The Precautionary Principle in the 20th Century

Late Lessons from Early Warnings

Paul Harremoes, David Gee, Malcom MacGarvin, Andy Stirling, Jane Keys, Brian Wynne, Sofia Guedes Vaz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781853838927
• eBook ISBN: 9781134207855
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Insurance
• Index: Business

The precautionary principle is widely seen as fundamental to successful policies for sustainability. It has been cited in international courts and trade disputes between the USA and the EU, and invoked in a growing range of political debates. Understanding what it can and cannot achieve is therefore crucial. This volume looks back over the last century to examine the role the principle played or could have played, in a range of major and avoidable public disasters. From detailed investigation of how each disaster unfolded, what the impacts were and what measures were adopted, the authors draw lessons and establish criteria that could help to minimise the health and environmental risks of future technological, economic and policy innovations. This is an informative resource for all those from lawyers and policy-makers, to researchers and students needing to understand or apply the principle.

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Introduction

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Late lessons from early warnings: an approach to learning from history

In 1898, Lucy Deane, a United Kingdom (UK) factory inspector, observed:

‘The evil effects of asbestos dust have also instigated a microscopic examination of the mineral dust by HM Medical Inspector. Clearly revealed was the sharp glass-like jagged nature of the particles, and where they are allowed to rise and to remain suspended in the air of the room in any quantity, the effects have been found to be injurious as might have been expected’ (Deane, 1898)

One hundred years later, in 1998, the UK government decided to ban ‘white’ asbestos, a decision that was echoed by the European Union (EU) the following year. The current asbestos-induced death rate in the UK is about 3000 deaths per year, and some 250,000–400,000 asbestos cancers are expected in Western Europe over the next 35 years, due to past exposures (Peto, 1999).

The hundred years between the 1890s and 1990s is the main focus of this detailed review of the use, neglect and possible misuse of the concept of precaution in dealing with a selection of occupational, public and environmental hazards. The costs and benefits of the actions or inactions of governments and others in responding to ‘early warnings’ about hazards provide us with its content. The aim of this volume is to see if something can be learnt from these histories that can help us prevent, or at least minimise, future impacts of other agents that may turn out to be harmful, and to do so without stifling innovation or compromising science.

The book is an example of the information needed to help the EU and European Environment Agency (EEA) member countries to frame and identify sound and effective policies that protect the environment and contribute to sustainable development. Providing such information is the regulatory duty of the EEA, an independent agency of the European community established in 1993 to provide objective information to the policy-making bodies of the EU and its Member States (Council Regulations, 1210/90 and 993/99).

In trying to reduce current and future risks the lessons of history have rarely been used. The histories of a selection of hazards is therefore the subject matter of The Precautionary Principle in the 20th Century. Fourteen case studies (arranged chronologically according to the first date of early warning) have been chosen from a range of well-known hazards to workers, the public and the environment, where enough is now known about their impacts to enable conclusions to be drawn about how well they were dealt with by governments and civil society. Such conclusions should be based on ‘the spirit of the times’ and not on the luxury of hindsight. There are other public health effects and environmental disasters that have not been looked at, such as thalidomide (James, 1965), lead (Millstone, 1997) and the Aral Sea (Small, 2001) These provide additional information about unintended consequences, and the conflict between economic and social interests, from which additional lessons from history can be drawn.

The authors of the case studies were asked to structure their chapters around four key questions:

1 When was the first credible scientific ‘early warning’ of potential harm?

2 When and what were the main actions or inactions on risk reduction taken by regulatory authorities and others?

3 What were the resulting costs and benefits of the actions or inactions, including their distribution between groups and across time?

4 What lessons can be drawn that may help future decision-making?

The case studies and authors have also been chosen with a transatlantic audience in mind. Three chapters are focused either on North American issues (eg, pollution of the Great Lakes) or primarily on the North American handling of issues that are also directly relevant to Europe (benzene, and diethylstilboestrol (DES) administered in pregnancy) and are authored by scientists from North America (Gilbertson, Infante and co-author Swann, respectively). Three chapters cover issues of some conflict between North America and Europe (hormones as growth promoters, asbestos and methyl tert-butyl (MTBE) in petrol); all the other chapters are as relevant to North Americans, their public health and their environments as they are to Europeans.

