ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

It seems that we scientists cannot win, if recent articles in New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´
(‘Can science save its soul?’ by Mary Midgley, 1 August 1992, and last
week’s ‘How science fails the environment’ by Brian Wynne and Sue Mayer) are
anything to go by. If we attempt to climb out of our box and broaden our
horizons, we get beaten about the head by Mary Midgley for practising
‘scientism’. If we stay in our box, we get thrashed for our ‘narrow
reductionism’. After that it is quite surprising to find Greenpeace applying
for – even insisting on – membership of the scientific community. But it
insists at the same time on rewriting the rules, and though it seems almost
churlish to refuse admission, I am afraid Wynne and Mayer’s ‘green science’
does not qualify them for membership.

The expertise one needs to respond to this pair of writers is neither
science nor philosophy but rhetoric, because that is what they are
practising: trying to frighten you into agreement by any irrational device
they can lay their hands on. Wynne and Mayer talk of ‘green science’ (in
fact of ‘good’ green science, but the moral philosophy can wait till later).
Calling something ‘green science’ creates a metaphor – that the science
itself is ‘green’ – and metaphor is a potent weapon in the hands of the
demagogue. Words can make emotions supplant rational thought: that is why
the Greeks taught rhetoric almost as soon as they learnt to orate and write.

The effect works even on an emotionally neutral expression – for example
‘logical space’ (to borrow from the linguistic philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein). At first sight it looks as if ‘logical’ is a modifier of the
word ‘space’, whereas in fact it changes its meaning, setting it totally
apart from all other ‘spaces’. It is impossible to confuse the phrase
‘logical space’ with ‘curved space’ (as in Einstein) or two-dimensional
‘film space’ (to quote the film director Sergei Eisenstein). In short, if
one cannot talk of science as ‘science’, then one must be talking of
something entirely different. Science does not need qualifiers like ‘good’
or ‘green’, or suffixes like ‘-ism’. Adding the -ism is designed simply to
bring science down to the level of the pseudosciences such as Marxism or
Creationism. People who do so think it a ticket of entry; actually it is a
rejection slip.

A further use of metaphor comes in the very naming of organisations –
‘Greenpeace’ and ‘Friends of the Earth’. Who could possibly be against them?
Think of the opposite: who would wish to be a ‘Brownwarrior’ or ‘World
Enemy’? I do not know what the Greek rhetoricians called this device, but
the advertising profession knows it (to quote Vance Packard’s 1958 book The
Hidden Persuaders) as ‘pre-empting the vocabulary in order to occupy the
moral high ground’. Once recognised, this technique can no longer harm or
influence.

WRONG APPROACH

But now to the meat of the argument. We are told that one of the central
doctrines of ‘green science’ is the ‘precautionary principle’, which Wynne
and Mayer say is that ‘the environment must not be left to show harm before
action is taken’. Like some of the things to be found on our beaches, you
shouldn’t pick up the precautionary principle until you know where it has
been. I have been on its trail since first coming across it in report HI 23
from the House of Lords in 1989, which dealt with the European directive on
the marketing and use of pesticides, in particular the ‘problem’ of the
biocidal tributyl tin compounds. Most scientific laws, principles, reactions
or hypotheses carry the names of their discoverers proudly, but this one is
curiously anonymous. Tracking its heritage was quite a whodunit, but as far
as I can discover, the precautionary principle was invented around 1965 by a
committee of German civil servants who called it the Vorsorgeprinzip –
literally, the ‘foresight principle’.

The Lords report quoted with approval a 1987 meeting of ministers from
countries surrounding the North Sea: ‘A precautionary approach is necessary
which may require action to control inputs even before a causal link has
been established by absolutely clear scientific evidence.’ My reaction to
this statement was to say that no scientist could ever do more than attempt
to establish causal links by absolutely clear scientific evidence. When we
do anything else – and that includes taking action before such limits are
established – we are not behaving as scientists. When I heard that Derek
Langslow, director of policy, planning and services at the Nature
Conservancy Council, had told the Lords’ committee that organo-tin compounds
were as ‘toxic, persistent and liable to accumulate’ as DDT, I realised that
legislators were being seriously misled. What he said was wrong – but
consistent with the precautionary principle. Most organotin compounds are
catalysts or stabilisers used for plastics products, including even drinking
water bottles. In a letter to me dated 20 June 1989, Langslow conceded,
‘this point could mislead’, and agreed to withdraw his evidence. But when I
wrote to the committee secretary, his reply indicated that the House of
Lords feels no obligation to change its mind.

I continued on the trail of the precautionary principle, and struck gold in
the form of John Gray, a professor in zoology at the University of Oslo who
is an ecologist and a member of GESAMP, a UN group of experts in the
scientific aspects of marine pollution. He agrees that the precautionary
principle is non-science. His version of it is ‘. . . action, even when
there is no scientific evidence to prove a causal link between emissions and
effects (the principle of precautionary action)’. He says that the idea is
laudable, and supports the philosophy behind the principle. However, he adds
that its acceptance ‘is entirely an administrative and legislative matter,
and has nothing to do with science’.

