Precautionary principle

Ulrik Ekman

Related terms: care, caution, complexity, danger, decision, disaster risk, foresight, harm, indeterminacy, judiciousness, prevention, protection, prudence, reductionism, risk management, safeguard, uncertainty

Even if it is relatively unusual in the 2020s to hear somebody use the term ‘the precautionary principle’ in everyday discourse unless the exchange is among specialists, the general notion is ancient and well known. Somebody might explain the cause of an unpleasant or dangerous illness, like COVID-19, by saying that ‘they failed to take the necessary precautions to avoid infection.’ One need not be a doctor to realise that here ‘precaution’ refers to an action that is supposed to be taken in advance and with foresight, to safeguard, to protect, and to prevent injury or something harmful. It is also not unusual to meet statements in public media like ‘the firefighter handled the extinguisher with great care’ and ‘wildfire weather calls for strong measures.’ Such everyday statements concerning climatic situations involving droughts and fires indirectly evoke the notion of precaution, which refers to judiciousness in avoiding harm or danger, prudent advance measures, or steps taken to maintain safety and ward off impending catastrophe. Such formulations already hint at key parts of what ‘precaution’ is commonsensically taken to mean: advance care, prudent foresight, good anticipatory judgment, and circumspection.

This entry revisits existing research-specific definitions of the precautionary principle (PP) and the implications of making different formulations operative. This is followed by a review of key issues in the scientific debates and controversies concerning this principle for more than 50 years, with a view to paving the way for ascribing new meanings to this concept in the environmental humanities today. The entry points out how a series of very influential sources in the environmental humanities could be said to share important parts of the values, worldviews, and research approaches commonly associated with the PP. The entry concludes by arguing in favour of adopting the precautionary principle as a valuable opening of the environmental humanities to the increasingly interdisciplinary research called for in the face of climate change and threats to environments as well as human health.

In research discourses, the concept of ‘the precautionary principle’ draws on the meanings of ‘precaution’ and has well-developed kinds of usage in fields such as sustainability science, health, ethics, law, and economics, as well as politics and governance. It has important roots in the German Vorsorgeprinzip, and it is often considered a matter of common sense, e.g., when described as a ‘better-safe-than-sorry approach.’ This principle was originally formulated as a response to anthropogenic forcing of changes in the environment, including the planetary surface, the biosphere, the atmosphere, and the climate. Notably, the formulation of the principle can be seen as an attempt to address the fact that the full range of consequences of human activities defy prediction and, due to the scientific uncertainty of the outcome of complex interactions among many variables, may have unanticipated and potentially damaging local and global effects on the environment or human health. The PP as an approach to risk management is particularly developed in the field of law in the European Union, which includes the following definition:

The precautionary principle is an approach to risk management, where, if a given policy or action might cause harm to the public or the environment and if there is still no scientific agreement on the issue, the policy or action in question should not be carried out. However, the policy or action may be reviewed when more scientific information becomes available (“Precautionary Principle – Eur-Lex”). 

The principle is often thought of as a guide for decision-making in public policy contexts. As such, it forms an advanced response to undue anthropocentrism in the sense of responding beforehand to humans’ potential blindness to their capacity to cause severe and widespread harm (Schettler, Barrett, and Raffensperger 2002).

The general line of thought inherent in the PP can perhaps best be gauged by considering its two most influential formulations, the 1992 Rio Declaration and the 1998 Wingspread statement:

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 1992, §15)

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. (“The Precautionary Principle – March 1998” 2013)

The Wingspread statement in the second quotation has been particularly influential in the continuing debates surrounding the principle, which remains contested and controversial in the second decade of the 21^st century. To begin to see the sources of controversy, it might be helpful to consider an analytical breakdown of the principle into the four main implications of this statement as laid out in one of the scientific sources in the field:

1. Preventive action should be taken in advance of scientific proof of causality
2. The proponent of the activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof of safety
3. A reasonable range of alternatives, including a no-action alternative for new activities, should be considered when there is evidence of harm caused by an activity
4. For decision-making to be precautionary, it must be open, informed, and democratic and must include potentially affected parties (Raffensperger and Tickner 1999, 8-9).

Controversy is likely to arise for a range of reasons. First, this principle states that a primacy is to be placed on a preventive planetary care, something that problematizes and to some extent inverts the tendency in much science as well as public policy to favor preemptive experiment and action, that is, to experiment and try something first and to cure any ailments that follows afterwards. Second, the exercise of such preventive care entails a considerable expansion and complication of deliberations and impact assessments. The time required for such deliberation and assessment conflicts both with the compulsion to implement what are taken to be useful, life-saving, or otherwise valuable scientific, medical, and technological innovations as soon as possible and with the pace of much governance and corporate competition. Third, controversy is probable because the principle vastly increases the responsibility placed on decision-makers. In effect, it requires them to shoulder the burden of proof of not causing avoidable, irreversible harm when proposing to introduce or change a product, a technology, an infrastructure, or an ecological-societal relation. Disagreements here may also well rise because finding any proof of harm entails having to provide a range of alternatives, including, not least significantly, that of non-action, which flies in the face of many humans’ assumptions regarding their free will and agency. Fourth, the call for open, informed, and democratically inclusive decision-making collides with the view, common in politics and economics, that important public decisions should be made by elected, representative government officials or by corporation executives. In effect, the PP implies the value of decidedly collective and collaborative processes of deliberation and decision (Jasanoff and Martello 2004; Tickner 2001). How to determine the breadth and depth of inclusion of affected parties can be in themselves difficult issues to manage and may well generate conflict. For instance, should one assume that the anthropocentric notions of personhood undergirding much social theory, governance, economics, and law are to hold? Or, on the contrary, can a potentially affected party like an animal, a life form, a chemical transition process, an ice shelf, a river, a forest, the ecosystem of a mangrove coastal zone, or an ocean be included and have a voice and a standing (Collins 2021; Garver 2021; Woolley 2014)?

