Community at Risk: Biodefense and the Collective Search for Security

By Thomas D. Beamish

In 2001, following the events of September 11 and the Anthrax attacks, the United States government began an aggressive campaign to secure the nation against biological catastrophe. Its agenda included building National Biocontainment Laboratories (NBLs), secure facilities intended for research on biodefense applications, at participating universities around the country. In Community at Risk, Thomas D. Beamish examines the civic response to local universities' plans to develop NBLs in three communities: Roxbury, MA; Davis, CA; and Galveston, TX. At a time when the country's anxiety over its security had peaked, reactions to the biolabs ranged from vocal public opposition to acceptance and embrace. He argues that these divergent responses can be accounted for by the civic conventions, relations, and virtues specific to each locale. Together, these elements clustered, providing a foundation for public dialogue. In contrast to conventional micro- and macro-level accounts of how risk is perceived and managed, Beamish's analysis of each case reveals the pivotal role played by meso-level contexts and political dynamics. Community at Risk provides a new framework for understanding risk disputes and their prevalence in American civic life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford Business Books
• Release date: May 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9780804794657

Thomas D. Beamish

Thomas D. Beamish is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis, and author of Silent Spill: The Organization of an Industrial Crisis and Community at Risk: Biodefense and the Collective Search for Security.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beamish, Thomas D., author.

Community at risk : biodefense and the collective search for security / Thomas D. Beamish.

pages cm.—(High reliability and crisis management)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-8442-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Risk management—Political aspects—United States—Case studies.   2. Biosecurity—United States—Public opinion—Case studies.   3. Biological laboratories—United States—Public opinion—Case studies.   4. Bioterrorism—Prevention—Research—Public opinion—Case studies.   5. Public opinion—United States—Case studies.   6. Local government—United States—Case studies.   I. Title.   II. Series: High reliability and crisis management.

HD61.B43   2015

363.325'360973—dc23

2014045953

ISBN 978-0-8047-9465-7 (electronic)

Typeset by Newgen in 10/15 Sabon

COMMUNITY AT RISK

BIODEFENSE AND THE COLLECTIVE SEARCH FOR SECURITY

Thomas D. Beamish

STANFORD BUSINESS BOOKS

An Imprint of Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

HIGH RELIABILITY AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT

Series Editors: Karlene H. Roberts and Ian I. Mitroff

SERIES TITLES

Leadership Dispatches: Chile’s Extraordinary Comeback from Disaster

By Michael Useem, Howard Kunreuther, and Erwann Michel-Kerjan

2015

The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience

By Kathleen Tierney

2014

Learning From the Global Financial Crisis: Creatively, Reliably, and Sustainably

Edited by Paul Shrivastava and Matt Statler

2012

Swans, Swine, and Swindlers: Coping with the Growing Threat of Mega-Crises and Mega-Messes

By Can M. Alpaslan and Ian I. Mitroff

2011

Dirty Rotten Strategies: How We Trick Ourselves and Others into Solving the Wrong Problems Precisely

By Ian I. Mitroff and Abraham Silvers

2010

High Reliability Management: Operating on the Edge

By Emery Roe and Paul R. Schulman

2008

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Conceptual Footings of Risk and Governance

2. Risk Communication, Local Civics, and Discourse

3. Davis, California: Home Rule Civics and Biodefense

4. Roxbury, Massachusetts: Direct Action Civics and Biodefense

5. Galveston, Texas: Managed Civics and Biodefense

Conclusion: The Civic Politics of Risk

Appendix: Research Strategy

Notes

Index

Illustrations

MAPS

Map 3.1. Davis, California

Map 4.1. Roxbury and Boston city neighborhoods

Map 5.1. Galveston city and island

TABLES

Table I.1. Community cases for comparison, 2010

Table 2.1. Comparative civics and discourse: Davis, Roxbury, and Galveston

Table 3.1. Davis, California, regional city socioeconomic and educational differences

Table 3.2. Themes, letters to the editor, Davis Enterprise, December 2002–November 2003

Table 4.1. Roxbury, Massachusetts, Boston metro area socioeconomic and educational neighborhood comparison

Table 5.1. Themes, letters to the editor, Galveston County Daily News, and submitted FEIS comments, January 2003–December 2004

