Community ecology and communication barriers: Advancing communicative structures of environmental health issues to build community capacity

Communities facing potential environmental exposures often feel that government-based environmental agencies are not adequately addressing their concerns regarding risk, thus resulting in misunderstanding and distrust. Environmental communication plays a critical role in addressing the public's growing awareness and apprehension about environmental health risks. Although opportunities for public participation in environmental health assessments have greatly increased, the communication of perceived or actual risk information among key stakeholders needs further evaluation. We conducted a cross-sectional study and structured interviews to 1.) evaluate the perceptions of risk held by two geographically distinct communities that host identical municipal solid waste incinerators; and 2.) examine the communicative structures among key stakeholders, defined as a state environmental agency, community activists and the general public. We illustrate how the understanding of a community's ecology (i.e., social, cultural, economic, and political composition) can contribute to building capacity to affect local environmental management. We demonstrate that human health, environmental health, and quality of life concerns from waste-to-energy facilities are socially complex; involve multiple stakeholder responsibility; require individual and organizational behavior change; and are characterized by policy failure. The effort put forth to understanding a community's ecology helped to 1.) explain the community's resistance to accept the findings from health studies; and 2.) propose place-specific strategies to assist community capacity building. We propose that practitioners need to consider a community's ecology and social context of risk as they pertain to environmental health issues. These factors will determine how diverse communities interpret and respond to environmental communication and capacity building efforts.