The year 2024 was the warmest since recording began in 1850. That year saw the average global temperature exceed 1.5°C (2.7°F) above its pre-industrial level. Given some responses to this and other marks of increasingly threatening climate change, ‘precaution’ might seem a concept on the rise. There is certainly an increasing public and research-specific interest in advanced planetary care in the face of climate change. There is also a greater focus on the preventive building of resilience through degrowth, conservation, and regeneration. At the same time, ‘precaution’ might appear to be on the wane as a descriptive or normative standard. In the mid-2020s, a number of key governments, financial institutions, and corporations can be observed to have withdrawn from global climate agreements and from investments in advanced global climate actions.

A similar ambivalence can be observed in the research fields specifically concerned with the definition, development, and use of the PP.

On the one hand, it is common to reaffirm the key importance of this principle for sustainability science of the 2020s. It is often noted that the PP is more important than ever since it provides a strong framework for reliable decisions in complex and risk-laden affairs involving the resilience of the environment, the health of human and other life forms, and the effects of technology and science.

This kind of positive reaffirmation is often bolstered by pointing back in time to key events and insights that have made this principle an important approach. The acid rain crisis in the 1970s and early 1980s strengthened precautionary approaches because lakes and streams became too acidic to support fish, amphibians, and other aquatic life and because acid rain was stripping land of the nutrients in soil and foliage that are needed for plants to grow (Rafferty 2017). Similarly, the observations since the 1970s of ozone depletion and the ozone hole, mainly caused by manufactured chemicals, increased awareness of the need for precaution due to the increased risks of sunburn, cancer, and permanent blindness, as well as the widespread harming of animals and plants (Christie 2001; Crutzen 1970; J.E. Lovelock, Maggs, and Wade 1973; Molina and Rowland 1974; Parson 2003). The raising of these concerns led to the adoption of the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which bans the production of chlorofluorocarbons, halons, and other ozone-depleting chemicals (Environment 2018).

Important research insights have also paved the way for increased affirmation of the importance of the PP. For example, Rachel Carson’s work in Silent Spring, the Club of Rome discussions since the late 1960s, and the publication in 1972 of The Limits to Growth are credited with bringing to broader attention the types of complex global problems respecting the actions of modern humankind to which the PP would be one important and perhaps more adequate response (Carson 1962; Meadows and Rome 1972; Hanekamp 2005; Harremoes 2002). The rise of an environmental movement and the first serious considerations of the principle as a judicial response to the pollution of the North Sea in the 1970s were also key turning points (Marr 2003). As the rich existing research testifies, the importance of this principle was born out as it became part of international agreements and was increasingly implemented in environmental law during the 1970s and 1980s, especially in the European Union (Bodansky 2004; Freestone, Hey, and Freestone 1996; Kysar 2010; McKinnon 2012; Sand 2000; Stone 2001; Van Dyke 2004; Whiteside 2006; Wiener 2008). The rise of the PP in the early 21^st Century can be observed in the traces it has already left in the fields of political sciences, government, and the economics of trade treaties, in medical research, engineering, and, not least, environmental studies.

More than anything, the relevance of the principle appears proven by the rising consensus over more than 125 years concerning the greenhouse effect. The existence of the effect has been known since the time of Joseph Fourier (1824), and it has become an object of increasingly intensive concern since the 1950s when Roger Revelle and Charles David Keeling demonstrated the limited capability of the ocean to absorb carbon dioxide. Concern over the greenhouse effect was further strengthened by Edward Teller and Keeling’s work showing that fossil fuel societies and their carbon dioxide emissions would have potentially radical effects on the climate (Franta 2018; Keeling 1960; Weart 2008).

Arguments for precautionary approaches have gathered considerably more consensus during the more recent widespread debates concerning the Anthropocene. More recent arguments supporting degrowth (Garver 2021; Kallis 2018; Parrique 2022) and post-growth (Jackson 2011, 2021, 2025; Rosa and Henning 2018) research initiatives point out that the deployment of more precautionary approaches in public policy making and economics is no less urgent in the 2020s than in 1972 when the projective simulations in The Limits of Growth were presented. As already suggested in that report, the growth of production and consumption could not continue infinitely but would sooner or later meet with resource depletion, ecosystemic destruction, and unmanageable levels of pollution: for example, lack of potable water, loss of biodiversity, and increasing global warming due to CO2 and methane emissions. More recently, acknowledgement of the precautionary principle has been part of the drive behind more decidedly eco-constitutional changes in several places in the world (Collins 2021; Woolley 2014).

On the other hand, it must be observed that currently, in the mid-2020s, the PP remains weak both as a theory and in practice when viewed in a global lens. It could even be considered in decline and crisis, where it had up until now been the strongest.

