The precautionary principle is designed to allow government authorities to respond pre-emptively, as well as after damage is inflicted, with a lower threshold of scientific certainty than has normally been the rule of thumb in the past. “Scientific certainty” has been tempered by the notion of “reasonable grounds for concern.” The precautionary principle gives authorities the maneuverability and flexibility to respond to events in real time, either before they unfold or while they are unfolding, so that potential adverse impacts can be forestalled or reduced while the suspected causes of the harm are being analyzed and evaluated.
Advocates of the precautionary principle argue that had it been invoked in the past, many of the adverse effects of new scientific and technological introductions might have been prevented, or at least mitigated, and they cite the introduction of halocarbons and the tear in the ozone hole in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, the outbreak of BSE in cattle, growing antibioticresistant strains of bacteria caused by the over-administering of antibiotics to farm animals, and the widespread deaths caused by asbestos, benzene, and PCBs.
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In these and other instances, there were telltale signs of potential harmful effects, often right from the time of their introductions. The warning signals were ignored for a variety of reasons, including conflict of interests among the researchers responsible for overseeing possible threats. For example, in the United States, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), is responsible for monitoring health problems in the nation’s farm animals and plants. But the USDA is also charged with the responsibility of promoting American agricultural products. In countless instances, the department has been less than rigorous in the pursuit of potential adverse environmental and health effects caused by existing agricultural practices, if those practices might, in any way, threaten the welfare of the agricultural interests they also serve.
In the case of the BSE outbreak in the U.K., it’s been pointed out subsequently in government hearings and public exposés that the reason the government regulatory body was so slow to respond to the spreading crisis is that its responsibility was to safeguard the industry it monitored and not consumers. Often, potential links went unexplored because the connections required interdisciplinary approaches that were never forthcoming. For example, veterinarians examining BSE in cattle failed to make the link with the disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a brain-wasting illness in humans, now known to be caused by eating beef from BSECONTAMINATED cattle. Had medical researchers been brought in early on to work with the veterinarians to explore the possible connection between the brain-wasting diseases in cattle and in humans, action to prohibit the spread of BSE to human populations might have occurred earlier, saving many more lives.
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In the case of halocarbons, PCBs, and methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), all artificial chemicals, their novelty itself should have raised some eyebrows. Researchers knew from the very beginning that these chemicals persist in the environment, are easily dispersible, and can become ubiquitous. So if problems do arise, it would be more difficult to get rid of them.
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Frequently, lay evidence of potential harm precedes clinical evidence by years, and even decades, but is ignored by the “experts” and the powers that be. Workers were aware of the harmful effects of asbestos and PCBs long before regulators turned their attention to the problems. In countless instances, local communities notice the causal association between ill health and local industrial activity well before public officials. Love Canal in the United States comes easily to mind.
The precautionary principle has been finding its way into international treaties and covenants. It was first recognized in 1982 when the UN General Assembly incorporated it into the World Charter for Nature.
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The precautionary principle was subsequently included in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992, the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty) in 1992, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety in 2000, and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in 2001.
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The European Union hopes that by integrating the precautionary principle into international treaties and multilateral agreements, it will become the unchallenged standard by which governments oversee and regulate science and technology around the world. While the U.S. has integrated aspects of the precautionary principle into some of its environmental regulations, for the most part America’s approach and standards are far more lax than the EU’s, while still arguably better than those of many other countries.
In recent years, the U.S. government, in tandem with U.S. industry, has taken every occasion to challenge the tougher approach to the precautionary principle taken by the EU. The U.S. views Europe’s tightening regulatory regime as a noose around American exports and is determined to thwart its efforts to make the principle the gold standard for the world. America’s National Foreign Trade Council best expressed U.S. governmental and industry concern in a report issued in May 2003. The council warned that the EU’s invocation of the precautionary principle “has effectively banned U.S. and other non-EU exports of products deemed hazardous, stifled scientific and industrial innovation, and advancement.”
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Margot Wallstrom, the EU’s outspoken environmental commissioner, made clear her belief that Europe and America were beginning to diverge in a fundamental way when it comes to the issue of sustainable development and global environmental stewardship. She noted that although environmental concerns appear last among nine issues of concern among American voters, they appear among the top-five most pressing issues for European voters.
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Wallstrom also observed that while “the environment is essentially a local issue within the U.S.... in Europe . . . there is a greater understanding among the broader public of the international and global dimension of the environmental challenge.”
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The bottom line, concludes Wallstrom, is that while in America environment is only a second-tier issue, “environmental policy has been one of the foundation stones of the European Union itself.”
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Wallstrom and others see the precautionary principle as the front line in their regulatory arsenal to advance the cause of sustainable development in a globalizing world.
But the import of the precautionary principle runs even deeper. It speaks to a profound shift in the way society views its relationship to nature and its approach to scientific pursuits and technological innovations. The European Enlightenment tradition, to which America has become the most enthusiastic supporter, puts a premium on power over nature. Americans, by and large, view nature as a treasure trove of useful resources waiting to be harnessed for productive ends. While Europeans share America’s utilitarian perspective, they also have another sensibility that is less prominent here in America—that is, a love for the intrinsic value of nature. One can see it in Europeans’ regard for the rural countryside and their determination to maintain natural landscapes, even if it means providing government assistance in the way of special subsidies or forgoing commercial development. Nature figures prominently in Europeans’ dream of a quality of life. Europeans spend far more time visiting the countryside on weekends and during their vacations than Americans. It is, for them, a valued pastime.
