Precautionary Tale

The latest environmentalist concept--the Precautionary Principle--seeks to stop innovation before it happens. Very bad idea.

Ronald Bailey from the April 1999 issue

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This problem--deciding who gets to decide what--is just one of many slippery slopes that the Precautionary Principle teeters over. Of course, it quickly became apparent that, for the AAAS panel, the only democratic decisions that are acceptable are those consistent with environmentalist goals. But other obvious problems were never acknowledged.

For example, democratic decision making concerning any and all environment-affecting actions could have the effect of ratifying extraordinarily conservative choices. That is, a community could use its environmental veto to say, No, we don't want a new store, a new housing development, a new factory, a new road. Basically, it means that the vested interests of the present can strangle the future. After all, as one wag noted, an environmentalist is somebody who already owns his second home in the woods.

Of course, neither the regulators at the meeting nor the environmental activists on the AAAS panel considered a real solution: removing the decisions about resources from the political process entirely. Politics is always win/lose, while market decisions are generally win/win. Give fishermen, loggers, and cattlemen secure property rights to the resources, and that shifts their incentives toward trying to protect and enhance their resource, rather than merely plundering somebody else's resource.

Draconian as the Wingspread proposals are, Jeff Howard doesn't think they are strong enough. He fears that wily capitalists and innovators will find ways around them, so he suggests five additional tenets:

• Precaution must become the default mode of all technological decision making.
• Even the most fundamental of past decisions must be subject to re-examination and precautionary reform.
• The primary mode of regulation and regulatory science should be at the macroscale.
• Knowledge of broad patterns trumps ignorance of detail.
• Human society must identify and accommodate itself to broad patterns in natural processes.

Consider for a moment the tenet that "even the most fundamental of past decisions must be subject to re-examination and precautionary reform." Actually, the process of technological innovation constantly "re-examines" past decisions, but that's not what Howard has in mind. He wants to create a political process, which he naturally insists would be open, that would eliminate technologies of which he disapproves: nuclear power plants, organochlorines, most plastics, etc. But what I find intriguing is the idea that "even the most fundamental of past decisions" could be "reformed."

How fundamental is fundamental? Decisions like the invention of the automobile? The use of fossil fuels? The development of agriculture? Fire? Look at Howard's last tenet, that society must accommodate itself "to broad patterns in natural processes." What violates the broad patterns in natural processes? Medicine? City building? Farming?

Before the AAAS session ended, Howard offered a third corollary to the Principle: "Precaution requires consideration of the full range of social and technological alternatives" to what is being proposed. It is very much in line with the Wingspread Consensus Statement, which declares that precaution "must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action."

Environmentalists often liken technology and economic growth to a car careening down a foggy road. They suggest that it would be better if we slowed before we crashed into a wall hidden in the fog. The Precautionary Principle, its champions believe, "would serve as a `speed bump' in the development of technologies and enterprises."

Unfortunately, these principles and tenets may sound sensible to many people, especially those who live in societies already replete with technology. These people already have their centrally heated house in the woods; they already enjoy the freedom from want, disease, and ignorance that technology can provide. They may think they can afford the luxury of ultimate precaution. But there are billions of people who still yearn to have their lives transformed. For them, the Precautionary Principle represents not a speed bump but a wall.

Should we look before we leap? Sure we should. But every utterance of proverbial wisdom has its counterpart, reflecting both the complexity and the variety of life's situations and the foolishness involved in applying a short list of hard rules to them. For some people in some situations, "Look before you leap" is good advice. Others might be wiser to heed the equally proverbial, "He who hesitates is lost."

People have understood this maxim for millennia, and the chances are that its message will eventually reach even Wisconsin's Wingspread Conference Center. And when it does, I want the Wingspreaders to understand that the moral equivalent of a Federal Anti-Hesitation Commission isn't such a good idea, either.