RE: Culturally Sensitive Risk Communication, Outreach

[John V. Stone <jvstone@umd.umich.edu;jvstone@glerl.noaa.gov;;;;;;;>]

Excellent point, John. I'm envious of your attendance at the Society for Ecological Restoration conference. Was there, or will there be, a publication issued from your panel discussion?

I feel obliged to note that Risk Perception Mapping is not "my" methodology, although I did participate in its development back in the late-80s.. Rich Stoffle, of the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) at the University of Arizona, was the brainchild of the RPM concept and method.

But back to your observations on risk communication, stakeholder triage, and the question of "who eats the fish." To carry the question a step further, or perhaps to take it a step back, I'ld like to ask "who eats what parts of which fish, and why?" The development of Great Lakes fish consumption advisories is a good case in point. For the most part, these advisories reflect cultural assumptions regarding appropriately consumable parts of a fish, namely the flesh. Yet some cultural traditions regard flesh and internal organs as equally edible. A couple examples from the Great Lakes region pop immediately to mind. Some Finnish-American populations in the Upper Great Lakes eat a seasonal holiday dish called "kukko" -- essentially, fish liver and leek pie. The livers of a particular species of fish (the exact species escapes me just at the moment) are frozen and saved throughout the year, then mashed into kukko for the Christmas holiday meal. People who practice this tradition could potentially abide by agency-issued fish consumption advisories yet exceed their maximum annual loading in just one or two bites. Another intriguing example comes from the western Lake Erie basin, where the French-American tradition of eating "mushrat" is alive and well. In this case, French-American folk taxonomy treats the muskrat as a fish, and it is not uncommon to see "Fish Fry! All you can eat mushrat!" advertised on local church marquees during the Roman Catholic seasonal prohibition against eating meat on Fridays during lent. I personally don't have the toxicological data on muskrat, but I'm going to assume from their diet and their less-than-pristine local habitat, that their flesh and internal organs would contain similar loadings for the same toxins as the fish that share that habitat. But fish consumption advisories don't include muskrat, even though some people are eating them as fish, and doing so in good faith.. Other equally compelling examples abound in Native American and First Nation cultural traditions as well.

We all may ultimately eat the fish, however broadly defined, but we all don't ultimately eat all of a fish, although some of us eat more of it than others. The issuance of fish consumption advisories (and other analogous regulatory processes) would do well to incorporate such "cultural risk vectors," if you will, into their risk calculations. But to do so would require a more culturally sensitive form of risk communication. And it was to that end that I suggested "Risk Perception Mapping" as an ethnographic approach to understanding "who eats what parts of which fish, and why."

Cheers,

jvs