The principle is not generally accepted as an explicit and strong part of scientific research, technology, policy, economics, or law outside of the European Union. For reasons that climate justice scholars would be quick to point out, the principle has a particularly weak presence in Africa and South-East Asia, where major parts of environmental and societal developments are expected to take place. Moreover, negotiations between the EU and the United States over the precautionary approaches favoured by the EU and risk assessment approaches undergirded by cost-benefit analysis favoured by the United States are no longer even at the previous decades-long level of stalemate (Sand 2000). The United States has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and appears to be actively dismantling initiatives aimed at climate change mitigation and green transition while increasing fossil fuels extraction and consumption.

Even inside the EU, where the PP is the strongest and the most deeply and widely implemented, it appears to be under considerable threat (Read and O'Riordan 2017). In recent legislative trade treaties, precaution has by no means been something that could be taken for granted. Brexit also threatens to open a split, with the principle adhered to only on the EU side, while at best partially on the United Kingdom side.

More generally, the PP is challenged, implicitly but all the more seriously, inside sustainability science itself by rival approaches, especially by innovation and green transitions, viewed as ‘green growth’ via innovation. Insofar as such environmentally dubious innovative research transition projects are funded and implemented, which is very often the case under the broad umbrella of so-called ‘sustainable development,’ existing legislative foundations for the precautionary principle are being undermined and de facto dismantled along with in-depth consideration of alternative political-economy visions for a new green deal (Chomsky and Pollin 2020; Tienhaara and Robinson 2023).

In the face of this complex unresolved situation, perhaps the more thought-provoking course is to query why the PP is resisted, theoretically and in practical operations, certainly in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields but also wider social, technological, and ecological contexts of interest to the environmental humanities. The debates over the principle are wide-ranging, numerous, and have been ongoing for at least 50 years. This entry focuses below on a selection of four recurrent issues that could be viewed as key hinges for considering what has made the PP so controversial and how to ascribe renewed meaning to ‘the precautionary principle’ in the environmental humanities.

Sound science

The PP is at times rejected partly or wholly for being an abstract normative idea involving moral claims and their values rather than being epistemic and scientifically descriptive (Harris and Holm 2002; Peterson 2007; Sandin 2007). At other times, existing formulations of the PP are criticised for being scientifically unsound (see, e.g., Charnley 1999) or for having no place in science because it is marginalising the role of science in the analysis of environmental risks (Gray and Bewers 1996). Similarly, the PP is seen by critics as deeply ambiguous, lacking clear definitions as well as a ‘sound’ logical basis (Majone 2002, 90). It is also part of the debates that critics claim the PP is incoherent and not unified (Manson 2002; Peterson 2006), that it is unclear or ill-defined (Bodansky 1991; Hartzell-Nichols 2017), or that it is too absolutist and epistemologically no better than normal scientific risk assessment (McKinney 1996; Nollkaemper 1996).

Here, the PP seems not least to come under fire because it is taken to problematize ‘sound’ or ‘normal science’ as understood in the modern Western tradition. This type of criticism often appears to be levelled by scientists who see their fields and approaches threatened by a paradigm that may not be compatible, in part or wholly, with that tradition.

At least potentially, the PP does signal a paradigm shift, even if this shift is not theorised or practised as such. Climate change, along with the intimate connections of the PP with environmental ethics and law, as well as adaptive governance and policy, can usher in a reconsideration of the allegedly value-free character of science. In such a radical reconsideration of its status, Western science can be viewed as a major driver of modern Enlightenment goals (e.g., empirical truth, rationality, progress, growth, liberation) and, as such, a major part of the problems of climate change, from environmental breakdowns to climate injustice, rather than, as often claimed, the key to their solution. The PP may be resisted because it hints at the need to assess the extent to which the continued widespread pursuit of the Enlightenment values inscribed infrastructurally and more or less invisibly in modern science leads to blue and green colonialisms, planetary catastrophes, and the extinction of life forms, including human ones.

When questioning the reasons for these types of resistance to the PP, it is worth noting that alternatives to the kind of ‘sound science’ they typically invoke do exist, both as pursuits inside so-called ‘normal science’ and as elaborated by proponents of the PP in response to such criticisms.

Arguments for the role of science in risk analysis often stress the objectivity and political neutrality of science as contrasted with the alleged ethico-politically ideological or abstract quasi-religious character of the PP. Questions concerning the objectivity and value neutrality commonly attributed to scientific knowledge, however, have been raised by historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science as well as by scientists themselves at least since the early 20^th Century. Ludwig Fleck’s claim that the development of truth in scientific research remains unattainable, because researchers are locked into the developing ‘thought collectives’ and ‘thought-styles’ of their period and environment, clearly critiques notions of value-free science and pure, direct observation of facts (Fleck 1980). Paul Feyerabend’s attack on the tyranny of the rationality and objectivity of scientific method remains famous not only for its problematization of the value-free ideal but also for advocating an epistemic pluralism as the better alternative because less repressive of an open exchange of ideas, scientific creativity, and a free, democratic science (Feyerabend 1975, 1978). Thomas Kuhn’s highly influential contribution to the philosophy of science not only broke with key positivist doctrines but presented an account of the progressive historical development of more or less incommensurable scientific paradigms (Kuhn 1962).

