EcoAxes

Bruegel's Fall of Icarus: a technology trusted beyond its limits.

After Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1582

EcoAxes / Included ideologies / Technological and modernist environmentalism

Policy principle and orientation

Precautionary Environmentalism

The outlook built around the precautionary principle. Where an activity threatens serious or irreversible harm to health or the environment, a lack of full scientific certainty is no reason to delay protective measures, and the burden of proof falls on those who want to introduce a new technology, chemical or organism, not on those who want to hold it back.

Key figures
Hans Jonas, the Rio Declaration (Principle 15), the Wingspread Statement (1998), Carolyn Raffensperger and Joel Tickner, the European Environment Agency (Late Lessons from Early Warnings)

Where it stands

  1. Environmental EthicsAnthropocentrismEcocentrism
  2. Ecological InterventionNoninterventionActive Stewardship
  3. Economic PhilosophyGreen GrowthPost-Growth
  4. Environmental AuthorityCentralized AuthorityLocal Autonomy
  5. Environmental JusticeAggregate OutcomesDistributive Justice
  6. Technological OutlookTechnological OptimismEcological Precaution
  7. Energy PhilosophyEnergy AbundanceEnergy Sufficiency
  8. Conservation StrategySustainable UseStrict Protection
  9. Agricultural EcologyLand SparingLand Sharing
  10. Ecological Political PriorityIncremental ReformTransformative Change

Precautionary environmentalism is defined by its position on technology and novelty; its other positions follow from caution (toward protection, sufficiency, low-input agriculture) and carry wide bands.

Definition

Precautionary environmentalism is organised around the precautionary principle. The version adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 reads: “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”. The stronger Wingspread Statement of 1998 reads: “when an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically”, and it puts the burden of proof on whoever proposes the activity.

As an environmental outlook, it extends this into a general distrust of technologies that are powerful, new, irreversible or poorly understood. These include geoengineering, genetically modified organisms, gene drives, synthetic chemicals and nuclear power. It distrusts the “technical fix” in general, and prefers restraint, reversibility and means that are well understood.

Historical development

The principle began with the German Vorsorgeprinzip of the 1970s and with Hans Jonas’s The Imperative of Responsibility (1979). Jonas argued that the scale of modern technology calls for a “heuristics of fear” and a duty to the future.

It entered international law through the North Sea conferences, the Rio Declaration, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (2000), and the treaties and chemicals law of the European Union, including REACH. The European Environment Agency’s Late Lessons from Early Warnings (2001, 2013) documented cases, from asbestos to leaded petrol, where precaution would have prevented harm. The principle has been central to campaigns against GMOs, nuclear power and pesticides, and more recently against solar geoengineering and gene drives. Risk analysts and the promoters of those technologies have contested it.

Principal claims

  • Serious and irreversible harms justify acting before science is certain.
  • The burden of proof lies on those who introduce something new, not on the public.
  • Alternatives to a risky activity should be examined, and the least harmful option that does the job should be chosen.
  • Technologies tend to create problems nobody foresaw. The history of invention is also a history of harms recognised too late.
  • Decisions made under uncertainty should be open, democratic and reversible.

Policy implications

The outlook supports testing and approving chemicals, organisms and technologies before they reach the market. It wants moratoria on deploying geoengineering and releasing gene drives, and restrictions on GMOs and pesticides. It prefers proven, low-impact and reversible measures, and the phasing out of technologies whose risks are unresolved. It calls for strong environmental impact assessment and public participation in decisions about technology.

Internal disagreements

Precautionary environmentalists disagree about how strong the principle should be, weak like Rio or strong like Wingspread. They disagree about whether it covers the risks of doing nothing as well as the risks of acting, a question climate change makes urgent. They divide sharply over which technologies it covers, nuclear power above all. And they disagree about whether it can be put into practice without freezing every decision.

Criticisms and controversies

Cass Sunstein argued in Laws of Fear (2005) that the strong principle contradicts itself, since every option, doing nothing included, carries risks the principle would forbid. Risk analysts argue that it ignores probabilities and benefits. Ecomodernists and other technological environmentalists argue that it has blocked technologies, including nuclear power and golden rice, whose absence has cost lives and ecosystems.

Supporters answer that the principle is a rule for deciding under uncertainty, not a ban on acting, and that the record of late lessons speaks for itself.

Relationships to other traditions

Precautionary environmentalism is the position on technology of deep ecology, ecofeminism, degrowth, appropriate technology and much of the mainstream environmental movement. It is built into green liberalism’s institutions through impact assessment and chemicals law. It is the direct opposite of ecomodernism, eco-accelerationism and technological environmentalism, and at odds with ecological engineering and planetary stewardship over designed and engineered interventions.

References and further reading

  • Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (1992), Principle 15.
  • Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle (1998).
  • Raffensperger, C. and Tickner, J., eds. (1999). Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle. Island Press.
  • Jonas, H. (1984). The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. University of Chicago Press. (German original 1979.)
  • European Environment Agency (2001). Late Lessons from Early Warnings: The Precautionary Principle 1896–2000.
  • Sunstein, C. R. (2005). Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle. Cambridge University Press. (The principal critique.)