Ideally, a risk-free environment is one where all the technologies that are being utilized work together harmoniously, so that no pollution or danger to the public exists. However, creating a risk-free environment is a complex task. Too often efforts to resolve one environmental problem fail to consider the effects this solution will have on other environmental risks. For example, although the industrial release of toxins into the U.S. environment fell in 1992 for the fifth straight year, waste generation rose slightly. Furthermore, while scientists are working on a fuel cell power supply that could power the cares of the 21st century--which would use hydrogen and oxygen to produce electric power with less pollution than other fuels --a recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report raises the possibility that the so-called "zero emission," or electric, vehicles may be responsible for more emissions that gas-powered cars. The report cites the polluting smokestacks of electric power plants, especially in the Northeast.
In addition, sometimes even when it looks as though one environmental problem is being resolved, scientists disagree on whether this is, in fact, the case. For example, although the concentrations of chemicals like DDT and PCBs in people's bodies and in the environment across the Great Lakes region have dropped sharply, environmental scientists have disagreed on whether these lower levels mean that people and wildlife are safer. This dispute is only part of a much larger scientific dispute that surfaced when the Clinton administration made public an EPA study that many believed would lead to significant changes in environmental policy on these chemicals.
What many scientists and politicians do agree on, however, is that a map of the most polluted places in the United States is also a map of poverty, minorities, and the weakest links in the health care system. Many people in these poverty-stricken ...