.”

The state’s business community wasn’t alone in expressing skepticism about some aspects of the report. Even as it was being formulated, the part dealing with “peace of mind” invited comparison with the much-lampooned task force on self-esteem created four years ago by state Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara).

Even environmentalists who worked on the study worry that some of the more subjective aspects of it will detract from its overall value.

“There are some squishy areas that can make you a bit queasy. No doubt about that,” said Lawrie Mott, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council and a member of the advisory committee that reviewed the study.

Still, Mott defended the effort to consider social welfare as part of the risk assessment project.

“The project was trying to find a way to integrate value judgments into risk assessment. It was another way of telling the regulatory agencies that there are other factors to consider besides statistics.”

Mott and others emphasized the importance of moving beyond cancer studies as the only true measure of risk assessment.

“From the beginning, all of us said there is so much uncertainty about the (cancer) data, and it leaves out so much about other health hazards,” said Carol Henry, who was the ranking EPA official assigned to the project until moving to the federal Department of Energy last March.

“In past studies, a whole range of non-cancer problems haven’t been factored into risk assessment, “ Henry said. “Reproductive, neurological, respiratory and other effects that may not have death as an end point. We show them to be a major concern in this study.”