Amazon.com description: Product Description: Divided We Stand is an account of the virtues and failures of environmental risk assessment. In the authors view, the assessment process involves politics, technology, and issues of social choice, an unstructured grouping that often presents contradictory and confusing standpoints: the virtues of science and the scientific method are extolled on the one hand and condemned on the other; no viable solutions are offered; and there is no real understanding of the issues being discussed. The authors analyze this chaotic situation by applying what they call cultural theory - the synthesis of a number of recent intellectual developments, particularly in the anthropology and natural resource ecology. This book will be of interest to students and scholars from such diverse disciplines as industrial engineering, natural science, urban planning, and design, and anthropology.