precautionary principle

It’s kind of sad that people do not naturally abide by something like the precautionary principle. Our world today is so controlled by money that people, especially big companies, will sacrifice harm to the earth or people for making more money. But if a written precautionary principle is what gets companies to stop being so selfish and actually look at all the options and choosing the least harmful one before acting then I completely agree with putting it into action.

At first thought this does sound like a great plan, it could force companies to slow down and really think about their actions. They would have to look at the consequences of what their company is going to do rather than primarily thinking about what could make them the most money. In most cases, this could probably really be a good thing. There are a lot of disasters that could possibly have been prevented if they would have thought about the precautionary principle before acting.

Some have argued that if we always used the precautionary principle then it could stop good things from happening. An example could be cell phones, using precautionary principle could have possibly stopped them from developing cell phone technology, if they would have looked at the possible negative side effects, like radiation, they may not have been able to continue developing the technology. Radiation from cell phones is something we still fully don’t understand the side effects of.

But when we take a look at more serious environmental problems there are many places where we can see that the precautionary principal could have been very helpful. For example, deforestation, this is a big environmental problem where we know many of the direct side effects. The precautionary principal would have been a system that could of possibly stopped some of this deforestation. If the companies involved would have stopped and looked at the kind of damage that deforestation could of caused.

Even when bad things happen, which they will, because we aren’t perfect, we aren’t going to make the right decision every time, at least if the precautionary principle was used we would be able to know that before acting we did everything we could to try and ensure that a disaster wouldn’t happen. When companies go into things knowing that something bad could happen and then something bad does happen, it becomes redundant, this sort of thing seems to happen over and over again. I am a firm believer that something like the precautionary principle could very well prevent many disasters.

Does it not seem like logic to you that people should think in depth about the actions they are going to make and what possible long and short term effects they could have? We do it for small decisions we make in our every day lives. I thought long and hard about what college to choose to go to and that decision really only affected me. Yet we have companies making decisions that could quite possibly affect thousands or millions of people and they don’t think all that hard about it.

Next, we need to discuss the proactionary principle, it is that basically states that one needs to assess the risk while still assessing what opportunities could be missed out on. I do agree that people should have their freedom to create new technology that could help us move forward and better the earth, but there also needs to be a sufficient amount of proof that the benefit far outweighs the negatives. This is why I think there should be a good balance between precautionary principle and proactionary principle, people should feel free to create new things but if those creations are going to have a bad effect on people and the environment then that probably isn’t something we need in this world, because it just isn’t worth it. But they can still take what they learned from that experience and use it to create something that can benefit the world.

I also do agree that any research that is done on a topic to determine predictability should be done based on scientific knowledge that is already established to be true. There is no point in making up scenarios; one could make up hundreds of scenarios all with different outcomes. It would be pointless to determine that a new innovation was not worth continuing with if it were deemed to be risky and wasn’t based on scientific fact.

Overall, I believe that proactionary and precautionary principals are both principals that could have very good effects on society. They are both things, that if used the right way, and I believe should be used together, will better our use of technologies and the way we go about creating new technologies.