Abstract
Scientists interested in contamination normally deal only with pollution itself, not with people’s perceptions of pollution or the relationship between pollution and land use. The overall objective of this article was to examine the relationship between people’s perceptions of pollution and their views on future land use. People were interviewed at an Earth Day Festival near the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, New York. On an open-ended question, people thought that BNL should be left as it is, or maintained as a preserve, park or conservation area, or used for environmental research. Almost no one thought that it should be used for housing or industrial purposes. When asked to rate a list of possible future land uses, maintaining BNL as a National Environmental Research Park for research and for recreation were rated the highest (nuclear storage was rated the lowest). This was consistent with the subjects’ views that pollution was the greatest concern about BNL. The congruence between perceptions about concerns or problems and future land use preferences suggests a unified view of management of contaminated sites, such as BNL, at least among a group of people whose environmental interests were evident by their presence at the event.
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Acknowledgments
We thank M. Fitzgerald and Fran Cameron for field assistance during the research and M. Greenberg, B. Friedlander, and C. Powers for valuable comments on the research or manuscript. This research was conducted under a Rutgers University protocol and was partly funded by the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (DOE, DE-FG 26-00NT 40938) and NIEHS (P30ES005022). The results, conclusions, and interpretations reported herein are the sole responsibility of the authors and should not in any way be interpreted as representing the views of the funding agencies.
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Burger, J., Gochfeld, M., Shukla, S. et al. Pollution, Contamination and Future Land Use at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Arch Environ Contam Toxicol 55, 341–347 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00244-008-9141-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00244-008-9141-6