Ecological Risk Assessment
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Ecological Risk Assessment1
Robert T. Lackey1
Environmental Research Laboratory
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
200 SW 35th Street
Corvallis, Oregon 97333
The Issue
A short time ago, the President, Vice President, six cabinet secretaries,
the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, four governors,
and a cast of thousands met for a full day to resolve an ecological issue
that has created gridlock in the Pacific Northwest. Ecological issues --
and ecological risk assessment ~ have moved from the fringes of science
and policy to center stage. Some observers even propose that formal risk
assessment be the core organizing principle for all ecological
management and protection.
Papers on "risk assessment" are now found in many ecological
1 Adapted from a presentation given at a symposium "Cntical Issues in Risk Assessment and
Management," Tulane University, New Orleans. Apnl 13-14, 1993 This manuscript has been submitted to
Fisheries, Bulletin of the American Fisheries Society, for possible publication This paper has been subjected to
scientific peer review, but does necessanly reflect policy positions of the Environmental Protection Agency.
2Dr Lackey is Deputy Director of EPA's Environmental Research Laboratory, located in Corvallis,
Oregon The Laboratory conducts a national and international research program on a variety of ecological and
nsk assessment problems Dr Lackey holds a courtesy professorship at Oregon State University in his academic
specialty, fisheries and wildlife science He also serves as Associate Director of the Center for Analysis of
Environmental Change, a joint research unit of Oregon State University, the EPA Corvallis Laboratory, the
Forest Service Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, and Battelle Pacific Northwest
Laboratories
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Robot T. Lackey Ecological Risk Xsstannent ^ Sapumbor 8. 1993
journals. Entire books on ecological risk assessment have been
published within the past year. The previous two EPA administrators
have given major policy talks on the subject. Congressional committees
have publicly endorsed the concept as the approach of choice. The
National Academy of Science has commissioned panels of experts to pass
judgement on the merits of the concept and it's application.
Conversely, there has been a different view — less charitable:
risk assessment is a form of techno-speak that will be used to justify the
destruction of more and more of our nation's natural environment.
Further, risk assessment is a tool used by the scientific and technical elite
to impose their values and priorities on the general public under the
guise of scientific objectivity. Ecological risk assessment in this view is
undemocratic at best ~ immoral at worst.
The sudden interest in ecological risk assessment is a dramatic
development. Clearly something has changed, and changed quickly and
profoundly. There are several reasons.
My purpose here is not to be an advocate for, or be a detractor of,
any of the various assessment concepts, approaches, or procedures, but
to summarize the issues.
How Well Are We Doing?
How well are we doing in developing and implementing public
policy to protect ecological resources?
The fundamental measure of success in any ecological protection
regulation is: how well are the resources in question doing. How well
are we doing?
First, and most important, many people feel that the condition of
ecological resources in this country has deteriorated in spite of all our best
efforts. For example, tall grass prairie ecosystems have disappeared.
The acreage of wetlands in the United States has declined precipitously.
A number of species, such as the northern spotted owl, Florida panther,
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and California condor, are struggling for their very existence.
Biological diversity is purportedly declining throughout much of the
nation.
Others have a different view. The quality of our ecological
resources is actually improving. Some species may be endangered, but
we are generally doing a good job of balancing competing societal
demands. Where we do deviate from carefully thought-through decision
making, it is often because "scare tactics" have been used to sway the
process and, as a result, irrational and excessively costly environmental
protection decisions have been made that are counter to the best interests
of the majority. Things aren't perfect, but they are getting better.
With such divergent views, you might wonder if it is the same
planet that is being evaluated! Risk assessment is often offered up as a
formal and systematic procedure to forge consensus from these very
divergent opinions about the status and trends of our ecological
resources.
A second stimulus for the development of risk assessment is the
sheer cost of complying with environmental regulations. Since the
formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the total cost
of complying with environmental regulations has been one trillion
dollars. Annual compliance costs are now somewhere between $125 and
$150 billion. I am not saying that we necessarily need fewer regulations,
but those we do have, cost a lot of money.
The type of regulation being used is also changing. Command and
control regulations were typical when pollution problems were fairly
straight-forward in the 1960s and 1970s. More recent environmental
problems require changes in human behavior if pollution is going to be
reduced. Such tools as the tax code, land use laws, and market incentives
are costly and they often are very intrusive. For example, few people
appreciate a government agency telling them what they can and cannot
do with their property.