FIGURES

Figure I.1. Biosafety level-4 hazmat suit

Figure 3.1. Frequency, letters to the editor, Davis Enterprise, December 2002–November 2003

Figure 5.1. Frequency, letters to the editor, Galveston County Daily News, and submitted FEIS comments, January 2003–December 2004

Acknowledgments

I would like to begin by thanking the National Science Foundation. Generous funding from the NSF’s Infrastructure Systems Management and Hazards Response subsection of the Civic, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation division made Community at Risk and its ambitious case comparative methodology possible (grant number #0509812). What is more, the initial ideas behind and the support for the project were the outcome of a two-year fellowship, part of the NSF Enabling the Next Generation of Hazards Researchers Program, then housed at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. In the context of that fellowship, a handful of research mentors and NSF directors, including Denis Wenger, Kathleen Tierney, Peter J. May, Howard Kunreuther, Raymond Burby, William A. Wallace, Michael K. Lindell, Susan L. Cutter, and Linda B. Bourque, offered their valuable time and experience in developing a defensible, and therefore competitive and fundable, research proposal. Of these, Kathleen Tierney, Peter J. May, Denis Wenger, Raymond Burby, and Howard Kunreuther deserve special thanks for their help in the early stages of Community at Risk. They shared general ideas about how to frame and analyze risk and risk-related research, posed difficult questions, and provided pointed comments on early drafts of a research proposal. Also important to my efforts were conversations with the other NSF fellows in those initial two years, especially Tom Cova, JoAnn Carmin, Colin Polsky, and Jenny Rudolph.

Once funded to pursue the research for Community at Risk, my efforts were supported by a handful of students at the University of California–Davis, where I had joined the faculty in 2003. Without the help of early research assistants like Kirk Prestegard and Amy Luebbers, who helped gather the data on which the analysis in Community at Risk rests, this book would have been nearly impossible. Students Dina Biscotti and Kelsey Meagher were also vital in creating analytic tables of the information gleaned from telephone interviews that greatly informed and enhanced my conclusions.

Once the data collection and analysis had been completed, I put the results on paper. The first report focused on the alliance that had formed between Roxbury’s civic activists and those from outside Boston who had joined them in their protests against Boston University’s plans to build and host a federally funded National Biocontainment Laboratory. Vicki Smith, Ryken Grattet, Paul Lichterman, Julie Sze, David Smilde, and Michael McQuarry supplied thoughtful comment and critique on that paper, which was later published in the journal Social Problems. More important to this book effort, that paper’s focus on the civic dynamics of protest and alliance in Roxbury helped me to better understand the role that local social and political dynamics played in framing what was at stake and ultimately the civic politics of risk. This focal point would frame my analysis in subsequent community cases and provide the substantive argument behind the larger book effort.

I then began to intensively analyze and pursue what would become Community at Risk and submitted chapters to a UCD writing group for critique. Group members included Eddy U, Stephanie Mudge, and Ming-Cheng Lo. All supplied criticisms that helped me to organize my thoughts and theories about what appears on the pages that follow. Later, another writing group in UCD’s Humanities Center examined some chapters. Participants included Patrick Carroll, Ryken Grattet, Julie Sze, Jonathan London, Charlotte Biltekoff, and Natalie Deep-Sosa, all of whom also provided useful criticisms from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including American studies; geography; environmental justice; agriculture, food, and technology; science and technology studies; and law and legal studies. They lent perspective to my sociological rendering of what risk acceptability meant in the three civic and community cases I investigated.

Important also was Chip Clarke’s review of an early draft of one chapter. Chip provided insightful criticism that strengthened my overall effort. David Pellow also improved the manuscript with incisive critique and suggestions as it moved toward publication. Anonymous reviewers of the text also provided lucid comment that pushed my thoughts and therefore the text contained herein. What is more, I am grateful to Margo Beth Fleming and James Holt at Stanford University Press for supporting this project, answering my many questions, and guiding the manuscript through the editorial process. Margo did a wonderful job creating a structure of expectations and dates that pushed the manuscript (and author!) that, although ambitious, were achievable. Both Margo and James helped to make this a better book than it would have otherwise been.

