Climatron: Personal Blog of Kyle Vandercamp

Still from Ron Fricke's film Baraka

Yes, Vorsorgeprinzip. Never heard of it right? It’s the originating German for Precautionary Principle, which you may well have heard of.

The Precautionary Principle spans science, economics, politics, all things really. But like anything, it only works if you use it. And that’s not as stupid as it sounds.

Primum non nocere, “First, do no harm” is a precept of medical ethics, also eloquently known as Nonmaleficence. It’s pretty obvious what it means and the Precautionary Principal is an articulation of that same meaning. Humans have gradually developed a cautious streak since way back, back on the plains and savannas and the cold starry nights of our ancestors.

What I think modern humans struggle with is enacting that meaning on a conceptual level – we’re cautious in and attentive of our own lives but beyond our immediate environments, nearly unconscious of causality. Perhaps that’s why precaution is so apparent in the physician’s world, where it’s all about the immediate.

And my point is, any practical application of big science should be filtered this way too… Without precaution, some aspects of science are so powerful that irreversibilities are possible. This will make more sense soon.

Having a blog can be like having one long OpEd column. So if I sound a bit preachy, I don’t mean to, but I’ll say this – the world is incredibly complicated, we should move through it with a precautionary principle, now more than ever…