Abstract
By proclaiming that the protection of ecological health is as important as the protection of human health, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has called attention to the relatively unexplored area of ecological risk assessment (ERA). The new field of ERA, while still in its infancy, is rapidly expanding and finding frequent application at many national hazardous waste sites. As with any new methodology, the rapid development of ERA has generated many unresolved questions: Should ecological risk be based on risks to individuals, populations, or ecosystems? How much is society willing to pay to save a small number of individual animals? What is a de minimis level of risk for an ecosystem? More importantly, the recent interest in ERAs has focused attention on the extreme sensitivity of ecological systems to environmental insults. In fact, the widely held belief among health risk assessors that protecting for human health will protect for ecological health is challenged by a recent EPA ecological risk assessment that illustrates that this may not be the case.
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