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David Ropeik
Retired Harvard Instructor, Author
David Ropeik is an award-winning broadcast journalist, a Harvard instructor, and an international consultant in risk communication and risk perception. He’s also the author of How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.
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We instinctively feel safer about anything natural and more worried by anything human-made, but instincts may not lead to choices that do human or environmental health the most good.
Two recent examples from The New York Times, one from a columnist and one in an editorial, illustrate the danger of news media coverage of risk that is alarmist, incomplete, and inaccurate.
Proposals to completely eliminate parental choice over whether their kids will be vaccinated can backfire and drive more parents into the anti-vaccination camp.
The massive damage humans have done to the natural world has provoked a backlash that could be just as dangerous, or more. There is a growing global rejection of technology and almost anything human-made in favor of whatever is more 'natural'. But a simplistic rejection of modern technologies eliminates many of our best options for solving the problems we've created.
The massive damage humans have done to the natural world has provoked a backlash that could be just as dangerous, or more. There is a growing global rejection of technology and almost anything human-made in favor of whatever is more "natural." But a simplistic rejection of modern technologies eliminates many of our best options for solving the problems we've created.
The massive damage humans have done to the natural world has provoked a backlash that could be just as dangerous, or more. There is a growing global rejection of technology and almost anything human-made in favor of whatever is more 'natural.' But a simplistic rejection of modern technologies eliminates many of our best options for solving the problems we've created.
A newly released series of anti-nuclear videos demonstrates just how blind to the evidence our underlying values can make us... and how that blindness can make it harder to solve the huge and complex problems facing modern society.