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"Pollution -- Case studies"
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Heavy Metal Contamination of Water and Soil
This title includes a number of Open Access chapters.Although adverse health effects of heavy metals have been known for a long time, exposure to heavy metals continues and is even increasing in some areas. Remediating heavy metal contaminated soils and water is necessary to reduce the associated health and ecological risks, make the land resource available for agricultural production, enhance food security, and scale down land tenure problems. This book discusses the causes and the environmental impact of heavy metal contamination. It then explores many exciting new methods of analysis and decontamination currently studied and applied in the field today.
eBook
Is a little pollution good for you? : incorporating societal values in environmental research
Could low-level exposure to polluting chemicals be analogous to exercise -- a beneficial source of stress that strengthens the body? Some scientists studying the phenomenon of hormesis (beneficial or stimulatory effects caused by low-dose exposure to toxic substances) claim that that this may be the case. Is A Little Pollution Good For You? critically examines the current evidence for hormesis. In the process, it highlights the range of methodological and interpretive judgments involved in environmental research: choices about what questions to ask and how to study them, decisions about how to categorize and describe new information, judgments about how to interpret and evaluate ambiguous evidence, and questions about how to formulate public policy in response to debated scientific findings. The book also uncovers the ways that interest groups with deep pockets attempt to influence these scientific judgments for their benefit. Several chapters suggest ways to counter these influences and incorporate a broader array of societal values in environmental research: (1) moving beyond conflict-of-interest policies to develop new ways of safeguarding academic research from potential biases; (2) creating deliberative forums in which multiple stakeholders can discuss the judgments involved in policy-relevant research; and (3) developing ethical guidelines that can assist scientific experts in disseminating debated and controversial phenomena to the public. Kevin C. Elliott illustrates these strategies in the hormesis case, as well as in two additional case studies involving contemporary environmental research: endocrine disruption and multiple chemical sensitivity. This book should be of interest to a wide variety of readers, including scientists, philosophers, policy makers, environmental ethicists and activists, research ethicists, industry leaders, and concerned citizens.
eBook
The Uses of Ecology
\" W. T. Edmondson has spent his career answering questions about the ecological impacts of human experiments on lakes in Washington State. In this volume, he recounts these studies and captures from his experiences a larger view of the nature of our environmental problems. . . . While the commentary is wide ranging, the foundation is a personal account of one ecologist's lifetime experience on the dual points of research and public application of that research.\"-Research and Exploration\"W. T. Edmondson, a zoologist, extracts enduring lessons from his more than 50 years of experience in persuading political powers to make use of scientific knowledge when they set about drawing up laws for managing human interventions in the environment. Any scientist who follows in Edmondson's footsteps should benefit from reading this sensitive recounting of political battles.\"-Garrett Hardin, Pacific Northwest Quarterly
eBook
Sacrifice Zones
Across the United States, thousands of people, most of them in low-income or minority communities, live next to heavily polluting industrial sites. Many of them reach a point at which they say \"Enough is enough.\" After living for years with poisoned air and water, contaminated soil, and pollution-related health problems, they start to take action--organizing, speaking up, documenting the effects of pollution on their neighborhoods. In Sacrifice Zones, Steve Lerner tells the stories of twelve communities, from Brooklyn to Pensacola, that rose up to fight the industries and military bases causing disproportionately high levels of chemical pollution. He calls these low-income neighborhoods \"sacrifice zones.\" And he argues that residents of these sacrifice zones, tainted with chemical pollutants, need additional regulatory protections. Sacrifice Zones goes beyond the disheartening statistics and gives us the voices of the residents themselves, offering compelling portraits of accidental activists who have become grassroots leaders in the struggle for environmental justice and details the successful tactics they have used on the fenceline with heavy industry.
eBook
Voluntary environmental agreements : process, practice and future use
Voluntary environmental agreements (VEAs) have been regarded as a key new instrument for meeting environmental objectives in a flexible manner. The aim of this book is to highlight and learn the lessons from existing experience.
eBook
Sensitivity analysis of the relationship between disease occurrence and distance from a putative source of pollution
The relation between disease risk and a point source of pollution is usually investigated using distance from the source as a proxy of exposure. The analysis may be based on case-control data or on aggregated data. The definition of the function relating risk of disease and distance is critical, both in a classical and in a Bayesian framework, because the likelihood is usually very flat, even with large amounts of data. In this paper we investigate how the specification of the function relating risk of disease with distance from the source and of the prior distributions on the parameters of the function affects the results when case-control data and Bayesian methods are used. We consider different popular parametric models for the risk distance function in a Bayesian approach, comparing estimates with those derived by maximum likelihood. As an example we have analyzed the relationship between a putative source of environmental pollution (an asbestos cement plant) and the occurrence of pleural malignant mesothelioma in the area of Casale Monferrato (Italy) in 1987-1993. Risk of pleural malignant mesothelioma turns out to be strongly related to distance from the asbestos cement plant. However, as the models appeared to be sensitive to modeling choices, we suggest that any analysis of disease risk around a putative source should be integrated with a careful sensitivity analysis and possibly with prior knowledge. The choice of prior distribution is extremely important and should be based on epidemiological considerations.
Journal Article