This was obviously not going to satisfy either scientists or
environmentalists. There followed a long and acrimonious correspondence in
the pages of Marine Pollution Bulletin, attempting to close this Pandora’s
box. Gray was attacked from all sides. I accused him of practising moral
philosophy, which he denied, but did say that while the precautionary
principle was non-science, he sympathised with it and approved of the
‘philosophy’. In the April 1992 issue, a number of scientists tried to come
to his aid by allowing the null hypothesis to be abandoned in environmental
matters. The null hypothesis is the starting assumption in an experiment
that events have a chance link rather than a causal one, within a chosen
measure of probability.

Tony Stebbing, manager of the land-ocean interaction study at the Natural
Environment Research Council, did his best with the statistics, but wanted
to include assimilative capacity – the ability of an ecosystem to absorb
certain amounts of a pollutant without harmful effects – which is anathema
to Greenpeace, and which Wynne and Mayer emphatically exclude. Alfred
Josefson of the Danish National Environmental Research Institute and Randall
Peterman and Michael M’Gonigle of Simon Fraser University in British
Columbia also tried to ‘improve’ the statistics in a paper entitled
‘Statistical power analysis and the precautionary principle’. Robert Earll
tried ‘Common sense and the precautionary principle’, but that was no good
since we know from the writings of the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert
that science is not a common-sense activity.

On the other side, Boyce Thorne-Miller, of Friends of the Earth in the US,
said the principle was now adopted by consensus, and as a standard of
precautionary action, in Resolution 44(14) of the London Dumping Convention,
which says that in implementing it ‘the contracting parties shall be guided
by a precautionary approach to environmental protection’, so we had all
better clam up and get on with it. But there was a sneaking suspicion that
the emperor still had no clothes.

Were Greenpeace’s policy makers grateful for all these attempts to bend over
backwards to accommodate them? No, they simply pushed even the most
apologetic and helpful scientists further into the mire by producing their
own version of the precautionary principle. This, totally rejecting Gray,
says: ‘No wastes should be discharged in the sea unless it can be shown that
they are harmless’. Just like Wynne and Mayer, Greenpeace wants action
before the possibility of harm has been shown. Its version of the
pre-cautionary principle not only abandons the need for scientific evidence
in environmental matters – or, it seems, any evidence at all – it now
demands a proof of ‘harmlessness’.

In attacking existing scientific burdens of proof, Wynne and Mayer say:
‘Uncertainty in the data exposing a lack of scientific ‘proof’ of safety can
equally well be used as a lack of ‘proof’ of harm.’ It cannot, but we can’t
accuse them of lacking chutzpah. There can be no absolute proof of ‘safety’
or ‘harmlessness’ even if we want there to be one. We have to live with
risk.

Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell once sat on a couch together and tried to
prove that there was not a hippopotamus in the room. In the end they had to
get down on their knees and look under the sofa. If two eminent philosophers
in one poorly furnished room could not rationally prove the nonexistence of
one large hippopotamus and had to resort to empirical methods, why should
Greenpeace get away without even bending a knee? If Wittgenstein and Russell
cannot do it without effort, it is because it cannot be done, and no
scientist has ever wasted a minute in the attempt.

Just to be on the safe side, last October I asked Mark Simmonds and Paul
Johnston of Greenpeace to provide the proof of the possibility of
‘harmlessness’. The reply has been total silence. The challenge is still
open. Yet having written the precautionary principle into legislation on the
basis of unsound scientific advice, governments now have to justify, apply,
defend and use it as a basis for prosecution.

LEGISLATIVE FAILURE

So if the precautionary principle is bad science, or non-science, could it
possibly be good law? Lawyers have tried to fit it into their legal systems,
and failed. Daniel Bodansky, professor of law at the University of
Washington in Seattle, observes that ‘the precautionary principle is so
frequently invoked that some commentators are beginning to suggest that it
is ripening into a norm of international law’. He deplores this, because
such a law is uselessly vague: it cannot measure how much caution is
required, or how much harm may be done.

The same point has been made to British legislators, who require under the
Food and Environment Protection Act of 1985 that we must not commit
‘unacceptable environmental damage’. Since it is a legal tenet that
ignorance of the law is no excuse, I need to know well in advance how much
damage is acceptable. But who can tell me? The advice from the Department of
the Environment was that we must anticipate. It is worse than Alice in
Wonderland, where the pattern was ‘sentence first, verdict afterwards’.
This is verdict first, trial afterwards, and no need for evidence. If
retrospective law is bad, prospective law – having to know what as yet
undescribed crime my present acts may make me guilty of at some unspecified
time in the future – is plainly nonsensical.

This has untold practical consequences. For a start, it means that
Greenpeace can identify a ‘pollutant’ and define a ‘polluter’ with
inadequate scientific evidence, or none, and without a definition of either.
They define hazardous substances as those which are ‘toxic and persistent
and liable to accumulate’.

