"Precautionary Principle"

Sounds to me like everyone -- including maybe even President George W. Bush -- could get behind this principle:

"Where threats of serious or irreversible harm to people or nature exist, anticipatory action will be taken to prevent damages to human and environmental health, even when full scientific certainty about cause and effect is not available, with the intent of safeguarding the quality of life for current and future generations."

Pretty dramatic, eh? That very language is "[a]mong the various Comprehensive Plan amendments being considered by the [Seattle] City Council for adoption in 2004." And even more dramatic (and surprising to me) is that the Precautionary Principle

"was set forth in the Rio Declaration of the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment and was signed and ratified by the United States among other nations. It states:"In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."

My own immediate observation is that the City of Seattle's language has significantly removed any economic testing of the "Principle" by removing the "cost-effective" verbiage. Taking the language at its face-value and very seriously indeed, such a Principle could be used to overturn all constitutional protections in the sake of "precaution." It's a Principle which could be used to justify doing pretty-much anything one wants to do.

Also particularly missing is any respect for "property." The Principle calls for protection of "people" and of "nature" but neglects to mention "property." Is that a mere oversight?

I understand where proponents might be coming from. I am well-aware of the problem of global climate change and the scientific ambiguities and I am concerned. See my post from last August 2003: What is the small-c 'conservative' thing to do?

But language such as that contained in the "Precautionary Principle" is so broad and sweeping and unhindered that it might be used by, say, a President who wanted to launch a preventive strike against, say, a ruthless dictator who was draining vast marshes in order to punish the people who lived amongst them. But that couldn't happen, could it?

I am all for "caution" but "pre-caution" sounds to me like a wild card which might be used by people of meager principle.

UPDATE: As a practical and specific matter, when it comes to global climate change, I am probably in line with doing 'cost-effective' things to attempt to deal with the matter; whether the cause is a product of industrialization or natural is somewhat a separate issue; in any case there is a problem. But the language of the Principle -- when I see it in black & white on my screen -- is a bit troubling as a general social policy.

Comments

[Ophelia Benson]

Yep. One notices the same thing with the debate GM foods. All too often people talk as if all the risk - all of it, not even just most of it, but all of it - were in using GM seeds. But what about the risk of not using them? What about the risks of bad harvests, for instance? There's a bizarre sort of logic at work by which whatever the status quo arrangement is, is taken as a given, and the innovation is closely investigated for risk (but not benefit). It would surely seem more reasonable to ask what are the risks of taking both courses of action, not just one. Innovation itself ought not to be automatically more suspect than What We Are Doing Now. Or at least, if it is, it would be nice to see some explanation of why it is.