Risk roulette

Risk. It pervades our daily lives, our policy debates, our every media. Above all, it infects our efforts to wrestle with environmental threats, and sustainable opportunities. It slips its way insidiously into arguments, morphing into a weapon to be wielded by either side. Everyone’s searching for that elusive smoking gun; for the whiff of conclusive proof. Only to find, as likely as not, that the other side has one too. Or that the smoke turns to mist in the harsh light of new evidence, of unexpected events...The fear of risk cramps us, stamps on creativity and stifles innovation. In the articles which follow, we find some imaginative ways of responding to it which don’t involve either the ostrich pose or the lunatic’s leap in the dark. But to kick off, a few risky thoughts, courtesy of Martin Wright...

The Devil We Know

A conversation at a party. Idle chat, which she enlivened (when she found out what I did) by the familiar game of ‘wind up the greenie’. This always has some entertainment value, if only because you get to counfound expectations. (Pass the dead flesh and let’s talk about cars.) Then someone mentioned GMOs, and the ribbing gave way to earnest intent. As in... “How dare they try to foist this stuff on us, when no-one has a clue what effect it might have? If you environmentalists can help get rid of that, then I might just be less cynical about all this global warming business. What really scares me is what it could do to my kids...” And while we talked, she puffed her way through maybe half a dozen Marlboro Lights.

Smoking guns of proof are as rare in medical science as the environmental variety, but there’s a pretty sure whiff of certainty around the consequence of smoking cigarettes. When you’re young, of course, you’re immune - at least to warnings (especially pompous ones from the government). But when you’re old enough to know...? The trouble is, it’s so familiar, such a reassuringly everyday kind of way to top yourself. Maybe warnings don’t work with the devil we know.

And if the one-third of the world’s population who smoke has such touching confidence that their personal life-support system can ward off its effects, despite compelling evidence to the contrary, is it any wonder that we find it hard to believe that we could conceivably be doing something similar to the life-support system of the planet as a whole? Despite compelling evidence that natural systems are indeed breaking down at a phenomenal rate.

De Nile ain’t just a river in Egypt...

The vast majority of heavy smokers are at no greater risk of dying from lung cancer than non-smokers, according to a recent US study. Largely because they’ve already died from heart disease, or a stroke...

Scared Enough to Buy It

Risk makes a marvellous marketing tool. One seized on by everyone from supermarkets to Greenpeace. It must be Rule One in some secret marketing manual somewhere: “When in doubt, put the frighteners on them...”.

Remember the anti-bacterial chopping boards? They carried a not-so-subliminal message: your kitchen is a hotbed of unseen terrors. If you don’t buy this, you’ll be putting your kids at risk from all manner of unpronounceable bugs.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, are past masters at provoking outrage - and raising funds - through fear. “Your children are breathing toxic fumes - please give generously.”

Sure, there’s plenty to be alarmed about out there. But motivating people by frightening them has to be the most obvious of tactics. It can leave us feeling helpless, disempowered, and confused by claims of rival ‘experts’. At first, it terrifies. Then it leaves us cold. And we soon get immune to boys who cry wolf...

Jonathon Porritt: “I’ve been enormously struck by the photos of environmental activists trashing GM crops while wearing protective masks, goggles, laboratory suits... There is not the single, slightest scintilla of scientific evidence to demonstrate that there is any threat whatsoever to human health by walking through a crop of GM rape! So why the gear? What impression does it leave in those who see that image?”

Safe is Risky

Take the safety culture of the modern car. Cossetted within our crumple zones, airbags and safety cages, it’s no surprise if our driving habits are getting more risky, as if subliminally aware that we’re less likely to pay the ultimate penalty.

Hence the old joke. Want to encourage safer driving? Replace the airbag with a sharpened spike, pointing at the drivers’ heart - or his crown jewels. That should do the trick.

In fact, take our whole ‘cocoon culture’ in general. Those anti-bacterial chopping boards are just the tip of the iceberg. Efforts to insulate and immunize ourselves often expose us to new hazards. Doctors are warning that excessively clean environments put children at greater risk from a compromised immune system than the odd dodgy bacteria in mildly dirty ones. And the latest health alert? Keeping them safely indoors in front of the Play Station, away from marauding cars and ‘stranger danger’, means a sedentary lifestyle which may knock years off life expectancy. All wrapped up and no room to breathe...?

103 child pedestrians and 32 child cyclists were killed on the roads in 1998. Air pollution - in large part from motor vehicles - kills up to 24,000 people in the UK alone each year.

Safe is Big

Try to cut out risk, and you often end up cutting out the small, the individual, the diverse.

Small abbatoirs get closed down because they can’t meet new safety standards. Small farmers can’t sell unpasteurised milk.

Small forms of transport - feet, bicycles - are eschewed in favour of ‘safe’ big ones -buses, cars.

Trade-offs, always trade-offs. Cycle regularly, and you massively reduce your risk of expiring from heart disease, and massively increase the risk of expiring beneath a skip lorry. And in this age of ‘perfect information’, show me one person who consciously weighs up the risks before making such a choice (as opposed to using them as justification for what they were going to do anyway)...

Small hotels fail under the weight of fire regulations. (And no, you’re not allowed a choice when it comes to that particular risk.)