KNOWLEDGE GAP

Unlike today’s schoolchildren – who are introduced to Venn diagrams at an
early age – our legislators and mandarins clearly cannot tell a logical And
from a logical Or, while environmental groups’ preoccupation with a
material’s possible effects can lead them into some absurd positions.
Ilmenite, a black mineral composed of iron titanium oxide that is so
insoluble in water that it forms the beaches in some parts of the world, is
nontoxic, and will accumulate wherever it is put. Yet Bellona, the principal
environmental group in Norway, insists that ilmenite is ‘pollution’ because
it cannot be proved harmless. It must therefore not be dumped, and so should
be stored within a specially constructed (and hugely expensive) dam on land.
Local people, meanwhile, insist that the dam is a bigger hazard than dumping
the ilmenite at sea. The Norwegian minister of the environment is caught in
the middle.

On the basis of such faulty logic Greenpeace instructs governments and, on
occasion prevents governments and individuals going about their lawful
business. Here are Simmonds and Johnston again, in Marine Pollution
Bulletin: ‘Legislators must not be allowed to conclude that the
precautionary principle is in some way scientifically invalid. The
precautionary principle must be supported by the scientific community.’ I
had heard the expression ‘eco-fascism’ but had not expected it to be put so
explicitly. Note, for example, the hectoring tone, demanding that the
principle ‘must be supported’ by scientists, which is the antithesis of the
scientific attitude and normal scientific discourse.

There are more specific weaknesses to Wynne and Mayer’s argument. There is
the boast at the beginning about ‘Greenpeace’s successful campaign against
the marine dumping of radioactive waste in the early 1980s’. But what
influence did they have on the USSR, which New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ reported as having
dumped 21 nuclear submarine reactors in the Barents and Kara seas since the
1960s (This Week, 13 February)?

Germany and Scandinavia are held up as models of environmental virtue. But
Norway not only burns 8 tonnes of oil equivalent per head of population –
about as much as the average American and twice as much as the average
Briton – it also exports twice that amount per head, in exchange for imports
of consumer durables from around the world, leaving the pollution at source.
According to OECD statistics, plenty of those imports are tropical
hardwoods, as they are in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. The Norwegians shoot
explosive harpoons at whales, don’t they? As for Germany, have you seen the
Elbe, Weser and Rhine? Samuel Coleridge decried the filthy condition of the
Rhine in verse nearly 200 years ago, when the Industrial Revolution had
barely started.

Another fairy tale that environmentalists and politicians tell each other is
that they believe in the ‘polluter pays’ principle. Most industrial
enterprises operate on, and measure their success by, measures like return
on sales or return on capital, defined as the ratio of profit to revenues,
and of profit to fixed assets employed. If, as a consequence of regulation,
necessary or not, power stations spend £500 million removing
sulphur dioxide from flue gas, or water companies incinerate sludge instead
of dumping it at sea, the cost is passed on to the customer. Indeed, such
companies may welcome the increased expenditure if the essential nature of
their products guarantees them a minimum return on capital. Global
businesses simply transfer plant to the country where costs are lowest and
where inevitably regulations are least strict. Large multinational companies
welcome over-regulation because they can afford it; smaller companies,
supposedly the engines of growth, simply go to the wall. If you want that
last fractional microgram of sheep-dip removed from your upland drinking
water, it is the customer who will pay. Bang goes another principle.

Or consider copper. It is the pesticide in antifouling paints, in green
Cuprinol for wood preservative, in copper oxime, which is used on coffee and
vines, and in Bordeaux mixture, the ancient fungicide made by mixing copper
sulphate with calcium hydroxide. Is 5500 tonnes of copper an unacceptable
hazard? Is 400 000 tonnes a hazard? I hope not. The first is the amount
dumped in the urine of the world’s human population because copper is an
essential element for all living organisms. The second is the natural burden
in the world’s rivers. I ran out of zeros on my calculator trying to work
out the total tonnage in the oceans. Would another 15 000 tonnes per annum
be significant, or harmless? And what is the ‘green scientific’ method for
estimating the hazard? The assimilation capacity would allow us to work it
out, but Greenpeace has rejected this approach.

One of the practical costs of these unscientific and impossible requirements
is time and effort wasted by scientists in industry and government. I was
not reading the House of Lords report HI 23 or the European Commission’s
Marketing and Use Directive for fun, but because they were trying to put
manufacturing industry out of business.

The Greenpeace approach is not anti-science – although there is a lot of
that about – but neither is it science. So what is it? It is moral
philosophy at least, and religion probably. All that scientists can say to
Greenpeace is: sorry, your application for membership of the scientific
community has been carefully considered – and rejected.

Alex Milne is a consultant chemist who spent 34 years in the paint industry
working mainly on antifouling products. His work now includes bioremediation
of toxic wastes.