In the early 21^st century, ways of theorising and pursuing science that recognise its limits have been proposed by influential figures in these fields and are increasingly widely recognised (Douglas 2009; Elliott and McKaughan 2014; Kincaid, Dupré, and Wylie 2007; Steel 2015, 8). Feminist epistemologists have not only criticised androcentric bias but have also rejected the value-free ideal. One such approach is to opt for a social and contextual empiricism that emphasises the difficulty of separating social values and forces from the pursuits of scientific knowledge and the consequent impossibility of considering such knowledge purely a product of cognitive processes (Longino 2002). The alternative view would be that social interaction in a broad sense assists humans, scientists included, in securing firmer and rationally based knowledge. Another such approach is to question whether science exists in a social, political, or economic vacuum and to seek a more comprehensive notion of scientific rationality that integrates the ethical with the epistemic and demonstrates that value-laden science can also meet key criteria for being epistemically reliable (Kourany 2010). The interdisciplinary development of science and technology studies (STS) since the 1970s and 1980s likewise viewed science and technology as socially and materially embedded and co-constructed enterprises (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987; Jasanoff et al. 1995; Latour 1987).

Proponents of the PP share with such approaches the views that some appeals to ‘normal’ or ‘sound’ modern science operate with a narrow notion of science that hampers safer, firmer, and more rational pursuits of knowledge, action, and sensation under conditions of uncertainty. It is relatively common to find among proponents of the PP statements to the effect that the role of science must be reassessed to recognize that it is not the first nor the final arbiter but rather one very important input to decision processes alongside social, political, economic, technological, and juridical ones, for example (Jackson 1993, 59; Moltke 1996). Proponents also argue in favour of recognising a precautionary approach as the ‘sounder’ and ‘more rigorous’ science or pursuit of knowledge because of its greater epistemic bandwidth and its capacity for engaging adaptively over time with complexity.

Tim O’Riordan and James Cameron, for example, argue that the PP opens the better way to pursue a post-conventional or post-normal science because conventional scientific methods are insufficient for securing continued environmental life support:

Natural processes appear to operate in ways that are not fully understood by conventional scientific methods. Indeed, we see much of the life support functions already described may act in an indeterminate way and hence act in a thoroughly unpredictable manner. The usual scientific approaches, dependent on observation, verification, falsification and replication coupled to prediction by reference to statistical inference, hypothesis testing and modelling may not be sufficient to instil confidence (O'Riordan and Cameron 1994, 4-15).

In a similar vein, Marco Martuzzi and Joel Tickner advocate the use of the PP as the wider, more careful, and healthier scientific approach to situations of currently irreducible complexity: “The increasing complexity and uncertainty of risks and the frequent lack of information on risks as well as the limits of science and policy structures to adequately address them require the development of tools to further support decision-making when health and welfare might be affected” (Martuzzi and Tickner 2004, 8). Ted Schett and Carolyn Raffensperger affirm due recognition of the role of ethical values in the PP because extending science towards what is not known stands the greater chance of more resilient and healthy decisions. They also advocate a thoroughly sceptical scrutiny of all aspects of the science measures proposed:

“Recognizing the limits of science, the precautionary principle is intended to enable and encourage precautionary action that serves underlying values based on what is known as well as what is not known. It encourages scrutiny of all aspects of science, from the research agenda to the funding, design, interpretation and limits of studies” (Schettler and Raffensperger 2004, 66).

It is uncontested by both critics and proponents of the PP that the environmental and climatic, technological, and social problems of the Anthropocene are of great complexity and confront the sciences with uncertainty about the consequences and effects of actions taken. To some extent, the debates about the value of the PP hinge upon how uncertainty is understood and the mode of approaching it. Roughly, the difference is between either assuming that the parameters of risk assessment and risk management afford sufficient reductions of uncertainty to proceed with current decisions and practical implementations or believing that a more extended (or less reductive) and careful engagement with uncertainty is called for. The latter approach to uncertainty involves consideration of a wider set of possible consequences, and it may not be capable of reducing the complexity at stake, just as it may not be capable of presenting a reliable basis for proceeding with plans and implementations. This not only means that alternative modes of action other than those currently proposed could come into play, but also that recommendations for non-action may be the outcome.

Proponents of the PP do not so easily assume a type of mastery of uncertainty of knowledge as do proponents of conventional risk assessment, who appeal to normal science. Instead, they propose to work in an expanded way with deep scientific and epistemic uncertainty. Proponents of the PP view this epistemic limit as a condition to be explicitly recognised and propose using distinctions among at least three kinds or levels of uncertainty in analyses and assessments of risk: statistical, model, and fundamental uncertainty (Schettler and Raffensperger 2004, 68-71). On this view, it makes a difference that makes a difference to operate with (1) unknown values of variables whose probability distribution can be determined; (2) unknown values for many interacting variables whose likely values are difficult to predict even if models are used that have undergone some reduction of complexity; and (3) complex systems whose indeterminacy confronts science and knowing with fundamental uncertainty and inherent ignorance.

