Remembering Jim Flynn

The family, friends, and colleagues of Jim Flynn are deeply saddened by his death on November 28. Here, I would like to reflect on my experience with this special man. I first met Jim in the mid-1980s in a Las Vegas hotel. He and his colleague, Jim Chalmers, and several others called a meeting of risk researchers to plan a proposal to the Nuclear Waste Project Office of the State of Nevada (NWPO). Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the state was given access to funds to sponsor research to assess the potential social and economic impacts of siting the nation’s highlevel nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles from Las Vegas. The funding came through and Jim became the project manager, responsible for coordinating the efforts of a motley group of headstrong economists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and geographers who made up the research team. This project, which lasted for about a decade, was scrutinized closely by two “watchdogs,” Bill Freudenburg and John Gervers, along with a tough advisory committee chaired by famed geographer Gilbert White. The stakes were high and the pressure to do quality work was intense—made ever more so by the hostility of the Department of Energy (DOE) officials who were hoping to site and build the repository and who sat in on our meetings with disapproving looks on their faces. Through this adventure, I came to know and respect Jim as a skilled and thoughtful manager of people and projects. Our team was enormously productive and our reports were of great value to the state and to the scholarly literature on risk perception and stigma. I was very pleased when Jim and C. K. relocated to Eugene in 1990 to become part of Decision Research. We recognized Jim as one of the foremost experts on social issues pertaining to nuclear power and nuclear wastes and he welcomed the opportunity to move toward being a researcher, rather than a research manager. I was impressed by how quickly Jim honed his skills as an academic researcher, crafting surveys, analyzing data, and writing reports for journal publication. He was a great colleague, energetic and competent, with a gentle manner and a unique gift for exposing government and corporate practices that disrespected the public and put them at risk. Jim authored or co-authored some 37 publications between 1991 and 2003, including two books and an article in Science. He was first author of a paper with C. K. and me titled “Gender, Race, and Perception of Environmental Health Risks” (1994) that discovered the famous “white male effect” in risk perception (a subset of the white male population— about 30%—held authoritarian and anti-egalitarian views and perceived virtually no risk from environmental hazards). This paper is the fifth most-cited article (out of about 3,400) published in the journal Risk Analysis (380 citations). Not bad for someone whose Ph.D. was in English Literature! Jim had a strong sensitivity to hypocrisy and injustice and he championed respect for the rights and safety of the public in the face of threats posed by industry and technology. He wrote convincingly about “technological stigma” and was first author of a book on that topic. He bristled at the arrogance of the nuclear industry and the Department of Energy as they attempted to site the Yucca Mountain repository with little or no regard for public values and concerns. Writing in Science magazine in 1991, he said: Viewing the nuclear-waste problem as one of distrust in risk management gives important insights into its intractability.” When DOE hired