The European Dream

by Jeremy Rifkin

  In the case of the BSE outbreak in the U.K., it’s been pointed out subsequently in government hearings and public exposés that the reason the government regulatory body was so slow to respond to the spreading crisis is that its responsibility was to safeguard the industry it monitored and not consumers. Often, potential links went unexplored because the connections required interdisciplinary approaches that were never forthcoming. For example, veterinarians examining BSE in cattle failed to make the link with the disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a brain-wasting illness in humans, now known to be caused by eating beef from BSECONTAMINATED cattle. Had medical researchers been brought in early on to work with the veterinarians to explore the possible connection between the brain-wasting diseases in cattle and in humans, action to prohibit the spread of BSE to human populations might have occurred earlier, saving many more lives.28

  In the case of halocarbons, PCBs, and methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), all artificial chemicals, their novelty itself should have raised some eyebrows. Researchers knew from the very beginning that these chemicals persist in the environment, are easily dispersible, and can become ubiquitous. So if problems do arise, it would be more difficult to get rid of them.29

  Frequently, lay evidence of potential harm precedes clinical evidence by years, and even decades, but is ignored by the “experts” and the powers that be. Workers were aware of the harmful effects of asbestos and PCBs long before regulators turned their attention to the problems. In countless instances, local communities notice the causal association between ill health and local industrial activity well before public officials. Love Canal in the United States comes easily to mind.

  The precautionary principle has been finding its way into international treaties and covenants. It was first recognized in 1982 when the UN General Assembly incorporated it into the World Charter for Nature.30 The precautionary principle was subsequently included in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992, the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty) in 1992, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety in 2000, and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in 2001.31

  The European Union hopes that by integrating the precautionary principle into international treaties and multilateral agreements, it will become the unchallenged standard by which governments oversee and regulate science and technology around the world. While the U.S. has integrated aspects of the precautionary principle into some of its environmental regulations, for the most part America’s approach and standards are far more lax than the EU’s, while still arguably better than those of many other countries.

  In recent years, the U.S. government, in tandem with U.S. industry, has taken every occasion to challenge the tougher approach to the precautionary principle taken by the EU. The U.S. views Europe’s tightening regulatory regime as a noose around American exports and is determined to thwart its efforts to make the principle the gold standard for the world. America’s National Foreign Trade Council best expressed U.S. governmental and industry concern in a report issued in May 2003. The council warned that the EU’s invocation of the precautionary principle “has effectively banned U.S. and other non-EU exports of products deemed hazardous, stifled scientific and industrial innovation, and advancement.”32

  Margot Wallstrom, the EU’s outspoken environmental commissioner, made clear her belief that Europe and America were beginning to diverge in a fundamental way when it comes to the issue of sustainable development and global environmental stewardship. She noted that although environmental concerns appear last among nine issues of concern among American voters, they appear among the top-five most pressing issues for European voters.33 Wallstrom also observed that while “the environment is essentially a local issue within the U.S.... in Europe . . . there is a greater understanding among the broader public of the international and global dimension of the environmental challenge.”34 The bottom line, concludes Wallstrom, is that while in America environment is only a second-tier issue, “environmental policy has been one of the foundation stones of the European Union itself.”35 Wallstrom and others see the precautionary principle as the front line in their regulatory arsenal to advance the cause of sustainable development in a globalizing world.

  But the import of the precautionary principle runs even deeper. It speaks to a profound shift in the way society views its relationship to nature and its approach to scientific pursuits and technological innovations. The European Enlightenment tradition, to which America has become the most enthusiastic supporter, puts a premium on power over nature. Americans, by and large, view nature as a treasure trove of useful resources waiting to be harnessed for productive ends. While Europeans share America’s utilitarian perspective, they also have another sensibility that is less prominent here in America—that is, a love for the intrinsic value of nature. One can see it in Europeans’ regard for the rural countryside and their determination to maintain natural landscapes, even if it means providing government assistance in the way of special subsidies or forgoing commercial development. Nature figures prominently in Europeans’ dream of a quality of life. Europeans spend far more time visiting the countryside on weekends and during their vacations than Americans. It is, for them, a valued pastime.