This difference implies that one has to operate in an expanded scientific field with two types of uncertainty that are different not only in scale or degree but in kind. ‘Statistical’ and ‘model’ uncertainty differ in degree of calculability, whereas ‘fundamental’ uncertainty differs in kind because its complexity is not reducible by calculation. Recognition of this third type of uncertainty implies that conventional or ‘normal’ notions of risk assessment are not sufficient but must be extended towards the unknowable (Wynne 1992). The three types of uncertainty described above can be seen as largely congruent with what Wynne calls risk, uncertainty, and ignorance. Wynne remarks that indeterminacy makes ignorance inherent in science, posing a challenge of irreducible complexity: here, causal chains or network relations are so complex that their operations are practically unknowable and their effects unpredictable for finite human scientists and their technical systems.

These distinctions among types of uncertainty are comparable to attempts by environmentalist proponents of the PP to operate with differences among 1) technical uncertainty handled by applied science, 2) moderate levels of system model complexity calling for management in ethico-politically contested areas, and 3) uncertainty stemming from problems so complex that scientists are forced to question their reducibility (Marshall and Picou 2008; Stirling 2008). For many environmentalist proponents of the PP, the key problems of planetary climate change in the Anthropocene belong in the latter category and call for a complexity turn and approaches that have been called ‘post-normal science’ (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1990; Ravetz 2004). One could say that some proponents of the PP are trying to live with ‘unsimple’ emergent truths, allying themselves with an augmented epistemology of plural model building: a version of pragmatism, it is argued, that recognises and affirms a dynamic evolution of knowledge (Mitchell 2009).

Perhaps Jaap Hanekamp is right to pinpoint the historical roots of the PP in the rise of the ecological movement in Europe and elsewhere in the 1960s and 1970s and thus in a cultural-ecological critique of the self-confident mainstream belief in the progress and growth of post-WWII society and its ‘civilization of nature’ (Hanekamp 2005). If that is so, one might ask whether today the PP is typically resisted and comes under threat because it confronts humans with the apparent and very uncomfortable necessity of living with an increase in scientific and existential humility. The PP may be resisted because it evokes a view of earthly belonging and care quite different from the view afforded by the anthropocentrism and exceptionalism undergirding modern liberal science, technology, politics, and economy. (Barca 2020; Jasanoff 2021; Jasanoff and Martello 2004; Bellacasa 2017).

Status as a theoretical principle

As observed above, the PP has frequently been singled out for being vague and for lacking coherence or plausibility as a principle. As noted and debated by proponents, critics often charge that the PP remains ill-defined, vacuous, ambiguous, internally inconsistent, incoherent, or irrational, or that it lacks a set of guiding criteria for its implementation (Bodansky 2004, 381; Gardiner 2006, 33; Jordan and O’Riordan 1999; Majone 2002, 90; Munthe 2011, 2; Sandin 2002, 288). Among those who do not simply propose jettisoning the PP, some efforts have been made to address logical and philosophical objections and to offer unifying clarifications and specifications (Manson 2002; Munthe 2011; Steel 2015). Others propose working out delimited versions of the PP with a view to implementation, sometimes aiming at a balance between the PP and risk assessment, drawing upon cost-benefit analysis (Kysar 2010; Lofstedt 2014; Randall 2011; Zander 2010).

Reviewing these discussions today, one might observe that it seems a shared premise that the key stakes are whether the PP should be taken as a clear universal or at least general principle and, if so, then how it can be formulated to permit a top-down reductionist specification of equally clear criteria and rules that could be implemented in practice and empirically. One could instead consider that the PP might remain valuable and factually important because it has considerable capacity to disturb this very strong universalist, anthropocentric, and exceptionalist heritage from the mindset of modern Western culture. Could it be that the PP comes under threat in these ways because its ‘vagueness’ and ‘practical implausibility’ include seriously disturbing and more complexly open ways of thinking and operating with preventive care? Perhaps the PP begins to display a set of alternative values and de facto practical arrangements that disturb, pause, and parenthesise a still prevalent philosophical, scientific, and technological approach to truth and reality. Might it be that the PP seriously perturbs the assumption that truth and reality must and should be universally or generally mastered and grasped ‘precisely’ by humans, i.e., clearly extracted from the world and expropriated in reductionist ways as ‘free’, 'natural’ or ‘objective’ environmental resources?

Practical action

In some assessments of the PP, the criticisms primarily driven via appeals to universality or generality are sidestepped in favor of seeing the PP less as a ‘principle’ in those overall theoretical senses and more as an attempt to develop a practicable ‘approach’ in, among other contexts, environmental governance, policy, and law. In these contexts, the PP has often been criticised for not being practically plausible.

Criticisms here arise in part because a more specific set of criteria for implementation concerning concrete problems and cases is allegedly needed and missing. The main lines of criticism concern the thorny problem of articulating the PP in substantive ways that make clear which concrete policy acts and juridical measures constitute a precautionary approach. A majority of formulations of the PP can be seen to stay silent on this issue. Other formulations can be seen to begin to provide such substantive elements, but still leave the issue open and unresolved. Moreover, on closer inspection the elements at issue can also be considered in significant tension with each other: taking preventive action (“Communication from the Commission on the Precautionary Principle” 2000, 15); shifting the burden of proof (Maguire and Ellis 2005); using the best available technology and clean production methods (Jackson 1993); insuring cost-effectiveness (Gollier and Treich 2003; Munthe 2011).

