Acceptable Sources of Knowledge About Risk. Stephen Duplantier, 7325 Palmetto St., Box 45B, New Orleans, LA 70125-1098
Acknowledgment of scientific uncertainty is a recognition that a crisis of scientific objectivity has occurred. Scientific knowledge, like all knowledge, suffers from a host of uncertainties. The worst uncertainties are from factors wholly outside of the scientific enterprise itself. In fact, issues such as the framing and modeling and inadequacy of statistical and decision-theoretic difficulties are relatively simple as compared to meta-scientific issues such as non-anthropic ecological, political, and cultural/social knowledge and where to get, understand and interpret these. The task for risk science is to enlarge it’s sources, methods, and domains of knowledge. This paper suggests that bioregional knowledge is a potent source for the reduction of uncertainty regarding risk-based practices. Bioregional knowledge is «wild», local, co-evolved, situated, grounded, non-anthropocentric, and deeply ecological knowledge. In short, the domain of ecosemiotics, or the non-anthropocentric signs of nature. A tactical goal is altering the scale of perception of risk and the chains of non-obvious causality. Fischoff et al (1981) suggests an anthropocentric approach to acceptable risk. But acceptable risk is about more that people. Missing sources include indigenous wisdom and the animals, plants and processes which constitute bioregional knowledge.