  The balancing of urban and rural time is less of a priority for most Americans, many of whom are just as likely to spend their weekends at a shopping mall, while their European peers are hiking along country trails. Of course, there are plenty of Americans who prefer to spend their time in the great outdoors, just as there are many Europeans who prefer the comforts of urban recreation. Still, anyone who spends significant time in Europe and America knows, quite well, that there is a great affinity for rural getaways among Europeans. Almost everyone I know in Europe among the professional and business classes has some small second home in the country somewhere—a dacha usually belonging to the family for generations. While working people may not be as fortunate, on any given weekend they can be seen exiting the cities en masse, motoring their way into the nearest rural enclave or country village for a respite from urban pressures.

  The strongly held values about rural life and nature is one reason why Europe has been able to support green parties across the continent, with substantial representation in national parliaments as well as in the European Parliament. By contrast, not a single legislator at the federal level in the U.S. is a member of a green party.

  European determination to maintain a semblance of balance between a utilitarian and an intrinsic approach to nature makes them take more seriously their responsibility to sustainable development and global environmental stewardship. The precautionary principle is perceived, in part, as a way to balance the scales, if you will, between commercial development and preservation of the natural environment.

  There is, however, another dimension to the European psyche, one we’ve alluded to repeatedly in earlier chapters, that makes Europeans more supportive of the precautionary principle than we might be in America—that is, their sense of the “connectedness” of everything. The precautionary principle is rooted in the idea that every scientific experiment, or technology application, or product introduction affects the environment in myriad ways that are complicated and difficult to assess. The older methods of determining risks, because they are reductionist, mechanistic, and linear in nature, don’t account for the subtlety of relationships in nature that are difficult to quantify or are unpredictable.

  Because we Americans place such a high premium on autonomy, we are far less likely to see the deep connectedness of things. We tend to see the world in terms of containers, each isolated from the whole and capable of standing alone. Connectedness, to us, conjures up the notion of shared dependency and vulnerability, qualities we don’t much admire. Our sense of self and world makes us ideal disciples of the Enlightenment frame of mind, with its emphasis on harnessing and isolating discrete bits and pieces of nature for the purpose of transforming the
m into productive property. We like everything around us to be neatly bundled, autonomous, and self-contained, which is the way we think of ourselves in the world. Everything in the Enlightenment model of nature is detachable and convertible. There are no relationships, just things, either in motion or at rest, bombarding other things or inert. Enlightenment nature is eminently exploitable. Every “thing” can be grabbed and used without consequence to anything else. There is only opportunity, never responsibility, because all things exist alone and therefore have no relationship to one another.

  The new view of science that is emerging in the wake of globalization is quite different. We are becoming increasingly aware of the connectedness of everything. Nature is viewed as a myriad of symbiotic relationships, all embedded in a larger whole, of which they are an integral part. In this new vision of nature, nothing is autonomous, everything is connected. Any effort to sever a part of the whole has consequences to everything else. There are no islands, no safe harbors, no self-contained eddies, only continuous interactivity, mutuality, and engagement.

  Europeans, because of their dense spatial and temporal history, have a far better appreciation of the new model of nature. Their lives have been lived far more communally and with greater embeddedness than have ours in America. They understand the logic of the precautionary principle because they know that in a densely lived environment, everything one does affects everything else.

  The precautionary principle calls on us to look beyond immediate activity, in isolation, and toward the whole context in which that activity unfolds. The sheer magnitude of today’s scientific and technological interventions can’t help but have significant and often long-lasting effects on the rest of nature—those effects can be potentially catastrophic and irreversible. The precautionary principle says, in effect, that because the stakes are so high, we have to weigh even the most dramatic benefits against the prospects of even more destructive consequences. The old Enlightenment science is too primitive and sophomoric to address a world where the bar for risk has been raised to the threshold of possible extinction itself. When the whole world is at risk because of the scale of human intervention, then a new scientific approach is required that takes the whole world into consideration. That is the logic at the heart of the precautionary principle.

  Systems Thinking

  Here, then, is the problem. The very success of Enlightenment science is now posing a fundamental conundrum for science. The more powerful the science and technology are becoming, the more complex and unpredictable are the impacts and consequences. Many in the scientific community worry that “the growing innovative powers of science seem to be outstripping its ability to predict the consequences of its applications, whilst the scale of human interventions in nature increases the chances that any hazardous impacts may be serious and global.”36 The old Enlightenment science seems to have run out of answers for how to deal with this new reality.