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Whether it is the total cost of complying with environmental
regulations, or the intrusiveness of some of the newer types of regulatory
approaches, a formal procedure that could evaluate regulatory
effectiveness would be very useful. Is the money being spent on
regulations doing as much good as it should? If government must
intrude in our lives to protect the environment, is it actually protecting
the most important ecological resources? Risk assessment offers at least
the potential of answering these questions in an objective way.
A third stimulus is the question of priorities, illustrated by a recent
EPA exercise. A committee of scientific experts appointed by the EPA
Administrator evaluated the risks facing ecological resources in the
United States, and ranked them in order of risk from greatest to least.
The top four were habitat alteration, global climate change, stratospheric ozone
depletion, and decrease in biological diversity. The presence of these four at
the top of the list was a real surprise to many.
Even more surprising were the issues ranked lowest by the experts
— the effects of herbicides, pesticides, acid deposition, airborne toxics, oil spills,
and groundwater pollution. The disconnect between ecological risk as
defined by the experts, and risk as defined by the focus of current
regulatory efforts, is striking. According to the panel, we are spending
our money, time, and energy on ecological risks of lesser importance.
Formal risk assessment has the potential to carry the ranking
process much further. Theoretically, we could focus our regulatory
efforts on threats thought to pose the greatest risk. With a given level of
dollars or intrusion into people's lives, we could obtain the maximum
ecological payoff.
A fourth stimulus is uncertainty. Scientists and policy analysts are
generally not effectively conveying ecological options to decision makers
and the public. Conveying uncertainty is clearly difficult. Conveying
the importance of the interconnectiveness of ecological systems and
human uses is another difficulty.
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For example, if the question arises as to the ecological consequences
of moving toward alcohol-supplemented gasoline to help decrease our
dependence on oil, how do we convey the ecological consequences of
this to decision makers in a way that is useful? Burning alcohol
produces byproducts that will have ecological effects. Putting more land
into agricultural production to grow more corn to produce alcohol will
have additional ecological effects. Runoff from these new corn fields will
affect streams and rivers. Converting wetlands to corn fields to grow
more corn will have additional consequences for migratory waterfowl.
Very quickly, everything is related to everything else and nothing makes
sense without extensive study, or we must rely on the subjective
opinions of scientific or policy experts.
Formal ecological risk assessment has a lot of appeal for addressing
these kinds of problems in an organized way. We all know that there is
no free lunch in ecological systems or decision making. The trouble is
that the cost of lunch is often very difficult to determine, and may be
nearly impossible to explain to someone. Risk assessment is often touted
as a tool to solve this problem.
A fifth stimulus for applying formal risk assessment is to try to
break decision-making gridlock. For example, the public forests of the
Northwest are nearly shut down in many places due to various law suits
over endangered species and other environmental issues. The use and
abuse of science in courts and other forums is rampant. The public,
perhaps most of us, doesn't know who to believe. Are northern spotted
owls truly going the way of the dodo bird, or is the concern for the
spotted owl just a vehicle that environmentalists are using to achieve a
more fundamental political objective? Or, are industry and timber
workers using the spotted owl as an excuse for problems caused by
automation and harvests in excess of the rate of regeneration?
The public must form opinions, but does so without great
confidence in the available scientific and technical information. The issue
tends to get couched in jobs vs. owls. Risk assessment might be able to
bring some consensus on difficult public choice issues such as this.
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A sixth reason deals with the programmatic performance measure
of the benefits of regulatory choices — specifically who should receive them?
One charge is that the affluent drive decision-making in managing and
protecting ecological resources. In the bureaucratic jargon of the day,
this is "environmental equity." Should environmental programs
primarily benefit the upper middle class? Or should environmental
decision-making be democratized? "Environmental justice" is the
rallying cry. Can ecological risk assessment help?
What about benefits for this generation vs. future generations? In
ecological terms, how do you compare the alternatives over time? Risks
of ecological catastrophe may be small in any one year. Over 50 years
things look much riskier. Over 200 years they make look absolutely
frightening. There is no simple analog to the discount rate, which
actually may be a good thing.
And, of course, who are the losers and how much should they be
compensated? The legal "taking issue" is very important in protecting
ecological resources. If Government must "take" a piece of property, then
there had better be a very defensible reason — preferably a formal,
objective one. Risk assessment might be very useful in providing that
justification.
