The Precautionary Principle: A Critical Appraisal

134 Pages·2001·0.57 MB·English

by  Indur M. Goklany

THE
PRECAUTIONARY
PRINCIPLE
A Critical Appraisal of
Environmental Risk
Assessment
I n d u r M . G o k l a n y

Copyright © 2001 by the Cato Institute.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goklany, Indur M.
The precautionary principle : a critical appraisal of environment
risk assessment / Indur M. Goklany.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-930865-16-3
1. Environmental risk assessment. I. Title.
GE145 .G64 2001
363.7'02–dc21
2001047310
Cover design by Elise Rivera.
Printed in the United States of America.
CATOINSTITUTE
1000 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.
Washington, D.C. 2001
Contents
1. ESCAPINGGOBLINS, ONLYTOBECAPTUREDBYWOLVES? 1
2. DDT:SILENTSPRINGORSILENTPEOPLE? 13
3. THERISKSANDREWARDSOFGENETICALLYMODIFIEDCROPS 29
4. GLOBALWARMING:FROMTHEFRYINGPANINTOTHEFIRE? 57
5. ENSURINGTHATGOODINTENTIONSDONOTSPAWNBAD
OUTCOMES 89
REFERENCES 95
INDEX 109

Acknowledgments
I was fortunate to have support and encouragement from several
quarters while writing this book. In particular, I thank Julian Morris
for helping me embark on and persist in this endeavor. The book
originated as a chapter in his fine book, Rethinking Risk and the Pre-
cautionary Principle (Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann, 2000). I also
thank Roger Bate, Ken Chilton, and Don Roberts for their detailed re-
views and comments on earlier versions of various chapters in my
book. I wrote parts of the book in the summer of 2000 while I was the
D&D Foundation Julian Simon Fellow at the Political Economy Re-
search Center in Bozeman, Montana. I am grateful to Terry Ander-
son, Rich Stroup, Jane Shaw, Roger Meiners, P.J. Hill, Dan Benjamin,
Roger Sedjo, Don Leal, and the entire PERC crew for their company
and support during my tenure there. I was doubly fortunate in Boze-
man to be the guest of Juliette Shaw and Eric Noyes, and the Mein-
ers family. This book, moreover, would not have been published
without the support of the Cato Institute’s Jerry Taylor, David Boaz,
and David Lampo.
Thanks to Ken Chilton, previous versions of the biotechnology
and global warming chapters of this book appeared as policy studies
from the Center for the Study of American Business (now the Wei-
denbaum Center), Washington University in St. Louis. A version of
the former also appeared in the Biotechnology Law Report. The DDT
chapter was published on the “Save Children from Malaria Cam-
paign” Web site, courtesy of Roger Bate and Kendra Okonski.
And, of course, no such undertaking can ever be successful with-
out constant support and encouragement from the home front. To
Maya, Sam, and, especially, Karen, I dedicate this book.

1. Escaping Goblins, Only to Be Captured
by Wolves?
“What shall we do, what shall we do!” he cried. “Escaping goblins to
be caught by wolves!”
—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, p. 98
So what do we do if we come to a fork in the road and one way
leads through territory inhabited by goblins and the other through
country infested by wolves? Which road should we take? Does it
even matter if we take one road and not the other?
Policymakers in the environmental and public health arena often
face such dilemmas. DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) is a
classic case. On one hand, this much-reviled chemical is a proven,
cheap, and effective method of reducing malaria, a disease that an-
nually afflicts 300 million people and claims over a million lives
worldwide (WHO 2000). Over the years, DDT has saved millions of
lives not only in Asia and Africa but also in Europe and the Ameri-
cas. But DDT has also been implicated in the decline of a number of
raptors such as the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon. It has been
found in various avian eggshells, in the tissues of fish, and in moth-
ers’ milk. Some suspect it plays a role in advancing various human
cancers and other disorders (Roberts 1999, Attaran et al. 2000, Tren
and Bate 2001).
So what should be the policy toward DDT? Should it be banned
because of its effects on birds and its hypothesized adverse public
health effects? Should its use be encouraged because of its proven
ability to combat malaria, one of nature’s dread diseases? Or should
different policies prevail in different areas, depending on whether
those areas are plagued by malaria or host species that might be
threatened by DDT?
Today’s environmentalists have increasingly invoked the precau-
tionary principle to solve such policy dilemmas. This principle is, es-
sentially, a restatement of a popular rendition of the Hippocratic
1