I also owe an incalculable debt to the more than 200 persons and organizations who answered the many questions my research associates and I posed to them. Some of those I spoke with even hazarded rebuke or worse from the universities where they worked or the communities where they lived. Therefore, because my conversations sometimes involved sensitive topics and revealing comments about both the individuals I interviewed and their allies and adversaries, I promised all my informants confidentiality. Therefore, the names and identities of my interviewees are withheld by mutual agreement. While I do not share their names, their voices collectively provide for much of the analysis that follows.

Finally, from the beginning of the project, Thom E. Beamish, my father, shared his perspectives and ideas regarding the influence that civic politics might have on risk, risk perception, and risk management efforts. While we may not always agree—indeed, in our wide-ranging discussions, we often do not—in the end his hard questions and observations had to be answered and therefore never ceased to push and inspire me. He may not know it, but his son appreciates his curiosity and questions and the faith he has always had in me. This book owes a good deal to that faith.

Introduction

THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS AND BIODEFENSE PLANS

Beginning on September 18, 2001, five letters containing anthrax arrived at the headquarters of ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Post, and the National Enquirer. Postmarked exactly one week after the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, those five letters were soon followed by others. In the end, 28 persons tested positive for exposure, 17 developed infections, and 5 died from inhaling anthrax in what would become the most fearsome act of bioterrorism in U.S. history (Daschle 2006; Kaiser 2011).

Yet, loss of life and physical injury may not have been the most indelible legacies of the anthrax attacks. Nearly a decade after the attacks, the FBI and other federal agencies still had not positively identified those responsible. Who did it, and why? Did the attacks represent an outside act of bioterrorism, or were they an inside job?¹ And what can the federal government do to prevent future attacks? Even after the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded in 2010 that they had been the work of a domestic scientist working at Fort Detrick, Maryland, many scientists and experts were unconvinced and insisted that America was still vulnerable (Broad and Shane 2011; Shane 2008, 2010a, 2010b). Because the attacks remained unsolved for so long, controversy haunted efforts to improve the nation’s biodefense systems.

Nonetheless, despite the lack of a culprit or connection to the events of September 11, in 2003, President George W. Bush would publicly conflate the two events based on temporal association. Invoking a moral panic (Cohen 1972; Goode and Ben-Yahuda 1994)² regarding the threat posed by foreign terrorists, Bush declared that men who would seize planes filled with innocent people and crash them into buildings would not hesitate to use biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons to achieve their aims (Bush 2003; Knobler, Mahmoud, and Pray 2002; National Research Council 2003; White House 2003). The implication was that the risks exposed by the September 11 and anthrax attacks represented outside interests determined to destroy America, as opposed to an inside risk posed by domestic security efforts and those associated with them.

Paralleling Bush’s claims, key federal agencies whose agendas included protecting against biological threats were now prioritized for funding and began to plan in earnest for the nation’s biosecurity.³ Biodefense for the 21st Century was a three-pronged risk management project that called for enhancing advanced biomedical applications’ development and testing, distributing countermeasures and vaccines, and creating a network of research institutions and ultrasecure National Biocontainment Laboratories (NBLs) (Mair, Maldin, and Smith 2006; NIAID 2002a, 2002b, 2002c). The overarching idea of the push was to shore up domestic protections and national preparedness through the development of a research/response network that could react quickly and efficiently to acts of bioterrorism. The federal government would spend some $14.5 billion between 2001 and 2004 alone to address the nation’s perceived vulnerability to biothreats (Schuller 2004) and some $78.3 billion by 2012 (Franco and Sell 2012).

One of the primary agencies involved in the new risk management plan was the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), whose annual budget increased by some $1.5 billion from 2002 to 2003 (Altman et al. 2005; Fauci and Zerhouni 2005; NIAID 2005). According to the NIAID, the priority placed on biodefense reflected a new model for the development of medical countermeasures to address the threat of bioterrorist attack. The old model was one in which vaccines were developed and given prophylactically to the armed forces to protect against pathogenic agents, stockpiles of which would also serve to preemptively vaccinate the general population in the event of an attack. In light of the attacks in 2001, national security elites deemed it insufficient to protect against the release of pathogens with catastrophic potential, known as Category A agents, all of which are easily disseminated, associated with high mortality rates, and able to inspire public panic and social disruption. Of course, if diseases such as these were to be weaponized and dispersed through an act of bioterrorism or war, the outcome would be disastrous. They therefore required special public health preparedness (NIAID 2011).