Why Risk Assessment?
Why conduct risk assessment for ecological problems? Assessing
risks has an intuitive appeal to most people. If we can Quantify risks, or
at least rank risks, we can allocate our efforts and regulations toward
protecting those ecosystems under greatest threat. After all, there has
been a general acceptance of this approach for health risk assessment —
why not for ecological resources?
Before we become too complacent let me point out that one
prominent environmentalist has recently called decisions based on risk
assessment the moral equivalent of murder. The same thought process
leads to the conclusion that risk assessment applied to ecosystems is
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Robert T Lacks? Ecological Ride Assessment 7 September 8. 1993
equally unacceptable. I will not spend any time discussing this
philosophical position, but its importance and influence in current
ecological debates, such as the Northwest forest and salmon faceoffs,
should not be underestimated.
Which Paradigm to Follow?
Which paradigm should we follow? Once a basic risk assessment
paradigm is defined and accepted, many of the scientific and technical
issues will fall into place. We ecologists usually don't spend enough
time on paradigm selection, but usually jump right into arguing about
details in the techniques of conducting assessments.
The tried and true paradigm is the basic political process —
sometimes pejoratively referred to as "muddling through." The strongly
rational amongst us often do not trust this process. Decisions are rarely
cost effective. Efficiency is not of great importance. Compromise
between competing views often appears to take the worst from each. In
short, the process offends our — at least among scientists — sense of order
or rationality.
A second basic, but very different, approach would be to follow the
insurance analog. After all, if uncertainty is the problem, then there is a
good record of success in the insurance business. The average person
can relate to this. There is a large body of procedures for measuring
risk for all kinds of activities.
The problem with this approach is that very few ecological risks
can be measured with any accuracy. I am always struck by the
despondent look that comes across the face of a policy analyst when he
realizes the broad confidence intervals on all the ecological predictions
that we ecologists are even willing to provide.
The third approach is the human health analog. In this approach
we generally define the human and the ecosystem as the analogous items
at potential risk. Using this analog it is easy for most of us to
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Robert T Lackey Ecological Ruk Assessment 8 September 8. 1993
understand risk as applied to ecosystems.
The approach works pretty well when applied to simple
ecosystems exposed to single stresses where one species can be used as
a surrogate — say bobwhite quail used as a surrogate for
agroecosystems. The problem is that bobwhite quail do not respond to a
chemical in the same way that an entire agroecosystem does.
And chemical stressors are just one of many stressors. In most
cases chemicals are not the most crucial cause of ecological changes.
Remember the ranking of risks to ecological resources (habitat alteration,
global climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, and loss of biological
diversity). To use this analog, we must simplify ~ often to the point
where the relevance of the results may be in question.
Another critical problem is that, contrary to individual humans
who die, and in most cases people think this is a bad situation,
ecosystems change dramatically over time, have no optimal condition,
and are only healthy when compared to some desired state specified by
humans. Ecosystem "health" is strictly an anthropocentric term.
Fundamental Assumptions
There are two core views of the world that compete for the basic
assumption of ecological risk assessment.
The first, most comfortable to most us and the most amenable to
scientific information, is the assumption that all benefits of decisions
affecting ecological systems are accruable to humans — the human-
centered view of the earth and it's biotic resources.
To be sure, we may preserve wilderness that few visit, protect
from extinction obscure species that have no demonstrated utility, and
spend vast sums to restore habitats for species of very limited economic
value. All these efforts provide benefits to people — the benefits may
be non-economic, may be non-monetary, may only be to buy some
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Robert T Lackay Ecological Rui Amassment 9 September 8. 1993
indeterminant form of future insurance, but they all benefit man.
Nature may benefit, but only as a byproduct of the primary decision.
The entire regulatory framework to protect ecosystems is set up
under this assumption. We protect biodiversity because some people
feel that bad things may happen to future generations if we don't. We
preserve wilderness areas because just knowing that unaltered
ecosystems exist has value to people.
The alternate world view is ecocentered. This is the realm of deep
ecology and certain religious or philosophical creeds. It is often called
earth-centered. The basic tenet is that benefits accrue to all species —
humans are only one species and are no more important than the others.
Thus all species are equal. We protect ecosystems because all
animals and plants have a right to exist. The importance of biodiversity
is because it is morally right, not because biodiversity might be important
to man.
