FLOOD03743

• County: Statewide
• Basin: Statewide
• Title: 25th Annual Celebration Hazards Research and Applications Workshop
• Date: 7/9/2000
• Floodplain - Doc Type: Educational/Technical/Reference Information

e

e

e

PSOO-27

Christine M. Rodrigue
Department of Geography
California State University
Long Beach, CA 90840
E-mail address: [e-mail]

Internet Recruitment and Activism in the Cassini Controversy

Social construction of hazard policy entails a risk assessment dialogue between technical experts
and public interest activists and between each of these and elected risk management
policy-makers. These dialogues are conducted in the often distorting presence of media and take
place in a terrain of public involvement and recruitment to political action.

This poster illustrates this theme in a case study of a recent technological risk controversy: the
.use of plutonium dioxide radioisotope thennal generators (RTGs) on board the Cassini-Huygens
mission to Saturn, in light of its gravity-assist swing by Earth in August 1999. The data consist
ofInternetdialogues on the topic, specifically, UseNet postings from I April 1995 through 31
March 1999. They illustrate the exponential impact of a very small and well-organized
opposition movement, which utilized the Internet to exert pressure to abort the launch and flyby.
Though Cassini went on to Saturn, the resulting political pressure has created an atmosphere in
which new missions may be more difficult to authorize if their goals and design require RTGs.

The success of the anti-Cassini activists raises questions about the nature of hazard
decision-making in a democratic but unevenly informed society and about the sources of uneven
access to information. It underscores the empowerment of small but well-organized groups in
the realm of natural and technological hazard policy and the potential of the Internet in
heightening individual empowennent in such debates, It does raise less heartening issues of
demagoguery in cyberspace, however.