The Precautionary Principle: a Critical Appraisal of Environmental Risk Assessment.

• Author: Mallinger, Michael D.
• Position: Book Review

By Indur Goklany Washington D.C.: Cato Institute, 2001. Pp. 119. $17.95 paper.

In politics, special-interest groups would love to have a regulatory trump card to play in order to ensure that their priority defeats everyone else's. Radical environmentalists are no exception. They have spent years promoting their proposals at all levels of government. Today's greens think locally and act globally. They now have a creed they would like to insert into regulatory policy that would serve as their trump card: the precautionary principle. In practice, this principle would be a foolproof means of stopping any economic activity they dislike.

At the 1992 Rio Conference on Sustainable Development, the United Nations (UN) formalized the precautionary principle by stating, "In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. 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" (United Nations, "Rio Declaration on Environment and Development," Rio de Janeiro, June 1992, at http://www.unep.org /Documents/Default.asp? DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163).

Simply put, the precautionary principle is the notion that governments should impose regulations to prevent or restrict activities that raise potential threats of harm to human health or the environment, even though scientific evidence regarding the severity--or even the presence--of the threats may be incomplete. Many environmentalists, especially those in Europe, invoke the principle to justify proposed restrictions on everything from pesticides and food additives to cell phones and biotechnology. In their vision, regulators should be required to consider potential costs that the application of new ideas may pose but should not be allowed even to consider costs that new regulations may inflict. Imposition of such rules, however, might make our population and the environment worse off than they otherwise would have been because it would slow technological progress toward risk reduction, which is the best way to reduce society's vulnerability to serious environmental threats.

Naturally, openly espousing so stark a philosophy would attract few sympathizers. Therefore, defenders of the precautionary principle have tried to soften its image, and in doing so they have gained many converts to the...