Do nothing.

Dragging my gaze away from my navel, for an hour, attractive as it is.

I've been thinking about the Precautionary Principle (PP) recently. Yeah I know, but it's my head and in the absence of a life to amuse it with, I let it pretty much go where it wants.
The PP came up in a discussion I was involved in a few months ago about a contentious area of sea bed, stopped it dead as it was meant to, and produced a lot of head nodding and murmured agreements. "Ah yes the precautionary principle. Of course. Hmm." In my head all i could hear was some inane twat wailing "but what about the children! Does nobody care about the children!" as some are prone to do when another group is doing something they personally don't want them to do. Like playing conkers or having sex in anything other than position a or position b, or with person c.

My work brings me into contact with a lot of people (conservationists, environmentalists) who care deeply and genuinely about what they call 'the environment'. It sounds nice, 'the environment', but I'm not sure I know where it is exactly. It's definitely something other than where I live, work or play, as it should be made (or left) to be 'natural', i.e., unaffected by civilisation, the artificial...the human in other words. Ironic really, as both concepts are very recent, very human concepts or categorisations. A topic for another day perhaps.

Anyways, one of the ways in which the *ists lay claim to dominion over what they define as the environment is by invoking the aforesaid Precautionary Principle, an unarguable semantic construction that requires absolute proof that anything human which occurs in near or to the environment will cause no damage. The generally accepted definition from the 1998 Wingspread Conference states:

"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. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof"

By public they mean themselves, rarely the same thing, but the worrying part to me is the part I have italiscied. If you can't judge the case for action/no action scientifically how the fuck are you going to prove or disprove no harm will result? Tarot cards? Mystic Meg? And what does harm mean in this case? Change. Or rather any change not approved by the proponent.

There is a huge literature out there dealing with the fear of change in relation to different groups in societies, those who desire order and control and those who require someone else to keep them safe. Within these groups change is characterised as threat, either to them personally, the system of control or even god forbid, future generations. For those of us who have ever lived, dealt or traded with extreme risk (I'm an ex-fishermen) the concept is almost totally opaque.

Managing resources, protecting much loved or useful landscapes, all no brainers if clear and agreed surely, but avoiding all risk, giving up the option of change for a generation that doesn't even exist yet is pseudo-intellectual bollocks. How many of us would be here now if the PP had been invoked before the introduction of mass vaccinations in the 20th Century? How many generations lost to hunger without the development of modern agriculture? The domestication of fire? Of course we have and will make mistakes, but any action, and its presumed benefits, must be weighed against the possible risks, not against the unknowable risks.

It's what humans do. It's what makes us human.
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