The balancing of urban and rural time is less of a priority for most Americans, many of whom are just as likely to spend their weekends at a shopping mall, while their European peers are hiking along country trails. Of course, there are plenty of Americans who prefer to spend their time in the great outdoors, just as there are many Europeans who prefer the comforts of urban recreation. Still, anyone who spends significant time in Europe and America knows, quite well, that there is a great affinity for rural getaways among Europeans. Almost everyone I know in Europe among the professional and business classes has some small second home in the country somewhere—a dacha usually belonging to the family for generations. While working people may not be as fortunate, on any given weekend they can be seen exiting the cities en masse, motoring their way into the nearest rural enclave or country village for a respite from urban pressures.
The strongly held values about rural life and nature is one reason why Europe has been able to support green parties across the continent, with substantial representation in national parliaments as well as in the European Parliament. By contrast, not a single legislator at the federal level in the U.S. is a member of a green party.
European determination to maintain a semblance of balance between a utilitarian and an intrinsic approach to nature makes them take more seriously their responsibility to sustainable development and global environmental stewardship. The precautionary principle is perceived, in part, as a way to balance the scales, if you will, between commercial development and preservation of the natural environment.
There is, however, another dimension to the European psyche, one we’ve alluded to repeatedly in earlier chapters, that makes Europeans more supportive of the precautionary principle than we might be in America—that is, their sense of the “connectedness” of everything. The precautionary principle is rooted in the idea that every scientific experiment, or technology application, or product introduction affects the environment in myriad ways that are complicated and difficult to assess. The older methods of determining risks, because they are reductionist, mechanistic, and linear in nature, don’t account for the subtlety of relationships in nature that are difficult to quantify or are unpredictable.
Because we Americans place such a high premium on autonomy, we are far less likely to see the deep connectedness of things. We tend to see the world in terms of containers, each isolated from the whole and capable of standing alone. Connectedness, to us, conjures up the notion of shared dependency and vulnerability, qualities we don’t much admire. Our sense of self and world makes us ideal disciples of the Enlightenment frame of mind, with its emphasis on harnessing and isolating discrete bits and pieces of nature for the purpose of transforming them into productive property. We like everything around us to be neatly bundled, autonomous, and self-contained, which is the way we think of ourselves in the world. Everything in the Enlightenment model of nature is detachable and convertible. There are no relationships, just things, either in motion or at rest, bombarding other things or inert. Enlightenment nature is eminently exploitable. Every “thing” can be grabbed and used without consequence to anything else. There is only opportunity, never responsibility, because all things exist alone and therefore have no relationship to one another.
The new view of science that is emerging in the wake of globalization is quite different. We are becoming increasingly aware of the connectedness of everything. Nature is viewed as a myriad of symbiotic relationships, all embedded in a larger whole, of which they are an integral part. In this new vision of nature, nothing is autonomous, everything is connected. Any effort to sever a part of the whole has consequences to everything else. There are no islands, no safe harbors, no self-contained eddies, only continuous interactivity, mutuality, and engagement.
Europeans, because of their dense spatial and temporal history, have a far better appreciation of the new model of nature. Their lives have been lived far more communally and with greater embeddedness than have ours in America. They understand the logic of the precautionary principle because they know that in a densely lived environment, everything one does affects everything else.
The precautionary principle calls on us to look beyond immediate activity, in isolation, and toward the whole context in which that activity unfolds. The sheer magnitude of today’s scientific and technological interventions can’t help but have significant and often long-lasting effects on the rest of nature—those effects can be potentially catastrophic and irreversible. The precautionary principle says, in effect, that because the stakes are so high, we have to weigh even the most dramatic benefits against the prospects of even more destructive consequences. The old Enlightenment science is too primitive and sophomoric to address a world where the bar for risk has been raised to the threshold of possible extinction itself. When the whole world is at risk because of the scale of human intervention, then a new scientific approach is required that takes the whole world into consideration. That is the logic at the heart of the precautionary principle.
Systems Thinking
Here, then, is the problem. The very success of Enlightenment science is now posing a fundamental conundrum for science. The more powerful the science and technology are becoming, the more complex and unpredictable are the impacts and consequences. Many in the scientific community worry that “the growing innovative powers of science seem to be outstripping its ability to predict the consequences of its applications, whilst the scale of human interventions in nature increases the chances that any hazardous impacts may be serious and global.”
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The old Enlightenment science seems to have run out of answers for how to deal with this new reality.
Enlightenment science is wedded to the notion that the behavior of the whole is best understood by analyzing the individual parts that make it up. The analytical method reduces all phenomena to its most fundamental building blocks and then examines the individual properties of each element in the hope of better understanding the construction of the whole. As mentioned in chapter 4, this mechanistic approach to science borrowed heavily from popular mechanical metaphors of the day. Machines can indeed be understood by taking them apart, analyzing their individual components, and then re-assembling them back into the whole. But in the real world of nature, behavior is not mechanistic and fixed, but conditional, open-ended, affected by other phenomena, and continually metamorphosing and mutating in response to the patterns of activity around it.