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Why environmental exposures?

Concerns about environmental health are rising. Publics, scientists and policymakers have grown increasingly alarmed about adverse health effects arising from catastrophic accidents such as the Bhopal disaster and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, as well as the cumulative effects of long-term exposure to pollutants and other by-products of the industrial age. It is abundantly clear, moreover, that exposure to environmental hazards is not distributed equitably (as we continue to witness through the slow-motion disaster unfolding in Flint, Michigan). In the USA, the President’s Cancer Panel (2010) has argued that environmental contributions to the national cancer burden have been grossly underestimated and that more research is urgently required on the impact of industrial, occupational, agricultural and military activities on community environmental health. Disentangling the ways in which environmental exposures affect human health is necessarily complex. Exposure science is emerging as a cross-disciplinary field that seeks to integrate insights across the life and physical sciences to better understand associations between chemical, biological and physical environments and adverse health outcomes (National Research Council 2012 ). Moreover, it is a field that is growing and changing rapidly in response to both scientific and institutional innovation. Over the past decade, scientists from toxicology, industrial hygiene, epidemiology, etc. have coalesced around the banner of exposure science with the dedicated support of funding agencies, journals, meetings and professional associations. At the same time, exposure science has had insufficient engagement with the social sciences, limiting its potential to inform policy or to document exposures in ways that are responsive to communities’ concerns. The issue here is not simply one of how effectively to communicate with publics and policy-makers. The very ways in which scientists conceptualize the basic notions of “environment” and “exposure” vary across disciplines and from the ways in which they are conceptualized by lay people, social scientists, regulatory officials and policymakers. Identifying the limitations of exposure science is, of course, straightforward. The more difficult questions focus on what roles the social sciences ought to play in understanding and responding to environmental exposures, and how best they can collaborate with other disciplines which contribute to contemporary exposure science. We argue here that social scientists should engage contemporary exposure science practice, as both partners and critics. Most of the papers included in this special issue, Environmental Exposures: Technologies, Techniques and Politics, can be situated at the intersection of environmental sociology and science and technology studies (STS). Our intent is to both generate meaningful critique of the emerging technologies and practices that produce scientific knowledge on environmental exposure and to identify ways that social scientists can join forces with other sciences and community health advocates to advance environmental exposure assessment. We ask what knowledge counts as evidence? How do politics shape what counts as scientific evidence? And how do we create and use scientific data about environmental quality to mobilize for a healthier and more just world?