In a recent study of the fears of average Americans, water pollution and drinking water quality ranked third and fourth on the list. Last May, the Chapman University “Survey of American Fears Wave 4” asked a random sample of 1,207 U.S. adults their level of fear about 80 topics, including crime, government, environment, disasters, personal anxieties and others.
A majority of Americans (53.1 percent) fear pollution of “oceans, rivers and streams,” according to the report, and researchers suggested this might be traced to the Trump Administration’s reversal of environmental policies of the Obama Administration. Fear of water pollution consistently outranks other environmental problems in the mind of the public, they said.
Slightly more than half of those surveyed (50.4 percent) expressed fear for the quality of their drinking water, which the study said might be attributed to prominent news coverage of lead contamination in the drinking water of Flint, Michigan, as well as the subsequent discovery of contaminated drinking water in other communities around the country.
The Chapman researchers said environmental issues had never cracked the top ten fears in previous surveys. This year, water fears outranked terrorism, North Korea’s nuclear weapons and high medical bills, among many others.
More information on the study is online at https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/category/fear-index.