Risk assessment is an anathema to those holding this view. The
mere discussion of ranking risks to ecosystems would be similar to
deciding which humans should live and which should die. The
intensity of the debate over the morality of aborting humans is similar.
The debate is morally based; rational argument plays little or no role.
From this philosophy comes uncomfortable questions such as:
"should we be subjecting thousands of animals to suffering so the
fragrances of our shampoos do not sting our eyes?"
It is easy to dismiss this view in a room full of rationalists, but the
ecocentric view is becoming increasingly important in the political
process.
For those individuals who hold an ecocentric worldview — or
those who lean in this direction ~ risk assessment will not be useful. In
fact it will likely be perceived as a form of ecological triage.
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Approaches to Assessing Ecological Risk
What then do we mean by ecological risk? Risk implies that there
is a "desired" condition and a "less desired" condition. Human values
define both.
Terms like degraded, destroyed, and sick imply an undesired
ecosystem state. Perhaps a more accurate term for this paper would be
ecological "consequence" analysis rather than ecological "risk" analysis.
I have always been envious of scientists working in health risk
assessment because there is a generally accepted view that healthy
humans were clearly better than sick ones — that living humans were
generally better than dead ones. In ecological risk assessment a corn
field, a short grass prairie, a mountain lake, a river flowing through
southern Louisiana, are only healthy when compared to the desired
condition of those ecosystems. They all may be healthy or may all be
degraded.
There are a half-dozen or so basic tools that are used to conduct
risk assessments. Each has many variations. Many risk assessments
use a combination of these approaches.
First, the most commonly used approach is the bioassay and its
many, many permutations. The basic idea is simple and straight-
forward. There is a stressor of concern, usually a chemical. A
surrogate for an ecosystem is selected — often a species of fish, a
representative bird, or perhaps a combination of plants. The chemical
is tested for toxicity, usually under laboratory and highly controlled field
conditions. The basic approach is very similar to the animal tests run in
health risk assessment.
The assumptions are that the chemical exposure applied under
laboratory or controlled field conditions can be related to that found in
nature, that the surrogate animals or plants represent the ecosystem or
ecosystems of concern, and that a factor can be added to allow for a
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Robert T Lackey Ecological Ride Assessment 11 Stpwmber 8. 1993
margin of safety — whatever the concept of "safety" means in ecology.
This approach has some real advantages. It is relatively simple to
use. It is easy to understand. There is a large data base for many
chemicals and many species. There are many laboratories and qualified
people who can perform these kinds of tests. And it is very similar to
the data used in health risk assessment
The problems with the approach are also readily apparent. It
works best for chemicals but many, perhaps most, of the major risks to
ecosystems are from stressors other than chemical. It assumes that a
simple surrogate (one or a few species) will respond in the same way as
an ecosystem. It does not work well in complex ecosystems, over large
regions, or with chemicals that cause low level, but persistent ecological
effects.
In short, it works well for a very narrow, though important, set of
concerns.
A second approach is the environmental impact analysis and its
derivatives. This approach has generally been used to assess the
ecological risk of "projects" such as proposed dams, highways, logging,
and so on. The approach involves identifying the ecological
consequences of the various options without value judgement. It may be
somewhat quantitative or simply a best guess.
The heyday of this approach was in the 1970s. Many variants
were developed, particularly to add a sense of quantification and
standardization. In practice, the "process" of developing the
environmental impact statement often became more important than the
actual document and its conclusions. Environmental impact statements
are often described now in terms of the number feet of shelf space
occupied. Volume of information is often inversely related to the
confidence that ecologist's have in the accuracy of the predictions. The
more confident we are in what will happen, the shorter the document.
The real advantage of environmental impact analysis is that the full
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Robert T. Lackey Ecological Ride Assessment 12 September 8. 1993
range of ecological effects can be addressed. All types of data can be
included. Lack of good predictions is the major disadvantage.
A third approach is the use of models. This approach tends to be
heavily quantitative with use of computers, mathematical analysis, and,
more recently, geographic information analysis, visualization, and
animation. This approach rapidly caught on widely in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Some of the luster has dulled because several very famous
models turned out to make terribly inaccurate predictions — one
prominent example is the Club of Rome 1972 model that predicted
worldwide famine and environmental disaster within a decade, at least
according to their critics. Others examples abound. Proponents are often
as strident as critics.