The precedence given to biodefense research focused on bioweapons agents increased so dramatically that it stirred controversy among experts in related fields of study. For instance, 700 microbiologists protested the newfound prioritization with an open letter to the NIH, claiming that the focus on bioweapons agents represented a misdirection of NIH priorities and a crisis for NIH-supported microbiological research (Altman et al. 2005). In response, NIAID director Anthony Fauci justified this increase by underscoring the threat presented by biological agents such as bacteria, viruses, and toxins. He noted how the recent deliberate exposure of the civilian population of the United States to Bacillus anthracis spores [had] revealed a gap in the nation’s preparedness against bioterrorism, and stressed the need for an accelerated research and development agenda . . . aimed at protection of the world population against future attacks (Fauci and Zerhouni 2005; NIAID 2002a, p. 1).

And while the conflict over biodefense plans initially played out among security officials and public health experts in professional venues and journals, by 2003 it had spread to the public as well. In some communities where the federal government wanted to build NBLs for research on bioweapons agents and extreme pathogens, the residents actively engaged in civic debates regarding those plans and what they meant locally.

Community at Risk focuses on three such locales where biodefense plans sparked local dialogue and debate. I investigated and compared civic responses to local university proposals to host NBLs in Roxbury, Massachusetts; Davis, California; and Galveston, Texas. I chose these three communities as cases for comparison for a number of reasons. In brief, on October 15, 2002, the NIAID requested formal proposals from interested research universities and public health institutions to construct, house, and manage an NBL on the federal government’s behalf. The research institutions that applied included Boston University Medical Center, Oregon Health and Science University, New York State Department of Health, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Maryland School of Medicine, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, and University of California–Davis.

After hearing a national radio broadcast (circa June 2003) about organized resistance to the University of California–Davis’s biodefense plans, I focused my initial efforts there. Soon thereafter, I collected and analyzed media coverage from all seven locales to gain a comparative impression of public response. Analyzing a community’s reaction through the prism of news media coverage does not, of course, provide a definitive account of local sentiment. Nonetheless, my findings were revealing. In the seven locales, the number of articles in the local newspaper about the construction of NBLs during the year preceding NIAID’s awarding a federal grant included Boston Globe, 21; Portland Oregonian, 20; Albany Times Union, 5; Chicago Tribune, 2; Baltimore Sun, 3; Galveston Daily Democrat, 25; and Davis Enterprise, 237. Obviously, Davis stood out for the sheer volume of articles, editorial columns, and op-eds published locally, the vast majority of which conveyed opposition to the university’s biodefense ambitions for violating local priorities, beliefs, and values. Based on these findings, I initially focused my research on Davis.

On September 30, 2003, Tommy Thompson, then secretary of health and human services, announced that the future NBL sites would be at Boston University Medical Campus in Roxbury, Massachusetts (BUMC), and at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB). For the University of California–Davis (UCD), the announcement represented defeat. In the year leading up to the secretary’s announcement, several groups and individuals had mobilized against UCD’s biodefense ambitions in a manner that far exceeded the other locales in its organization and intensity. This made it an important case insofar as it was initially alone in its vocal and public dispute.

Given that they were awarded funds to both build and manage an NBL as well as federal designations as Regional Centers of Excellence, which meant they would receive millions in federal money to promote research in the new biolab on extreme diseases, I chose Roxbury and Galveston for comparison with the Davis case. Within a year of BUMC’s award, it would confront a growing coalition of groups and individuals who opposed an NBL in Boston, which were initially organized by neighborhood residents of Roxbury and centered on claims of environmental racism and injustice. In Galveston, no movement against UTMB’s biodefense plans would materialize. Those who engaged the issue there would embrace UTMB’s efforts and the local NBL as a sign of progress. As I suggest in the Appendix, where I share the details of my research strategy, the three regions made excellent comparative cases for other reasons as well, including their demographic profiles, their diverse geographic locations, and their distinctive cultural orientations, all of which were reflected in how local citizens responded to biodefense plans.

I subsequently undertook five years of intensive field research in each community, during which I conducted 100 in-depth interviews and 135 semistructured telephone surveys,⁴ had numerous informal conversations and email correspondences, attended public forums and community events, analyzed local news media coverage, and collected and analyzed archival materials, including environmental impact reports, city documents, civic group documents, and white papers.⁵ My specific focus was reconstruction and analysis of the public dialogue and debate that ensued over the biodefense issue in each locale as it unfolded.

