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 has become the repository for a jumble of adventurous beliefs that challenge the status quo of political power, ideology and civil rights. Neither concept has much coherence other than it is captured by the spirit that is challenging the authority of science, the hegemony of cost benefit analysis, the powerlessness of victims of environmental abuse, and the unimplemented ethics of intrinsic natural rights and inter-generational equity. It is because the mood of the times needs an organising idea that the precautionary principle is getting a fair wind. However, unless its advocates sharpen up their understanding of the term, the precautionary principle may not establish the influence it deserves. Its future looks promising but it is not assured. 1 1. The Precautionary Principle in Context The environmental movement is both predatory and transforming. Over the past couple of decades, environmentalism has locked into other social movements such as rights to know and freedom of information; civil liberties in respect of health, freedom from oppression and the protection of indigenous cultural traditions; consumer power over companies or nations behaving against the rights of nature; feminism and gender issues generally but most particularly as these apply to the concerns of women over their health, their welfare and their own choice of giving birth; and to peace, security and the uneasy relationship between resource deprivation and civil strife. Because of this, environmentalism will never die. It will, however, metamorphose, and the political mechanisms through which it is articulated will change with the rise and fall of the “issue-attention cycle” (Downs, 1972). These relationships are captured in O’Riordan (1976), Pepper (1984), O’Riordan (1991a), Eckersley (1992), Mies and Shiva (1993) and most recently by Sachs (1993). Norton (1992) and Redclift (1993) have shown how sustainability has also become enmeshed in the environmental debate, unsuccessfully attempting to straddle the gaping divide between technical interpretations of replenishability and restoration, and more fundamental ethical responsibilities for protecting the intrinsic life support processes of an organic Earth and the well-being interests of future generations. To avoid the sustainability concept becoming meaningless, Norton (1992:98) calls for “... a set of principles, derivable from a core idea of sustainability, but sufficiently specific to provide significant guidance in day to day decisions and in policy choices affecting the environment”. Precaution could be one such principle, for it provides an intuitively simple guide to humans on how to intervene in environmental systems in a manner that is less damaging (Jordan and O’Riordan, 1995; O’Riordan, 1993). Admittedly, precaution lacks a specific definition and, as yet, it cannot prescribe specific actions or solve the kind of moral, ethical and economic dilemmas which are part and parcel of the modern environmental condition. None the less, the precautionary principle has much efficacy because it captures an underlying misgiving over the growing technicalities of environmental management at the expense of ethics, environmental rights in the face of vulnerability, and the facilitative manipulation of cost-benefit analysis. Paradoxically, as precaution becomes increasingly integrated into modern environmentalism it may well run the risk of following the dangerously successful pathway pioneered by sustainability