There are some real advantages of a modeling approach to
ecological risk assessment. Complex ecological systems can be evaluated.
The most sensitive data and relationships can be identified through
sensitivity analysis, and then data collection efforts focused on acquiring
the most critical missing data.
A fourth approach is the use of expert judgement. It can be used
alone or in combination with others. In a sense this is the original
approach to risk assessment. Find a technical expert that you trust and
have him estimate the risk of the stressors of concern.
More recent modifications have focused on organizing expert
opinion in a way that provides consensus results, or even quantitative
results. An appropriate example is the "panel of technical experts"
assembled by EPA to rank ecological risks. This example also illustrates
a potential problem ~ the "experts" ranked risks very different than did
the general public. The experts gave bottom ranking to hazardous waste
and chemical pollution. The public gave top ranking to the same risks.
Political choice, the^/r approach, is the tried and true decision-
making method in a democracy. It is strongly value laden. Scientific
information and scientific "truth" may or may not have a significant role.
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Robot T. Lackey Ecological Risk Assessment 13 September 8, 1993
It is able to resolve almost any type of issue — those few that it fails at,
turn out to be civil wars.
Many scientists are offended by this approach because answers are
almost never "right." The 20-year acid rain controversy is a good
example of the use and misuse of science in the political process.
The final approach to ecological risk assessment is the most difficult
to describe and appreciate ~ at least for rationalists like me — the
ecocentric approach. It as a totally alternative approach.
"Ecocentric" is not really a great descriptor — neither is deep
ecology — an alternative one. In this view, benefits do not all accrue to
man. All species receive benefits. Decisions tend to be made on what is
right, not what analyses tells us is optimal, most probable, or most
efficient.
One example of the concerns that people who hold these views
may have is that language is power (jargon, if you will), and that language
keeps the public out of the decision-making process. Generally you
cannot participate in ecological decision-making unless you know the
jargon. Simple, moral questions get lost in the language of the
technocrats. The process of risk assessment and risk management can
(and does) control the language of the discussion, and thus
disenfranchises those who do not speak the language, or trust the people
or institutions who do.
Another example of concern is the charge of "speciesism." This
concern hits close to home with me. For example, there are 50 million
pet dogs in the United States — what is more American than having a
pet dog? An ecocentric view is that pet ownership is slavery. One
species has enslaved another. Worse, pets do not help us meet our
survival needs, but are merely kept for personal gratification.
It is easy to make fun of these views and show how illogical they
are to rationalists like probably most readers, but when we spend
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Robert T Lackey Ecological Ride Assessment 14 September 8. 1993
millions of dollars to save three whales stranded in shelf ice in Alaska, as
happened several years ago, any rational analysis would have shown
that this taxpayer money was totally wasted. Yet at the same time we
cause thousands of rabbits to suffer painful corneal lesions, infections,
and pain so that our eye shadow doesn't make our eyes red, though
some spend twice as much and buy "cruelty-free" products. All of us are
a mixture of both human-centered and ecocentered worldviews — only the
ratios vary.
Future Research Needs in Ecological Risk Assessment
What kind of research is needed to help solve current and future
ecological problems?
The most important research needed is not easy to define, much
less fund. Worse, it is usually not safe research — especially for
scientists early in their careers and attempting to build reputations.
Publication in the "best" ecological journals will be difficult. It is usually
impossible to become the world's expert on the most important risk
assessment topics because the range of material is too broad.
Another aspect of the problem is perhaps best illustrated by a short
story involving an ecologist and a policy analyst. As dedicated public
servants, they were both working late one night in Washington on the
great ecological risk issues of the day. Very late that night the policy
analyst left work and walked the two blocks to the corner bus stop. It
was very dark except for a single bright street light illuminating the bus
stop. As he approached the bus stop and emerged from the darkness,
the policy analyst noticed the ecologist on his hands and knees searching
for something. He was crawling in a rigorously systematic fashion along
transects from one edge of the light to the other. The policy analyst,
always the helpful soul, asked the ecologist what he was looking for and
if he could help. The ecologist had lost his keys and wanted all the help
he could get to find them before the bus arrived. They both searched for
several minutes — the ecologist in a systematic, disciplined fashion - the
analyst in kind of a random, disjointed search. After several minutes
without success, the analyst said: "We've completely covered the bus
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stop without any luck. The bus will be here shortly. Let's go back to
first principles and see if we have overlooked something — to start with,
where was the last time you actually remember HAVING your keys?"