My interest in a comparative study of this kind was in exploring why and how each community responded in the way that it did to the kind of technological initiative and risk management plan represented by federal biodefense efforts. I investigated the different public claims and arguments made for and against the establishment of an NBL in each community. My overriding purpose was to highlight the role that the civic politics native to any given community play in shaping one of the most pernicious bases for public dispute in contemporary America: risk and efforts to manage it. The three cases provided an unusual opportunity for such a comparison because each one responded differently to identical risk management plans. They also provided an excellent cross section of community life in America, based on demographic profiles and locations (see Table I.1).

My use of a comparative framework to study the response of these communities to biodefense plans was also motivated by both practical and theoretical considerations. The comparative approach provided a basis for theoretical development in a way that single case exploration could not. I conducted the research in three communities engaged in intense dialogue over the same national issue, at a historical moment when uncertainty over the nation’s security peaked (circa 2001–2009). Field studies that provide this kind of comparative leverage are rare; the circumstances were akin to a naturally occurring experiment wherein the stimulus—the national context and biodefense as a risk management plan—was held constant, while local response varied widely. In essence, my search was for what explained this range of responses.

TABLE I.1   Community cases for comparison, 2010

Note: The U.S. Census lists as Hispanic or Latino (of any race) and therefore totals can be more than 100%. Other includes Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, American Indian, Alaskan Native, some other race, and two or more races.

My findings also hold practical implications. Comparative studies such as this can furnish useful information to policy makers and a public seeking security. These and related questions go to the heart of tensions between democratic institutions and civic expectations, as well as the technocratic and even authoritarian tendencies associated with ever-increasing risk and its management. In short, my study sheds light on a phenomenon that defines our age: the politics of risk.

A BIODEFENSE CONTROVERSY AND RISK DISPUTE

As we have seen, despite governmental plans to manage the risk posed by extreme biological pathogens, there was little consensus regarding the appropriate response to it and which agents posed the greatest danger. Indeed, some critics believed there was as much to fear from the government’s new biodefense plan and its research, facilities, and personnel as there was from potential acts of bioterrorism or naturally occurring pandemics (Kaiser 2005, 2011). In their minds, the proposed solution could easily become part of the problem.

Experts and pundits opposed to federal biodefense plans argued that America would be better served by addressing more common public health threats (such as influenza and antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis), rather than channeling billions into thinly veiled military programs and Department of Defense–sponsored NBLs (Cohen, Gould, and Sidel 1999; Goodenough and Ozonoff 2006).⁶ Others claimed that a proliferation of ultrasecure research facilities would simply increase the number of attractive targets for terrorism and elevate the possibility of non-terror-related accidents that would make society less safe (Enserink and Kaiser 2005; Kahn and Ashford 2001; Sidel, Gould, and Cohen 2002; Srinivasan et al. 2001). Some even made the case that the government’s biodefense plan and its associated infrastructure were merely mechanisms for channeling billions of dollars into the hands of elites, often at the expense of those who lived near such facilities (Haynes, Allen, and Lawrence 2007).

In Davis, Roxbury, and Galveston, local concerns and histories heavily shaped the way civic conversations about these plans played out. The various institutions, civic groups, and individuals involved—including activists, university administrators, and various business elites—put forth competing impressions of the NBLs that reflected differing definitions of what represented the common good in their community, as well as what threatened it the most. The variety of responses expressed by the different groups within and between each community exposed opposing and sometimes even antagonistic expectations and assumptions about how society should evaluate and manage collective risk.

Expectations regarding what is and is not acceptable risk can vary by context, such as by formal/informal and public/private situations; by social position, such as by professional identity and affiliation, or race, class, and gender differences; and by level of analysis, such as by micro-level personal psychology or, as I emphasize and argue, at the meso-level as reflected in community-based civic politics. Indeed, I found local expectations and responses to the risks posed by biodefense plans to largely reflect civic-scale issues; they were founded in local governance expectations, political relations and rivalries, and shared value-commitments. More broadly, I also argue that the tensions I found represented in the local civic dynamics and response to biodefense plans are characteristic of the sometimes fraught relations among modernity’s institutional triumvirate of state, market, and civil society. Indeed, the variant civic logics I analyze in this book highlight tensions inherent to both community contexts like those I studied as well as society in general when they confront potentially transformative interventions and economic developments that engage modernity’s trustee institutions as represented by state agencies, industry interests, and civil societal advocates because different governance logics and associated values prevail in each of them.