Some environmental groups who love whipping up public fears about, say, food safety, also enthuse over the traditional ways of life of indigenous tribespeople who regularly take risks, not least with their food, which would be outlawed here...

Risk is Slippery

Stamp it out somewhere, it bubbles up some place else. That’s the trouble with risk.

Take the school run - one of the main contributors to the rise in urban traffic flows. The most commonly-cited reason for the surge in the proportion of kids being driven to school, is parents’ fear that if their children walk, or - heaven forfend - cycle, they’ll be injured in a road accident.

So risk is reduced for the children en route, and increased for... those remaining pedestrians and cyclists on the streets; their friends and neighbours breathing the fumes; the Indian Ocean island communities at risk from sea-level rise...

(In this age of chaos theory, we’re familiar with the notion that a butterfly’s wings over Brazil can trigger a storm in China. So let’s hear it for the woman in Carshalton who started up the Volvo to ferry Natalie and Joseph to St Mary’s, and flooded the Maldives...)

Time and again, closing off a risk close to home means making life more risky for people, creatures, and the climate elsewhere. In an effort to ensure that every last drop of our water supply meets stringent drinking water standards, we emit vast quantities of greenhouse gases in the energy-intensive process of treating the stuff. Most of the time, feeling safe in the North involves buying more stuff, burning more energy...

Risk Kicks

Long before the first vodka-sozzled idiot put a single slug in the six-shooter, spun the chamber and invented Russian Roulette, risk has had a fatal attraction. From bungee-jumping to white water rafting, it’s stimulating, sexy. It seems we all have a need, metaphorically at least, to go off-piste.

And maybe that’s because being risky sometimes does the job, when safety first would fail. Ever since the days when the hunter went close enough to get the spear through the mammoth’s heart, and so secured food for the family for the rest of the winter...

We enshrine the risk-takers: the business man who played for high stakes. The keeper rushing to the edge of the box to throw himself at the feet of the striker. The beleagured batsman hitting his way out of trouble. (Dominic Cork, back to the wall, all guns blazing against the West Indies in June, snatching an impossible victory...)

Faint heart never won fair maiden. Who dares, wins... (An ex-SAS guy has written a book on survival skills in the urban environment. “Your surroundings may be familiar - but there is risk at every turn!” It’s a jungle out there...)

And the more we cosset and cocoon, the more our youth find ways to squirm out from under the safety curtain... unsafe sex, unsafe speed, unsafe drugs - sorted!

Safe is ugly, safe is uncool. Wrap up warm and look like a plonker? In these shoes? I don’t think so...

Risking Everything

Trouble is... we’ve never before had the chance to risk something really big. Like, oh... a global climate and life-support system which can sustain six billion people and their children in something approaching civilisation.

Once, when you took a risk, it threatened yourself, your family, your throne, or your nation. Which if you were Hitler or Napoleon, could be bad enough. But not quite as crazy as the stakes which, unwittingly, we’re playing for today. When our every action, almost, can subtly shift the odds.

Feel lucky?

Martin Wright

Are you Risky?

If you are...

a right-handed, breast-fed, married, non-smoking, optimistic Japanese woman with children, who always drives with her sidelights on, lives on a quiet suburban street, loves garlic, takes aspirins, avoided sexual intercourse in her early teens, and always warms up before a football game...

you are much less risky than...

an unmarried, left-handed, pessimistic airline pilot from Kazakhstan, who loves a smoke (but scorns smoke alarms), takes a sleeping pill to help him get some rest from the traffic noise outside his home, often takes a lift in a heavy goods vehicle but otherwise drives a small car without seatbelts, enjoys sprinkling dried basil on raw mushrooms, and never warms up before a football game...

Why....?

Left-handed people are marginally more at risk of developing cancer.
Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF)

Infants who were not breastfed were formerly three times as likely to die as those who were.
Food and Nutrition Bulletin

Inhabitants of Japan have the greatest chance of living until their ‘natural’ term.
World Health Organisation

Optimistic people live about 19% longer than pessimists.
University of Pennsylvania

Women who have given birth are less likely to develop breast cancer.
ICRF

Regular munchers of garlic (2-5 cloves a week) can reduce the risk of developing stomach cancer by 50%.
ICRF

Asprin appears to reduce the risk of cancer.
ICRF

Cars with the lights permanently on are involved in 10-15% less multi-car daytime crashes.
Injury Prevention Journal

The earlier a woman becomes sexually active, the greater the chance they have of developing cervical cancer.
ICRF

Warming up before a football game cuts injuries by 75%.
American Journal of Sports Medicine

Inhabitants of Kazakhstan have the greatest chance of dying before their time.
WHO

A single life is on average 2,000 days shorter than a married one.
University of Pittsburgh

Commercial pilots who have flown for more than 5,000 hours at high altitudes are more likely to suffer from leukaemia.
ICRF

HGVs are up to eight times more dangerous than cars in terms of fatalities per mile travelled.
Transport 2000

Driving a small (as opposed to large) car reduces life expectancy by 60 days.
University of Pittsburgh

You are twice as likely to be killed or seriously injured if you do not wear a seat belt in a car.
www.riskworld.com

Smoke alarms cut deaths from fires by 80%.
New England Journal of Medicine

Raw mushrooms, dried basil leaves, and sleeping pills all have carcinogenic properties.
Science Journal

28 May 2001

Martin Wright