"First, do no harm".

Groundwork appears in alternating issues of World Watch as a column and as small sidebars that unearth the concept from feature articles. The two are linked using the icon at left.

I learned from our building contractor recently that the siding shingles on our house are fire resistant and a great insulator, qualities that made them a staple of construction in the 20th century. He also told me that he would not touch the stuff--not even removing a few dozen to put in a new window--because their dust particles can produce an extremely painful cancer called mesothelioma. The cocoon protecting our family from the dangers of the outside world, it seems, is made of asbestos.

Who knew, when it was first produced and promoted, that this "magic mineral" would turn out to be so deadly? Mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases are expected to kill some 400,000 people in Europe alone over the coming decades. Although signs of asbestos' danger to human health were apparent as early as 1898, its economic advantages carried the day. Businesses and governments essentially followed a "leap before you look" approach to new products and scientific advances, an ethic that still prevails.

Today, this ethic may simply be too risky. Our planet holds 2.5 times more people than it did in 1950, and global economic activity is eight times larger in real terms, creating what economist Herman Daly has called a "full world." Release the ever-growing but often unregulated power of science and technology into this full world, and the recipe for large-scale catastrophes is complete. Indeed, industrial countries remain "many steps behind the problems they create," argues Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment in India. As those problems become more momentous--engineered genes run amok, for example, or nuclear waste that falls into terrorists' hands--nature or society will be hard pressed to absorb the unforeseen outcomes of our magical products.

But a safer future is possible, say advocates of the precautionary principle, a concept that turns conventional business practice on its head by placing the burden of proof of safety on a product's champions before the product emerges--rather than requiring injured parties to prove that the product is hazardous years or even decades later. Formally, the principle is commonly defined this way: "Where an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." It has been adopted as official policy by a range of governments, from the City and County of San Francisco to the European Union, and is invoked in treaties addressing North Sea pollution, ozone-depleting chemicals, fisheries, climate change, and sustainable development.

Note the revolutionary assertion: precaution is in order even if danger is not proven. This, along with the presumption of a new product's guilt until proven innocent, and the idea that the public ought to have input into decisions about whether a new product or technology is introduced, lay out a different vision of doing business and of advancing science. It is ampler than conventional vision because it values the long term, because it looks beyond shareholders to consider the needs of workers, citizens, and future generations, and because it is concerned with ecological health.

Because the precautionary principle challenges so many assumptions about how societies ought to advance, it is the target of strong critiques. Some critics charge that it is anti-science, because it values the views of a non-specialist public that may be influenced more by fears than by facts. Other critics ask how it is possible to prevent harmful outcomes which by definition are not known. Still others assert that adherence to the principle will stifle innovation, because it sets such a high bar for safety.

But proponents approach the issue of safety from a different perspective and with a different set of questions. If safe alternatives to a product or substance exist, why accept even a small, highly uncertain risk? This was the rationale used by the Danish Environment Agency in banning phthalates from toys because of the plasticizer's connection to reproductive abnormalities in animals, even though no danger to humans had been documented. Other advocates of precaution note that current regulations are not protecting the public. If laws governing the release of toxic chemicals are effective, says one study, why are pregnant women warned that mercury levels in freshwater fish may be dangerous? Still others warn about the consequences of releasing potentially lethal new products or processes into an increasingly crowded and integrated world.

Indeed, while the principle may be revolutionary from a business perspective, it is in fact a part of everyday life. "Better safe than sorry," "Look before you leap," "Better to prevent than to have to lament" (in Spanish), "A mouse that has only one hole is soon caught" (in French), and similar maxims reflect precaution at work in individuals. And it has long governed the medical profession: the physicians' ethic, "First, do no harm," cautions against quick decisions to intervene through surgery or drugs, because of the threats to health that these might introduce. No such caution surrounds economic interventions, probably because our planet and its societies have long been viewed as robust enough to absorb the complications of our scientific and business activities.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The big-picture understanding of economic advance that emerges from a precautionary perspective gives proponents a different view of critics' questions. The views of non-specialists are important, for example, because they are often on the front lines of a technology's impact--as illustrated by the case of a young British factory worker whose work led him to inhale asbestos over a 10-year period. By 1899 the worker was sick with lung disease. He reported that 10 of his fellow workers exposed to asbestos had all died around the age of 30. Despite this and other asbestos-related health anomalies at the time, the prevailing scientific view was that there was "no evidence of harm."

The trusim that unknown dangers cannot be prevented is not as damning an indictment of the principle as it may seem. Precautionists assert that some characteristics of new technologies or practices may signal the need for precaution, even if precise dangers remain unknown. Irreversible consequences, harmful persistent wastes, large-scale impact--any of these might justify a precautionary approach. Interestingly, all three apply to fossil fuel use. A precautionary approach that restricted coal and oil burning in the 19th and 20th centuries might have prevented our current climate predicament, perhaps the greatest environmental threat the human community has ever faced.

We cannot assume, however, that societies with limited use of coal and petroleum would have had a lower quality of life, which gets to the critics' charge that innovation would be stifled in a precautionary world. Scientists and engineers, having fossil fuels available perhaps for selected industries, but not, say, for private transport, would have directed their energy and creativity elsewhere, most likely helping to develop societies that operated safely within a more limited energy budget. Just as strictures on experimenting with animals have channeled the development of cosmetics in more humane directions, the precautionary principle could largely re-direct innovation, rather than handcuff it.

Indeed, the very nature of scientific inquiry may need to change to support precaution. Studies that investigate not just single factors, but the interactions of many, and those that investigate new problems rather than further refine old ones, could help to evaluate new technologies. And science will need to develop a new public spiritedness. "Science has been commodified," notes Carolyn Raffensberger of the Science and Environmental Health Network. "What we've created in the last 10 or 15 years is a science that has a goal of global economic competitiveness," with more dollars, for example, spent developing new drugs to treat cancer than developing ways to prevent cancer. The 400,000 Europeans expected to die from asbestos-related illnesses would likely have some strong views on this score.

Gary Gardner is Worldwatch's Director of Research.

Further readings for this column can be found at www.worldwatch.org/ww/groundwork/.