Word: risk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this the same California that has been sensitive to the risks from every kind of environmental threat? Three years ago, the state's voters approved Proposition 65, a law that mandates warning labels on any substance found to carry a 1-in-100,000 lifetime risk of causing cancer. As a result, cautionary notices now appear on gasoline pumps, in hardware and grocery stores and on the walls of Napa Valley wineries...
...fact, Californians are no different from other Americans when it comes to risk. The national temperament seems to have a fault line all its own. On one side of that psychic divide, Americans shrug off demonstrable threats: they build houses on eroding beaches, speed without wearing seat belts, go hang gliding and expose themselves to the cancer-causing rays of the sun. On the other side, they suffer a bad case of the jitters about the smallest threat to personal well-being. They flee from apples that might bear a trace of Alar and fret about radon, nuclear power...
...Scott Fitzgerald once suggested that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time." If so, America has developed a perverse sort of genius. Yet both national moods -- the urge to deny risk and the urge to insist that we can protect ourselves from it entirely -- may be traceable to the same unfailing optimism. In a culture that has long fancied itself a New World paradise, disasters seem impossible either to imagine or to tolerate. People expect to conduct the pursuit of happiness along a road that...
...they swing between imperturbability and panic, Americans leave many experts wondering how to get society to gauge an acceptable risk. Almost a decade of dwindling public confidence in the Environmental Protection Agency, which was treated like an unwanted appendage by the Reagan Administration, has led to a proportionate rise in the attention given to claims made by private consumer and environmental organizations that focus on food safety and risks to health. Dan Howell, the director of the Americans for Safe Food project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says that groups like his are flourishing. "Our membership...
...Berkeley, points out that naturally occurring carcinogens in many foods -- cabbage, broccoli and oranges -- are much more potent than traces of man-made pesticides. "Most of us are more secure with respect to basic survival than we were a generation ago," says Ann Fisher, manager of the EPA's Risk Communication Program. "We're now in a position where we look with fear at what might once have been thought of as less serious dangers...