"First, do no harm".

• Author: Gardner, Gary
• Position: GROUNDWORK

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...