Environmental Risk, Environmental Values, and Political Choices: Beyond Efficiency Trade-offs in Public Policy Analysis. Edited by John Martin Gillroy. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1993. 189 p. $42.00 (p).

This book has two general themes. The first is simply that environmental values do conflict with other values, notably instrumental efficiency values, in ways that complicate environmental policy decisions. The second, as the title suggests, is that good public policy requires taking into account but going beyond efficiency considerations, to the articulation and use of environmental values in addressing environmental risk. But beyond these general themes, the diverse chapters, which originated at a Trinity College symposium, do not have much common theoretical, methodological, or substantive focus. Only a few of the chapters offer specific suggestions for how environmental values should be incorporated in policy making. For good or bad, it is a book with seven introductory chapters: three by Vicente Medina, Steven Kelman, and Douglas MacLean on environmental values; two by Robert C. Paehlke and Christopher J. Bosso on environmental values and policy making; one by David Henderson on science in environmental risk analysis; and one by John Martin Gillroy on the asymmetry between instrumental and intrinsic values in analysis of environmental risk. These chapters precede and follow three case studies on environmental values and the NIMBY syndrome: one on landfill siting in Montpelier, France by William C. Gunderson; one on landfill siting in Rhode Island by Talbot Page; and one on hazardous waste facility siting in Alberta by Barry C. Rabe and John Martin Gillroy.

The result is a collection of essays that vary widely in their achievements, intended purposes, and degree of connection with each other. Several of the chapters offer excellent textbook overviews of their topics (Paehlke, Bosso, Henderson), but do not pretend to present original theoretical arguments or new empirical research. Important original contributions to the scholarly literature are made, however, by a few other chapters (Gillroy, Talbot, Rabe and Gillroy). Some chapters are almost outside the general themes of the volume (Henderson, MacLean). One chapter (Gunderson) is a case study that is accompanied by little theoretical justification or insight, but two others (Page and Rabe and Gillroy) use case studies and game theory to examine incisively some points of general scholarly significance. The chapter by Kelman, in which he advances the idea that people avoid trade-off between economic and environmental values by assigning them to different domains considered independently or sequentially, is very brief and disappointing. Unfortunately Kelman does not draw upon or even cite many works of Mark Sagoff in which he makes a very similar argument about consumer and citizen preferences.

In sum, this is a book with some important and valuable parts, even though it does not hang together very well as an integrated collection. Anyone teaching basic courses on environmental values, politics, or policy will certainly want to have a look at the chapters by Paehlke, Bosso, and Henderson as potential supplementary readings. All college teachers might be interested in the pedagogic strategy that Talbot describes at length. And the chapters by Gillroy, Talbot, and Rabe and Gillroy, which attend specifically how environmental values can be incorporated into policy making about environmental risk, deserve wide attention from analysts interested in game theoretic approaches to such concerns.

Robert V. Bartlett
Purdue University