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Dr. O’Brien, a botanist and environmental activist, has written a brief for changing the basis for environmental decisions that is impressively written and argued but still disappointingly flawed. Implementation of her proposed “alternatives analysis” could well improve such decisions, but less than she expects. Despite her refreshing candor about the limits of environmental management, she ignores many political and logical constraints on alternatives analysis (AA) and unduly demonizes risk assessment (RA). Her main point is that we should examine two or more alternatives for a given decision, and choose the option that is least damaging. She believes most current environmental decisions focus only on whether a single option poses an acceptable risk or is “safe,” findings that she sees as scientifically impossible, immoral, and damaging to democracy. It is impossible to undertake most business or government without posing some hazard to workers, the community, wildlife, or the environment. . . . Within this necessarily compromised context, moral decision making would appear to require giving priority to least-harm alternatives that are most beneficial for the environment and for the public interest. (p. 80) O’Brien devotes a chapter to reviewing less-than-perfect current examples of AA, ranging from environmental impact statements to Consumer Reports® evaluations of consumer products. A secondary theme of the book is that “risk” or biological outcomes are unduly narrow criteria for environmental decisions; a wider look at the adverse impacts and benefits of alternatives would provide society with a better sense of the tradeoffs entailed in any choice, “[b]ecause the differing benefits of the various alternatives remind us of divergent considerations [and] we will ask a broader range of questions about the alternatives” (p. 135). She ends with barriers to adoption of AA (e.g., fear of “changes in business as usual” and of “a public process"; concern about “having to consider an infinite number of outlandish alternatives"), and proposes solutions. There is quite a bit to be said for these theses, and O’Brien says most of it, eloquently, passionately, and with selective evidence. I agree with her that much environmental decision-making focuses on how much harm can be endured rather than avoided; opportunities for avoiding many harms are plentiful, if at certain costs; “risk” is only one of many attributes of decision alternatives, and only one of their consequences that people care about. While AA might sound potentially chaotic, I believe she is correct that “risk-based decision making is just as socially messy as decision making based on [AA]. It’s just that [AA] helps make visible the non-scientific elements that are always behind risk-influenced decisions regarding who will be allowed to do what to the environment” (p. 243). O’Brien also acknowledges that “permitting of hazardous activities is unavoidable to some degree” (p. 79), and that some hazards, such as those from nuclear wastes and persistent chemicals such as PCBs, cannot be removed (pp. 110, 116). For such inevitably damaging, irreparable situations, O’Brien suggests that society analyze options that allow “for the greatest possible cleanup or restoration,” even if the action chosen “will finally be based on economic and social costs, ethics, and political will,” and identify “related production, technologies, or behaviors that could cause the same problems in the future” (pp. 210-211). Although I endorse O’Brien’s call for more AA, I am much less sanguine that it will greatly improve environmental decision-making, based on what I see as undue assumptions or illogic in some of her discussions of AA, RA, and environmental policy. The first half of her book concerns “What Is Wrong with Risk Assessment?” The scope of this term is

journal of political ecology

Making Better Environmental Decisions: An Alternative to Risk Assessment by Mary O’Brien, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (published with Environmental Research Foundation), 2000. Reviewed by Branden B. Johnson