It is sometimes said that the United States (US) does not use the precautionary principle, but it is worth noting (see Table 1.1) that the US has helped to promote what could be called ‘precautionary prevention’, without necessarily calling it ‘the precautionary principle’.

The precautionary principle has become controversial, not least because of the disputes between the EU and the US over hormones in beef, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), global warming and other issues in which precautionary approaches have been invoked. There is now considerable debate (not to say terminological confusion, particularly between politicians on different sides of the Atlantic) as to what the precautionary principle means, and how it can be implemented. One aim of this book is to try to improve transatlantic understanding on the use of precaution in policy-making.

The authors of the case studies, who provided their services pro bono, were asked to keep their contributions brief, which obviously inhibits detailed treatment of the issues. However, we wanted to elicit key conclusions from the

Table 1.1 Some examples of ‘precautionaryprevention’ in the US

Issue	Precautionary prevention
Food safety (carcinogenic additives)	The Delaney Clause in the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, 1957–96, which banned animal carcinogens from the human food chain
Food safety (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE)	A ban on the use of scrapie-infected sheep and goat meat in the animal and human food chain in the early 1970s, which may have helped the US to avoid BSE
Environmental safety (chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs)	A ban on the use of CFCs in aerosols in 1977, several years before similar action in most of Europe
Public health (DES)	A ban on the use of DES as a growth promoter in beef, 1972–79, nearly ten years before the EU ban in 1987

Source: EEA

histories and not the detailed post mortems that others have produced: these can be accessed via the references for each chapter.

It has been pointed out that the case study authors are not without strong views, being for the most part active participants in the process of making the histories that are summarised in each chapter. Joe Farman, the author of the chapter on halocarbons, for example, discovered the ‘hole’ in the stratospheric ozone layer; Morris Greenberg helped to set up the first asbestos mesothelioma register; Michael Gilbertson has spent most of his professional life researching Great Lakes pollution and advocating its clean-up; and Peter Infante did the first cohort epidemiological study of benzene-exposed workers, and has worked for many years in the US Health and Safety Department to reduce workers' exposure to benzene and other pollutants. All other authors, to varying degrees, have had significant involvement in the subject of their chapters: indeed, they would not have been approached if they had not already extensively studied the case that they were asked to write about. All of them, as respected scientists in their fields, were expected to be as objective as possible in answering the four questions put to them. This involvement of the authors in the histories of their case studies is therefore brought to the attention of readers.

The case studies are all about ‘false negatives’ in the sense that they are agents or activities that were regarded at one time as harmless by governments and others, at prevailing levels of exposure and ‘control’, until evidence about their harmful effects emerged. But are there no ‘false positives’, where action was taken on the basis of a precautionary approach that turned out to be unnecessary? It was felt necessary to include such examples, but despite inviting some industry representatives to submit them, and discussing these in some detail, no suitable examples emerged. Attention was drawn to a US publication, Facts Versus Fears (Lieberman and Kwon, 1998), which attempted to provide some 25 examples of ‘false positives’. However, on closer examination these turned out not to be robust enough for those who recommended them to accept our invitation to use the strongest half dozen in this book. The challenge of demonstrating ‘false positives’ remains: possible candidates that have been mentioned include the ban on dumping sewage sludge in the North Sea, and the ‘Y2K millennium bug’.

What is the ‘precautionary principle’?

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) may have been pessimistic when he said ‘Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall… he will end up destroying the earth’. However, being wise before it is too late is not easy, especially when the environmental or health impacts may be far into the future and the real, or perceived, costs of averting them are large and immediate. Forestalling disasters usually requires acting before there is strong proof of harm, particularly if the harm may be delayed and irreversible, an approach to scientific evidence and policy-making which is part of what is now called the precautionary principle.

