Review: Precautionary Politics: Principle and Practice in Confronting Environmental Risk, by Kerry H Whiteside

The Precautionary Principle , Science , Politics and Ethics

In its restless metamorphosis, the environmental movement captures ideas and transforms them into principles, guidelines and points of leverage. Sustainability is one such idea, now being reinterpreted in the aftermath of the 1992 Rio Conference. So too is the precautionary principle. Like sustainability, the precautionary principle is neither a well defined principle nor a stable concept. It h...

The Precautionary Principle in Sustainable Environmental Management

The precautionary principle in environmental science.

Environmental scientists play a key role in society's responses to environmental problems, and many of the studies they perform are intended ultimately to affect policy. The precautionary principle, proposed as a new guideline in environmental decision making, has four central components: taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty; shifting the burden of proof to the proponents of an a...

Risk communication and the Precautionary Principle.

The perception of risks for environment and health deriving from globalization processes and an uncontrolled use of modern technologies is growing everywhere. The greater the capacity of controlling living conditions, the larger is the possibility of misusing this power. In environmental and occupational health research we tend to reduce the complexity of the observed phenomena in order to faci...

Response to review by Trevor Charles re: Precautionary Principle

Thank you for the review of our paper. We will provide a point by point response below to your comments. Since you have focused on biological questions, it is important for us to emphasize that we did not perform a “statistical analysis” (which is inherently evidentiary and data based and anchored in biological experiments). Instead, we are engaged in a rigorous analysis of risk as it is derive...