"That's pretty easy to answer" said the ecologist ~ "about a half a block
back, they fell out of my pocket." With considerable exasperation, the
analyst asked: "Then why in God's green earth are we wasting our time
looking here at the bus stop for your keys?" The ecologist quickly
responded with a mixture of conviction and tolerance: "Simple, look
back up the street - it's dark; we'll NEVER find anything there!"
Having said all that, here are several candidates for research:
(1) The first and most critical need is to develop and refine a risk
assessment paradigm that deals with "consequences," not "risks." Most
ecological "risks" are not really risks at all, but simply probability of the
consequences of certain actions or inactions. We don't measure the
"risks" of global climate change, we measure the "consequences" of global
climate change. We don't measure the "risks" of converting much of
mid-continental North America to agriculture, we measure it's
consequences. We don't measure the risks of converting a swamp to a
corn field, we measure it's consequences.
A consequence becomes a risk only when we apply societal or
individual values. After all there is nothing intrinsically ecologically
good or bad about climate change. Or converting prairie to wheat fields.
Or swamp land to corn fields.
(2) A second critical research need is to more realistically link
ecology and policy. In my experience, many policy analysts have an
unrealistic expectation of what role ecology can play. The questions
often asked of ecologists are: "What is the health of such and such
ecosystem?" "What kind of information will you need before you can
determine if something is safe for the environment?" "When will you
have enough research to recommend a decision?" "How much
biodiversity do we need?" "What do we need to do to make our
ecosystems sustainable?"
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These are all value-based questions that cannot be answered by
scientists without applying values — their's or someone else's.
(3) A third research need — and one that I have some doubts about
— is ecological currency. A "metric" for ecological risk assessment would
be very useful. You could rank consequences. You could measure
ecological health. You could compare the "value" of a corn field and the
value of a prairie pothole — the value of an old growth forest and second
growth, and so on. It might even be possible to add some credibility to
"green accounting."
Although important and potentially highly useful — I do not have
much confidence in the likelihood of a major breakthrough in this area.
Regardless, it ought to be pursued.
(4) A fourth research need is to better factor in the dynamic nature
of ecosystems. The gulf between ecologists and most other people is
substantial. Ecologists know ecosystems to be dynamic, highly chaotic,
and often unpredictable. For many reasons ecosystems change a lot
over time. Without any human involvement, ecosystems have massive
fires, disease outbreaks, invasions of new predators and diseases, shifts
in the earth's climate, shifts in local climate, population booms and
crashes, floods, earthquakes, droughts, and more. There is really no
"natural" state.
Many people, perhaps most I think, have a view of ecosystems
characterized by Ansel Adams photographs ~ natural ecosystems are
"perfect" — an equilibrium condition in which all the pieces operate in a
predictable, desirable way. Most views of ecosystems are of "natural,
unspoiled" panoramas. They are frozen in time and any deviation from
this timeless condition is "degradation." This is not the way the natural
world is.
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The Major Challenges Ahead
What does the future hold for ecological risk assessment? Two
safe predictions are foremost:
(1) First, ecological risk assessment will continue to stimulate
controversy and debate — sometimes very strident and divisive as we see
in the Pacific Northwest. Tension will be particularly severe with issues
where the desire of some to achieve environmental benefits comes at the
cost of individual rights. After all, the critical habitat of the endangered
silver-bellied, rough-legged, lesser nocturnal snail is also someone's backyard.
(2) Second, the paradigm of choice for assessing ecological risk, a
modified version of that used in assessing health risk, will continue to
be widely used. The paradigm will work reasonably well for fairly
simple ecological and political problems, particularly those dealing with
chemicals and simple ecosystems. It will not work well for more
complex ecological and political problems, unfortunately these are the
most important. Conversion of natural ecosystems to agricultural use, to
places for human habitation, and for human transport, dwarf the changes caused
by most other environmental stresses.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the ecological journals will continue to publish more
and more ecological risk papers, more books will be written on the
subject, there will be more talks on which is the best paradigm to use,
Congress and the Executive Branch will continue to look for ways to
prioritize ecological risk, and more panels will be commissioned to pass
judgement on approaches and methodologies — but the real challenge for
applied ecologists will continue to be: how best to put the right
information on the table, in the right form, and at the right time to best
factor in ecological consequences in the decision-making process.
econdc afs
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