Dark Horses

‘The aim of this book,” Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky write in the conclusion to Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (University of California Press, $14.95), “has been to understand the social forces that speak on behalf of environmental protection in America.” Certainly they succeed in understanding part of them, and in creating what is for the most part a shrewd and provocative book.

“What are Americans afraid of?” Oh: