Environmental worry

Another study has examined whether environmental worry, rather than a direct toxicological effect, was the most likely cause of reports of excess symptoms around landfills.37 This study compared the health of a community after interim clean-up measures of the landfill were introduced with past results on the health of the same community. It concluded that while the exposed population continued to experience and/or report significantly more symptoms than a comparison area, symptom reporting was clearly associated with perceived environmental risk rather than a causal mechanism between exposure and symptoms. 

Of course, I am concerned [about the environmental impact of the treatments]. But I have had a discussion with the head of our fertilizing company and he pretty much assured me that the amounts and the way we are doing it, plus the professional manner in which they do it, that I am not worried. We are not overdoing it. 

Historians sometimes point to Earth Day 1970 as the beginning of the modern environmental movement. And in some important ways, they are correct. But many people were worried about the dangers posed by polluted air decades before that event. One such individual was the French-born American chemist Eugene Houdry. Houdry spent much of his professional career studying the nature of catalysis, the process by which the rate of a chemical reaction is changed by the addition of a nonreactive substance. 

In comparison with most other industrialized nations, Sweden has relatively few serious environmental problems, but I believe, as do many others,9 that the level of risk acceptance is particularly low in large sectors of the Swedish population. Indeed, many pampered Swedish citizens, who have not experienced major natural disasters or war since Napoleonic times, appear to carry around their own personal worry box described by the American humorist Patrick F. McManus It s as though a person has a little psychic box that he feels compelled to keep filled with worries. When one worry disappears from the box, he immediately replaces it with another worry, so the box is always full. He is never short of worries. 10... 

This disastrous consequence comes about because intellectuals in less developed countries (LDCs), far from treating the preoccupations of the residents of economically developed countries as affectations of the very rich, adopt these same worries. Craven and Stewart provide an instructive analysis of risk issues in France and the francophone African state of Burkina Faso.1 The medical, environmental, geographical, and political problems of Burkina Faso are radically different from those in France, but intellectuals in Burkina Faso and college students in France responded similarly to questions about risk. In fact, intellectuals in Burkina Faso had borrowed concerns relevant only to France, and their opinions were reflected in the national media. Thus,... 

Most of us don t have to worry about crumbling communist relics, but we may have to deal with other forms of environmental asbestos contamination, in our workplaces, our homes, and our schools. What s the real risk, and how much worrying should we do The matter certainly warrants some thought, and in some cases action, but it does not warrant panic. Let s see why. 

For centuries, people have observed the transport and transformations of chemicals in the environment without really thinking in terms of "environmental chemistry". The odor of flowers (or of stockyards), the Fall coloration of maple leaves, and the bleaching of fabrics were all taken for granted. Even into the Age of Chemistry, no one really worried much about where the smoke went or why the water tasted funny. That has changed. 

Banat, K. M., Howari, F. M., and Al-Hamad, A. A. (2005). Heavy metals in urban soils of central Jordan Should we worry about their environmental risks Environ. Res. 97, 258—273. 

In spite of continuing worries about the dangers of pesticides, we still depend heavily on them. The Environmental Protection Agency reports (EPA) that around 500,000 metric tons of pesticides are used in the United States every year. We rely on them for disease control, agricultural production, preservation of buildings and materials, elimination of biting and troublesome organ-... 

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