W HAT CAN THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE DO FOR US ?

Is the precautionary principle applicable to the subject of extinction? It has been applied to this question by some official statements. The UN FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries urges a precautionary approach in relation to fish stocks.³⁰⁹ In order to motivate the precautionary principle, the Wingspread document explicitly mentions extinction as one of the areas where traditional decision methods have failed.³¹⁰ The Rio declaration does not explicitly talk about extinction, but claims that the precautionary principle should be used in situations of a) serious damage, b) irreversible damage, and c) lack of full scientific certainty. These are all salient aspects of species extinction: The extinction of species is typically irreversible. There are many uncertainties concerning the species issue. There are suspicions that extinction will harm some very important values.

There are non-linear effects that both increase the uncertainties and make the question of timing extra important. If the species loss results in a loss of an ecosystem service, that too is typically irreversible and the nonlinear reaction of ecosystems to encroachments makes the uncertainties great.³¹¹ In the worst case, loss of important ecosystem services can lead to what I called “game over-situations”. All of the things mentioned here turned out in section 3.3 to be precisely the kind of things that the precautionary principle is meant to deal with.

308 Gee 2006

309 McGarvin 2001 p.23

310 Wingspread Conference 1998

311 Daily 2000 p.336

Bryan G. Norton compares the rivet popping analogy by Ehrlich and Ehrlich (see section 2.7 above), to a phenomenon called “zero-infinity dilemmas”.³¹² A zero-infinity dilemma is a situation in which the probability for something to go wrong is very small, while the effects if it does is catastrophic.³¹³ If too many species disappear from an ecosystem, the ecosystem may break down. The same would be the case with the entire biosphere. For each single species, the probability that its extinction would cause the breakdown is “quite low”, but if it does, the consequences would be very serious indeed.³¹⁴

This too looks like a good reason for applying the precautionary principle to the question of extinction. The question is what probability is low enough and what gain is high enough to take the risk. The important thing to note is that the principle tells us not to be satisfied with an ordinary risk analysis. It urges us to take into account the uncertainty concerning the probability (there is no way we can know in advance whether the species in question will be the one that causes the break down). It also urges us to consider both the value of the ecosystem at risk, the harm that may be caused to this value, the uncertainties concerning these aspects, and the aspect of irreversibility. It finally tells us that as a result of these considerations we must adjust and quite possibly increase the burden of proof for those who want to take the risk.

Norton is not alone in concentrating on the possible breakdown of ecosystems and the loss of ecosystem services. The UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment group belongs to this category. They reason in three steps:

1. They first argue that working ecosystems provide us with many important ecosystem services.

2. Then they stress the importance of biodiversity for properly working ecosystems.

3. Finally, they suggest that since so much is at stake, and since we have good reasons to believe that biodiversity is important for the ecosystems to work, but do not know exactly how, we ought to apply the precautionary principle.

In our case, since the ecosystem services are very valuable and since there is a strong suspicion that loss of biodiversity may eventually be detrimental to this value, we should demand very strong evidence that the species under consideration will not be the one that breaks the neck of an ecosystem service. However, since we cannot ever know that in

312 Norton 1986:1 p.121, Norton 1987 pp.67ff

313 This is the standard definition. Norton adds a list of other criteria that are characteristic of the extinction in particular. I believe however that the simpler standard definition is sufficient for the point I am going to make.

314 Norton 1986:1 p.121, Norton 1987 pp.67ff

advance, we ought instead to demand good evidence that a certain practice will not cause extinction.

Protection of ecosystems and ecosystem services is not the only reason to apply the precautionary principle to the species issue however. Other species also supply us with a host of different instrumental values. In some cases the exploitation of these values risk causing extinction of the species. As we have seen, exploiting a species to the degree that it goes extinct may in fact be economically rational from an anthropocentric viewpoint. This is however something we do not always know for sure. In 3.3.2 I noted that when an act might result in an irreversible change, we need extra strong evidence against any suspicion that the change will result in serious problems – e.g. by destroying or depleting a resource that would afterwards turn out to be more valuable in its original state. This is clearly applicable to the situation we discuss here. Extinction is as we have seen irreversible, and we cannot know now what the value of the species will be for future generations of human beings. What we can know on the other hand is that historically species have time and again turned out to be valuable in ways we had not expected.³¹⁵ It therefore seems quite clear that the precautionary principle tells us not to drive species to extinction, and that if we still contemplate on doing it, a heavy burden of proof should be placed on the shoulders of those in favour of the exploitation.

315 Gärdenfors 2005 p.119