Criticisms also arise because the PP is seen as being developed and defined in varying ways as an approach to practical ‘action.’ For example, when considering a set of definitions in environmental law in EU settings, developed since the appearance of cases concerning marine pollution in the 1970s, some formulations of the principle operate negatively (by excluding some justifications for inaction), some work positively but without requirements (by permitting but not requiring that precautionary action be taken) while again others are formulated positively and with a view to a duty (by strongly advising or requiring that precautionary actions be taken) (Bodansky 2004). Observing such criticisms, one can remark that here the PP is attacked because critics assume that it should be defined in accord with normal modern science and that it should also deliver a general and concrete substantive basis for practical (in)actions.

In replying to such criticism, it seems to be a shared view among proponents of the PP that both of these assumptions are misleading. Proponents instead maintain that the focus in preventive decision-making and practice should be on flexibility, context-sensitivity, continuously varying feedback, learning, and the acquisition and updating of accumulating knowledge of hazards to health, life-quality, and the environment (Tickner 2003). It also appears to be a shared view among proponents that the PP and ‘preventive practice’ are most likely to remain existentially, economically, politically, and legally potent insofar as they remain suggestively vague and therefore flexible (Fisher 2001; Petrenko and McArthur 2010). They can perhaps best be viewed as developing guides for action or inaction under conditions of uncertainty rather than strict universal or general principles that can or should be coded precisely once and for all situations or cases (Hartzell-Nichols 2017; Jordan and O’Riordan 1999, 15-16).

Hence, insofar as the PP prescribes action, this is most often seen by proponents as, in each case, dependent upon “underlying values, the nature and plausibility of potential harm and the degree and kind of uncertainty” (Schettler and Raffensperger 2004, 77). Heuristic or pragmatic guidelines for preventive (in)actions could thus be left relatively open and, as in the examples of such guidelines below, with only relatively specific reference to existing knowledge:

• Protect diversity in environmental and other systems since we know that such systems tend to be more resilient in the face of shifts than highly stressed systems operating near thresholds or tipping points.
• Consider downscaling any scientific or technological experiment towards a ‘safe to fail’ mode rather than carrying through at the scale where precaution is a known necessity, and build in continuous monitoring feedback loops that permit adaptive learning.
• Shift the burden of proof of safety (or no irreversible harm) to the proposer or agent of an innovation, but consider it more a burden of persuasion and responsibility than a call for an impossible proof of absolute safety.
• Assess a wide range of alternative activities, including inaction: do not take only a risk management approach that tends towards minimizing risks but do also pursue a preventive approach that asks both whether the activity is necessary for achieving broader goals and whether there might be other ways to achieve those goals that could avoid harm entirely.
• Generate open, democratically inclusive, and transparent processes early in the decision-making, with a view to the accountability and fairness of hearing the parties involved and recognising that the broadest range of experience affords the best basis for sound science and good decisions.
• Appreciate and account for the existence of a broader scientific uncertainty as regards understanding the potential for harm: not only an uncertainty that can be reduced with more and better data for key variables, but also both the uncertainty inherent in all systems with multiple variables interacting in complex ways and the more fundamental uncertainty constituted by indeterminacy or our inevitable ignorance.

Observing the exchanges among critics and proponents could lead one to ask: is the PP attacked because it offers a wide, post-normal epistemic and ethical approach to preventive (in)action and because that approach, which takes seriously the practical uncertainty of our ignorance and the indeterminacy of knowing how best to act resiliently, is uncomfortable and demanding?

As hinted at above, one demanding corollary of such a wider, less anthropocentric, and more complex post-normal approach is that existing top-down, universal, or general guidelines for practice should perhaps be replaced by evolving assemblages. Such evolving guidelines would consist of a multiplicity of ongoing heuristic, bottom-up, particular, local and regional attempts to ascribe meaning to ‘preventive practice,’ and ‘(in)action.’ Is it not likely that the PP comes in for criticism because it includes this kind of difficult but arguably more resilient post-normal practical take on preventing extinction? Is the PP resisted because it seeks to operate non-anthropocentrically via the privileging of a selection of multiple incomplete, adaptively context-sensitive (in)actions? Perhaps post-normal PP practices meet resistance because they play themselves out in dynamic biological, ecological, and material-energetic relations of coexistence, with processual and structural feedback loops seeing to interdependence and belonging-with, and thus challenge common views of human sovereignty.

Facts and values

Many criticisms directed at the PP aim at what is perceived to be an approach to facts based on a deeply problematic set of underlying values and an equally problematic view of the world and humans’ place in it.

Some critics argue that the worldview implied by the PP is unduly fearful and pessimistic (see, e.g., Sunstein 2005). Others claim that adopting the PP would paralyse and stifle scientific discovery and technological development, or that it falls victim to an allegedly obviously self-defeating epistemological and scientific scepticism, or that it represents a practically weak and logically invalid attempt to convert morality into legislation (Manson 2002; Holm and Harris 1999).

Proponents of the PP try in turn to demonstrate that the design of normal science, along with permissive regulatory frameworks, comes rigged with built-in values that lead to scientific errors, failures to take uncertainty seriously, and environmental and life-threatening harm.

