The Mechanism In The Presentation Of Environmental Risks In The View Of Constructionism

Nowadays, with the rapid development of our economy and industry, a lot of environmental risks have surfaced. As a consequence of these, Social contradictions and conflicts are increasingly aggravating. China has step into a period of multi-compound environmental risks. Therefore, it’s of great significance to study environmental risks of contemporary society.Constructionism and realism are two basic perspectives in the study of environmental risks, traditional sociological theories always put emphasis on the objectivity and naturality of environmental risks, treat them as simple scientific problems, and give them explanations from natural or environmental science. However, theories of environmental constructivism focus on the relations between environment and society, they are more concerned with the process of issuing risks and how the activities of environment stakeholders make objective environment convert into social issues. Constructivists hold the idea that there are three important steps in the social presentation of a environmental issues, including claim integration, expression and competition.Based on this theory,taking the opposition to the expansion of the domestic waste incinerator in J Area as an example, this paper tries to analysis the mechanism in the social presentation of environmental risks,including claim integration, expression and competition. At the primary stage of presentation, stakeholders choose their own cognitions according to their different knowledge and interest, then collect materials to support their views, define the risks and give them names, thus develop their claims. After that, at the stage of claim expression, different stakeholders use varieties methods to attract attention, including the change of risks’familarity, correlation and catastrophe. the achievement of the legitimacy is another important task in this stage, the selection of rhetoric and utterance are of crucial importance in this stage, at the same time, the legalization of the proposer is another way to promote a claim. At last stage of claim competition, to push its claims to the political agendas, stakeholders will use their resource to compete in the fields of society, media, science etc. and finally finish the presentation of the environmental risks. The control and utilization of resource have became the most important strategy in the whole process of presentation. Environmental risks are not only objective facts, it’s also the results of people’s subjective construction. Owing to its uncertainties, each stakeholders participate actively to the presentation of environmental risks and make objective environment into social tissues.