Amplifying the probability of dispute is a growing recognition among the general public that something is always at stake. This now-pervasive sentiment reflects contemporary political relations characteristic of risk society (Bauman 2007; Beck 1992; Freudenburg 1993, 2000; Giddens 1990; Short 1984). The risk society label captures the contemporary preoccupation with the future, the potential for safety or harm, and predicting the relationship between them. It also captures a growing cynicism in the west regarding progress, as efforts to control the future have inexorably led to a proliferation of manufactured hazards and, with them, a diminished sense of security (Giddens 1990, 1999). Competing expectations and principles used to evaluate both what is at risk as well as how to manage it lie at the heart of the contemporary politics of risk.

The qualities that define risk society were embodied in the arguments over biodefense plans. The localized risk disputes that ensued after the events of 9/11 and the temporally associated anthrax attacks therefore provided a unique opportunity to explore the processes by which risk is locally assessed, accepted, or resisted—and therefore politicized—as well as to how it is managed by the state and its surrogates in the twenty-first century. By risk, I mean a situation in which something of great collective worth—for example, human life, property, or cherished values—is perceived to be at stake and its future status is uncertain (cf. Jaeger et al. 2001). By risk dispute, I refer to public conflicts that ensue when the state or its surrogates, which I term trustee institutions or simply trustees, introduce what are perceived to be new risks or initiate plans to manage risks on behalf of society. Trustee institutions, then, are authoritative bodies that purport to benefit the public(s) they serve.

This book approaches these practices through a series of guiding questions: Why has reaction to federal biodefense plans been so varied, particularly in a time of perceived high national vulnerability? How do the government and its surrogates pursue issues of risk and its management, and how is this related to public response? How does the public respond and why? What roles do ongoing social and political struggles and issues play in specific risk disputes? What, if any, are the connections among a priori beliefs, support or opposition, and risk dispute? And finally, what role do citizens and communities play in shaping risk management strategies themselves?

Scholars across a variety of disciplines have sought answers to these and other related questions. Empirical studies have tended to approach risk disputes as either problems of risk management or as matters of public perception. As risk management problems, risk disputes have mainly been studied at the national and cross-national levels based on the analysis of scientific standards, policy construction, the actions of policy elites who have sought to manage risks on behalf of the publics they claim to serve, and the national political movements that have sought to modify or stop their plans (see also Aldrich 2008; Bauer 1995; Jasanoff 1986, 1997; Jasper 1990; Rucht 1990, 1995). As matters of public perception, the study of risk disputes has typically taken the form of cognitive behavioral studies and less frequently as social and cultural accounts of risk. What is more, in a clear majority of these studies the question has focused on why the public misperceives risk, such that they oppose what the experts claim are reasonable efforts at managing societal risks.

The study of risk disputes has therefore tended to cluster at either the macro-societal level or at the micro-cognitive level. In so doing, it overlooks the meso-level where community and regional contexts and life takes shape and where such disputes often originate and are carried out. Too few studies have sought to explain risk perception and dispute at the civic level, wherein differing social and political experiences, social positions, and cultural resources translate into distinctive civic relations, governance conventions, and resonant social values, all of which shape what is deemed at stake. These differences can, and often do, lead to tensions, debate, and even risk dispute.

In analyzing each community’s response to biodefense plans, I found that I could not trace back the local style of civic engagement to an individual or group, nor were they reducible to an established political ideology or American polity generally. Rather, they existed as a meso-level structuring influence reflective of local civic dynamics. I therefore explain local community variation as rooted in variant civic conventions regarding authority and its exercise; ongoing civic relations and local political rivalries; and the distinctive civic virtues and associated value-commitments that resonated in each community. In each locale, these three factors produced a local civics and discourse that provided a strong set of cultural resources on which public engagement and dialogue were largely based. Put differently, local response to biodefense was grounded in who was pursuing it and furthermore who supported and opposed them in town (civic relations); impressions of how biodefense plans were being pursued and authority applied (civic conventions); and finally "what the implications of those plans were for community life given