Precautionary prevention has often been used in medicine and public health, where the benefit of doubt about a diagnosis is usually given to the patient (‘better safe than sorry’). However, the precautionary principle and its application to environmental hazards and their uncertainties only began to emerge as an explicit and coherent concept within environmental science in the 1970s, when German scientists and policy-makers were trying to deal with ‘forest death’ (Waldsterben) and its possible causes, including air pollution.

The main element of the precautionary principle they developed was a general rule of public policy action to be used in situations of potentially serious or irreversible threats to health or the environment, where there is a need to act to reduce potential hazards before there is strong proof of harm, taking into account the likely costs and benefits of action and inaction. A precautionary approach, however, requires much more than establishing the level of proof needed to justify action to reduce hazards (the ‘trigger’ for action). The Vorsorgeprinzip (‘foresight’ or ‘precautionary’ principle), in the German Clean Air Act of 1974, as elaborated in the 1985 report on the Clean Air Act (Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994) also included elements such as:

• research and monitoring for the early detection of hazards;
• a general reduction of environmental burdens;
• the promotion of ‘clean production’ and innovation;
• the proportionality principle, which states that the costs of actions to prevent hazards should not be disproportionate to the likely benefits;
• a cooperative approach between stakeholders to solving common problems via integrated policy measures that aim to improve the environment, competitiveness and employment; and
• action to reduce risks before full ‘proof’ of harm is available if impacts could be serious or irreversible.

Since the 1970s, the precautionary principle has risen rapidly in the political agenda, and has been incorporated into many international agreements, particularly in the marine environment, where an abundance of ecological data on pollution yielded little understanding but much concern: ‘huge amounts of data are available, but despite these data… we have reached a sort of plateau in our understanding of what that information is for… This is what led to the precautionary principle’ (Marine Pollution Bulletin, 1997). More generally, Principle 15 of the UN Rio Declaration on Environment and Development 1992 (see Table 1.2) extended the idea to the whole environment.

The use of different terms in these treaties and agreements such as ‘precautionary principle’, ‘precautionary approach’ and ‘precautionary measures’ can cause difficulties for communication and dialogue on how best to deal with scientific uncertainties and potential hazards. The concluding chapters of this book attempt to clarify some of these ambiguities.

In Europe, the most significant support for the precautionary principle has come from the European Commission's Communication on the Precautionary Principle (European Commission, 2000) and the Council of Ministers' Nice Decision, both in 2000. They have made significant contributions to the practical implementation of the precautionary principle, especially concerning stakeholder involvement and the avoidance of trade disputes. Some of the main issues raised by the case studies and by the European Commission's Communication are elaborated in the concluding chapters.

An early use of the precautionary principle: London, 1854

The use of precautionary approaches to hazards began well before the 1970s, particularly in the field of public health. One early application in Europe was by Dr John Snow, who in 1854 recommended removing the handle from the Broad Street water pump in an attempt to stop the cholera epidemic that was then ravaging central London. Some evidence for a correlation between the polluted water and cholera had been published five years earlier by Snow himself (Snow, 1849). This evidence was not ‘proof beyond reasonable doubt’. However, it was proof enough for Snow to recommend the necessary public health action, where the likely costs of inaction would have been far greater than the possible ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures, tables and boxes
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms and abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Fisheries: taking stock
• 3 Radiation: early warnings, late effects
• 4 Benzene: a historical perspective on the American and European occupational setting
• 5 Asbestos: from ‘magic’ to malevolent mineral
• 6 PCBs and the precautionary principle
• 7 Halocarbons, the ozone layer and the precautionary principle
• 8 The DES story: long-term consequences of prenatal exposure
• 9 Antimicrobials as growth promoters: resistance to common sense
• 10 Sulphur dioxide: from protection of human lungs to remote lake restoration
• 11 MTBE in petrol as a substitute for lead
• 12 Early warnings of chemical contamination of the Great Lakes
• 13 TBT antifoulants: a tale of ships, snails and imposex
• 14 Hormones as growth promoters: the precautionary principle or a political risk assessment?
• 15 ‘Mad cow disease’ 1980s–2000: how reassurances undermined precaution
• 16 Twelve late lessons
• 17 Conclusions
• About the authors
• References
• Index