The Precautionary Principle — Key to Sustainability?

Bryan Norton, a luminary thinker about environmental ethics in general and about sustainability in particular says with Anne Steinemann that, to avoid a vacuous notion of sustainability, we need:

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. (Norton, B.G, Steinemann, A.C. "Environmental Values and Adaptive Management", Environmental Values 10 (2001), pp. 473-506)

According to Norton and Steinemann, chief among the guiding principles for sustainability is the Precautionary Principle. This is not an isolated perception. For example, Australia's "National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development" (1992) adopts the Precautionary Principle as a guiding principle.

Much needs to be said about what "sustainability" is. More needs to be said about whether or not "sustainable development" is an oxymoron. Those topics provide fertile material for future posts. This one restricts its attention to the Precautionary Principle.

What is it? According to Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (1992):

Where there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation.

The Precautionary Principle puts a conservative stake in the ground: It says that the uncertainty of even our best (often scientific) understanding is not an acceptable reason to avoid acting on threats to ecological systems — and by extension, to human health and well-being. It challenges the primacy of growth-promoting economic reasoning whereby the earth's resources are strictly economic "inputs" or absorbers of economic "output" waste. The Precautionary Principle is a principle of damage prevention.

But it is also fundamentally something reactive — a hastily constructed prop to hold up a barrier for a last stand when a threat of ominous proportions is immanent. For example, the oft-touted Montreal Protocol for phasing out ozone-depleting substances was adopted before the ozone "hole" science was conclusive. It dictated that then-known ozone-depleting chemicals be phased out. Yet it had, and still has nothing to say about any new chemical that may deplete stratospheric ozone. It is left to the vigilant to demonstrate the potential for a new substance's harm. Only then will it be included in the banned list. Only when the damage is palpable, only when its possibility presses down on our collective conscience — only then do we invoke the Precautionary Principle.

Is this enough for sustainability? Is the Precautionary Principle even the most central principle involved? An answer to that question cannot ignore what the principle fails to do:

The Precautionary Principle fails to provide any guidance for human behavior that directly interacts with the enveloping environment — even when the environment is considered merely as a set of "resources" for development. It fails to provide any practical wisdom for metering and moderating our actions to ensure the flourishing of ecological systems — even considered solely as a requirement for human flourishing (in the broad, Aristotelian sense of eudaimonia). It fails to make plain a set of human values that take into account the nature of complex adaptive systems — the limited nature of their ability to absorb insulting perturbations without flipping into simpler, degraded systems.

Perhaps most importantly, the Precautionary Principle fails to take into account our relationships with our surroundings as an extraordinarily important context for living our lives. This very important notion is spelled out in greater detail in Chapter 11 of a new book on "Environmental Values" by John O'Neill, Alan Holland, and Andrew Light (London: Routledge, 2007):
http://www.routledge.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?sku=&isbn=9780415145091&parent
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