The nature of fairness: What the biggest land cleanup project in world history has to say about the culture of American environmental managemen

This dissertation examines the intersection of science and democracy in the culture of American environmental management. The theoretical and methodological approaches taken in this dissertation were inspired by the premise that environmental management theory and practice would benefit from closer contact with critical theoretical discussions about the epistemology of scientific knowledge and political theories of difference. The three empirical chapters are case studies of the Department of Energy's experiences managing the legacies of environmental contamination left by atomic weapons production at Hanford in Washington State, and the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Labs. These case studies suggest that the very idea of objectively measuring and manipulating nature, a premise of environmental management, has changed as a result of increasingly pluralistic citizen involvement in decision making. In this sense, the nature of fairness is that people recreate the means and justifications of managing the environment in the context of where they work, play, and what they imagine of places.;This effort contributes to environmental management practice and theory by comparing today's managerial orientations to those in the past, and indicating future alternatives. The prevailing view is that an appropriate goal for environmental managers is to create a political space for communicative reason in hope (if not ever achieved) of reaching public consensus on the facts and identifying reasonable goals. The alternative offered here is to accept that people's facts and values for places are mutually constituted, and that conflict is evidence of democracy functioning well. More narrowly, this dissertation demonstrates a survey-based method for comparative cultural analysis of orientations toward objectivity and pluralism; that INEEL stakeholders retain faith in objectivity but have less trust in expertise than in past decades; that Hanford stakeholders used a future land use planning process to make the future in the manner of an imagined past; that Hanford stakeholders held to the notion of objectivity even while their involvement in a scientific assessment made objectivity problematic.