No muckrakers they, former Boston area TV environmental reporter David Ropeik and toxicologist George Gray serve up a book with the weighty subtitle “A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You.”

Both are now with the Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, founded by Bush Administration Office of Management and Budget regulatory cop John Graham. Ropeik, formerly an environmental reporter with WCVB-TV in Boston, shows himself to be at ease moving from local TV coverage’s “short form” to the long form of a 486-page tome. Emphasizing that the views expressed in the book are their own, and not necessarily those of their employer – and keenly aware of the reputation the Center has attained through its corporate financial backing and Graham’s own controversial regulatory philosophy – the authors run through 48 different risks in three categories --Home/Transportation/Work; Environment; Medicine.

Their basic message: People too often fear things that, in fact, shouldn’t be all that scary, based on the facts. They hope their “balanced and hype-free guide,” with each risk factor accompanied by a convenient, if not necessarily absolutely science-based “risk meter,” can lend fresh perspective. And put fears and, therefore, resources where they most deserve to be.

Ropeik and Gray by and large find many of the traditional environmental risks to be overblown in the mind of much of the public. For example, the likelihood of exposure and consequences from incinerators is low, but lower still, for instance, for mercury. For ozone depletion, the likelihood of exposure is medium and the consequences of exposure are at the upper end of the low range. For pesticides, the risk meter registers low both for likelihood and for consequences. Radon registers at the upper end of the low range for likelihood and at the lower end of the medium range for consequences, in terms of severity and numbers of people affected.

Not much may come as an enormous surprise to many of the risk experts familiar with these issues, and Ropeik and Gray provide a reasonable rationale, along with informal expert reviews, to defend their positions in each case. Whether it comes as a surprise to environmental reporters may be another issue. Contributing to the winter 2002 Nieman Reports (see related story, this issue), Ropeik says he would have been a better reporter all those years if he had understood the science of risk and “why people are so afraid of some relatively low risks and so unafraid of some relatively big ones.”

Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You; by David Ropeik and George Gray. Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, N.Y.; 2002; ISBN 0-618-14372-6; $16 in paperback; 485 pages.