According to PP proponents, the pattern of inference in normal science can be viewed as placing a biased focus on what humans know rather than on what is not known. It also emphasises demonstrable cause-and-effect relationships and not relationships that may well exist but have so far remained hidden or invisible despite existing testing. This bias is perhaps most obvious in statistical procedures, where the broadly hegemonic preference in dealing with uncertainty is to try to minimise the probability of concluding incorrectly that there is an effect when one does not exist. This is also known as trying to avoid false positives or type I errors. It is a much rarer approach to aim at minimising the probability of false negatives or type II errors, that is, of incorrectly concluding that there is no effect when one exists. It is widely noted that existing regulatory frameworks place an onerous burden of proof on those attempting to protect, conserve, or regenerate the environment, life forms, and human health. Proponents of the PP argue that, even if it is an unintended consequence, this burden of proof installs a de facto bias in favour of scientific, technological, and industrial freedom of action (M'Gonigle et al. 1994).

Given the debates concerning facts and values discussed here, perhaps it should be recognised that the values embedded in existing formulations of the PP are not immediately clear, nor can they be expected to be self-evident or good for everyone. Moreover, one might also do well to recognise that a more widespread and diversified pursuit of the PP would not only be a boon but would come with complex tensions and costs. Such tensions and costs would include the problematization of valued goals internal to environmentalist concerns. For example, the rigorous pursuit of the PP is likely to prevent, slow down, or introduce conflicts into some of the otherwise promising environmentalist projects, along with others, including ecosystem or species-conserving initiatives. In other words, the pursuit of the values embodied in the PP comes with a price, a de facto cost, and an emergent set of complex tensions. It is one needed step to spell out more clearly for negotiation the values of the PP and the prices likely to be paid if/when they are pursued.

The debates above suggest that the PP remains valued as an inspiration to environmentalist action or restraint and as a challenge to entrenched assumptions and practices. One might conclude that the PP is resisted because of specific assumptions and practices. The PP complicates continued adherence to the very high value that modernity has placed on humancentric scientific and cultural agency and on humans’ sovereign freedom from what are viewed as threats and necessities imposed by nature. It is perhaps the better alternative, because it the more resilient, to point out from an environmental humanities perspective that these values reflect a skewed imperialistic and militaristic view of the world. This worldview implies an assumed necessity of warfare between humanity and nature, rather than seeking actualisation of what could be perceived as humans’ capacities for non-anthropocentric coexistence and a freedom that is not from nature but with and for it.

Environmental humanities, interdisciplinarity and insularity

The precautionary principle is a highly contested and important concept with a history and a set of usages that cross a wide range of contexts and scientific fields. Surprisingly, however, the principle is little known and little used in environmental humanities research, especially considering that it could facilitate more nuanced and effective engagements with many of its key issues.

One might say that the PP could serve as a portal to formulations of how environmental humanities contribute to the broader study of complex human-environment interactions. The PP could afford views of how the humanities have involved themselves with the development of heterodox and pluralist studies of the environment, studies that have been described as helping to straddle “the ‘fact-seeking’ disciplines as well as those that try to foster intelligent discussion of how humans might best relate to nature according to diverse ethical, aesthetical and spiritual principles” (Castree, Hulme, and Proctor 2018, 3). Alternatively, one might argue in favour of seeing in the PP potential openings of another science, or what Isabelle Stengers calls a slow science that reclaims rational thought and civilised appreciation from fast mobilisation to try to create a future worth living. Perhaps the PP can best be viewed as offering a finite, situated scientific approach to “an ‘ecology of partial connections,’ which requires learning from others, being transformed by what is learned, and acknowledging our debt to this transformative experience as we explore its problematising impacts in our own terms” (Stengers 2018, 127).

The scant usage of the PP in the environmental humanities is also surprising because it could be demonstrated that influential works and initiatives frequently cited and appropriated in the environmental humanities draw, if only implicitly, on the values, the practices, and the scientific outlook of the PP. A handful of examples may help bring this out.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa proposes to reengage with matters of care, noting that ‘care’ remains ambivalent in significance and ontology (Bellacasa 2017). This is intended as an invitation to a specifically speculative exploration of the significance of this concept or term for thinking and living better and more resiliently in more-than-human worlds. It is tempting to see an intimate but perhaps difficult relation between the Vorsorgeprinzip and ‘care,’ starting with the shared etymology that associates both ‘Sorge’ and ‘care’ with burdens of mind, worry, anxiety, lament, sorrow, mourning, and grief. This may pave the way for recognising a link between, on the one hand, Bellacasa’s open invitation to a broad speculative semiotic and ontological exploration and, on the other, the approach to deep structural and processual scientific uncertainty in the precautionary principle.

As a second example, one could look to political theorist Jane Bennett’s effort to reanimate matter and things, the aim being, as Bennett writes, “to encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things” (Bennett 2010, viii). Bennett’s path through ‘encouragements’ to such ‘engagements’ passes via human historical materialist ways of laying bare hegemonic human ways of grasping things and matter, but it is notably mapped out by speculative onto-stories on the scent of non-human thing-powers and agencies of technological artefacts and bodies. One could very well ask whether such careful ethico-political ‘encouragements’ via alternate, speculatively realist, more-than-human stories and scenarios can be considered fairly closely coupled with a precautionary ethics and governance of environmental matters.

