Ecological Risk Assessment and Ecosystem Health: Fallacies and Solutions

ABSTRACT

After surveying the two main paradigms for ecological risk assessment, this commentary discusses two mistakes often associated with the paradigm based on ecosystem health. These are the beard fallacy and the pragmatist fallacy. The argument is that if you really learn from experience with quantitative (human health) risk assessment, you can avoid importing similar fallacies into ecological risk assessment. The commentary suggests strategies for avoiding each of these fallacies and thus for improving analyses of ecosystem health.