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book-length study of the climate of history in the Anthropocene attempts to present intimations of the ‘deep times’ of human and geological agency and traces of ‘the planetary’ besides the globe. It does so from within a postcolonial, historical phenomenology that shifts between and superimposes everyday human historical consciousness and geological timescales that exceed the human (Chakrabarty 2021). One could claim an affinity between ideas of precaution and Chakrabarty’s humble decentering of the human and everyday cultural temporality, and also his explicit attempt to generate more-than-human ‘intimations’ of the planetary. Is this not close to an approach to the precautionary principle that acknowledges the time scales of biological and ecological adaptation and operates with an awareness of planetary limits, the indeterminacy of knowledge, and human ignorance?

Donna Haraway’s proposal to stay with the trouble, that is, for humans to become capable of responding deeply to each other and other creatures in the thick present and earthly place of the Chthulucene, involves listening for chances to ‘figure’ ethico-politically just multispecies flourishing, including emergent strings of human and other-than-human kinships (Haraway 2016). This figuring and listening for capacities for just lively responsibility works with a complex, intersectional, situated and timely material-semiotic assemblage of sensed and imagined entanglements – in attempts to “play string figures with companion species” (4). The phrase ‘string figures’ already suggests Haraway’s theoretical, methodological, practical, and processual granting of prominence to the figure of “SF,” understood as the workings of a braided or webbed alliterative list that includes “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact” (2). It is notable how Haraway opens and closes this as a science list, and orders it from the more normative imaginative figurations towards the more empirical and descriptive ones. Perhaps one can hear the ethico-political and scientific resonance between a precautionary biocentric decentering of the human and Haraway’s attentive SF listening to other chances of just kinships and for becoming capable of responding differently in deeply uncertain situations and times.

The late Bruno Latour sought to make things public (Latour and Weibel 2005). His call to humans to reset modernity – to engage with critical zones, and, not least, to land by coming down – to reorient ourselves and map a common Earth with human and non-human agencies, is a plea for collaborations addressed to scientists, theologians, politicians, economists, and activists as well as to artists to begin adjusting to the new climatic regime (Latour 2017, 2018, 2016; Latour and Weibel 2020). Latour’s call to reimagine, rehistoricize, and resituate the planet by facing Gaia is not least an ethico-political plea to redo existing scenarios for ecological disasters, planetary inequalities and wars of migration to negotiate better chances for peaceful modes of co-existence. This involves revisiting understandings of religion and nature hegemonic since the rise of the material sciences in the 17^th century to develop a new notion of Gaia from James Lovelock’s and Lynn Margulis’ earlier insights (Clarke et al. 2022; J. Lovelock 1979; Margulis 1970, 1981), redistributing elements in earlier religious notions of ‘nature’ in a secular way that better hints at the fragile, finite, complex systems in which living and non-living actors modify a planet, such as the Earth of a new climatic regime.

Latour proceeds by drawing out key lessons, rejoining a set of unconventional and inventive insights from the fields of science studies, politics, and religious studies. A science studies approach helps disengage the understanding of the objectivity of science from its coupling with a philosophical and theological definition of ‘nature.’ An expanded common world politics involving human and non-human agencies disengages traditional political theory from an epistemological and scientific definition of ‘nature.’ Taking apart the near identity of earlier definitions of ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ is to relink religious enunciation with a power to transform and convert, thus paving the way for a different political theology of the Earth approached as a geohistorical adventure (Latour 2017).

It might not be too difficult to see the affinity between the precautionary principle and Latour’s inventive ethico-political resetting of modern science and religion to face Gaia. Both are ethico-politically informed when facing situations and times of deep scientific uncertainty, and both try to take care of preventive actions, safeguarding continuously varying life forms and agencies on a common Earth.

As hinted at in the beginning of this section, the point of briefly bringing up this first handful of examples is to show that increased and more nuanced engagements with emergent definitions of the precautionary principle might help better address of strong interdisciplinarity as a recognized challenge in the environmental humanities but also across the sciences broadly speaking. There might be a broad and increasing consensus in research that finding more resilient transitions in the face of climate change requires interdisciplinary collaborations. However, this frequently meets with resistance from insular disciplinary demarcations of fields, theories, and methodologies.

Moreover, interdisciplinary collaborations frequently demonstrate inequalities and built-in hierarchies of power relations, as when universities or organizations operate as if it is taken for granted that STEM and geoscience approaches have the primary relevance, rights, and powers when studying environmental issues whereas the social sciences are silently assumed to have a more limited representation and the human sciences minimal such. Inversely, the ongoing developments of the environmental humanities most often restrict themselves to placing primacy on materials and ideas from their particular fields, as well as the methods commonly associated with the humanities, supplemented by some recent scientific findings of particular relevance. It is significantly rarer for EH projects to engage broadly with STEM approaches and insights, while collaborative bridges to parts of the social sciences are typically forged slightly more. As a result, it often remains a challenge to articulate and then demonstrate that the environmental humanities can and should contribute on an equal footing in environmental and climatic research precisely because they bring very necessary complementary competencies and capacities without which initiatives will likely fail.

It is worth observing that emergent definitions of the precautionary principle offer interesting leverage points in this context and show potential to facilitate difficult and much-needed efforts in interdisciplinary translation. It is part of the same observation that the examples above begin to hint at and pinpoint key environmental humanities competencies: considerations of ontological turns, capacities for more-than-human engagements, inventive operationalisations of the imagination and imaginaries, existential, affective, and sensate belonging and becoming-with, critically informed performance and interpretation.

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