  Enlightenment science is wedded to the notion that the behavior of the whole is best understood by analyzing the individual parts that make it up. The analytical method reduces all phenomena to its most fundamental building blocks and then examines the individual properties of each element in the hope of better understanding the construction of the whole. As mentioned in chapter 4, this mechanistic approach to science borrowed heavily from popular mechanical metaphors of the day. Machines can indeed be understood by taking them apart, analyzing their individual components, and then re-assembling them back into the whole. But in the real world of nature, behavior is not mechanistic and fixed, but conditional, open-ended, affected by other phenomena, and continually metamorphosing and mutating in response to the patterns of activity around it.

  As long as science and technology were more narrowly engaged in questions of acceleration and location, Newton’s mechanistic laws served well. Phenomena that could be isolated, timed and measured, and made subject to rigorous quantification passed muster. By the twentieth century, however, the reductionist and mechanistic idea was too limited a concept to capture the embeddedness of nature. It became more apparent to scientists that understanding society or nature required understanding the myriad relationships between phenomena and not just the properties of the component parts.

  Social scientists began to ask, How do we know a man except in relationship to the world around him? Taking the measure of a man—knowing his place of birth, age, height, weight, physical and emotional characteristics, etc.—tells us little of value about who he really is. It is only by understanding his relationship to the larger environment in which he is embedded and the many relationships he shares that we get a sense of him. In the old scheme, man was the sum total of his individual properties. In the new scheme, he is a snapshot of the pattern of activities in which he is engaged.

  If each human being is a pattern of interactivity, why wouldn’t all of nature be so as well? Science, in the twentieth century, began to re-examine many of its most basic operating assumptions, only to see them overthrown. The old idea that phenomena could be known by analyzing the individual parts gave way to the opposite conception—that the individual parts can be understood only by first knowing something about their relationships to the whole within which they are embedded. In a word, nothing exists in isolation, as an autonomous object. Rather, everything exists in relation to “the other.” The new science was called “systems theory,” and it put in doubt the older thinking about the nature of nature. Systems theory also cast a shadow on the rest of the Enlightenment project, including, most important, the idea of the autonomous being functioning in a detached, self-optimizing world, populated by other autonomous beings, each maximizing his or her own individual utility.

  Systems theory holds that the nature of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s because it is the relationship between the parts—the organizing principles that animate the whole—that creates something qualitatively different at the level of the whole. For example, we know from personal experience that a living being is qualitatively different from a corpse. At the moment of death, all of the relationships that made that living being a whole disappear, leaving just a body of inert matter. The great twentieth-century physicist Werner Heisenberg once remarked that “the world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.”37

  The new systems thinking owes much to the emerging field of ecology. Ecology comes from the Greek word oikos, which means “household.” The German biologist Ernst Haeckel was the first to define the new branch of biology as “the science of relations between the organism and the surrounding outer world.”38 Ecology challenged the Darwinian model, with its emphasis on the competitive struggle between individual creatures for scarce resources. In the newer ecological model, nature is made up of a multitude of symbiotic and synergistic relationships, where each organism’s fate is determined as much by the patterns of mutual relationships as by any competitive advantage. Where Darwin’s biology concentrated more on the individual organism and species and relegated the environment to a backdrop of resources, ecology views the environment as all the relationships that make it up.

  The early ecologists concentrated their efforts on local ecosystems. In 1911, however, a Russian scientist, Vladimir Vernadsky, published a paper that would expand the notion of ecological relationships to include the entire planet. He described what he called “the biosphere,” which he defined “as the area of the earth’s crust occupied by transformers that convert cosmic radiation into effective terrestrial energy—electrical, chemical, mechanical, thermal, etc.”39

  In a follow-up book, published in 1926, which he entitled Biospheria, Vernadsky broke with the scientific orthodoxy of the day, arguing that geochemical and biological processes on Earth evolved together, each aiding the other. His radical idea was at odds with orthodox Darwinian theory, which hypothesized that geochemical processes evolved separately, creating the
atmospheric environment in which living organisms emerged, adapted, and evolved—to wit, the environment as a storehouse of resources. Vernadsky suggested that the cycling of inert chemicals on Earth is influenced by the quality and quantity of living matter, and the living matter, in turn, influences the quality and quantity of inert chemicals being cycled through the planet. Today, scientists define the biosphere as

  an integrated living and life-supporting system comprising the peripheral envelope of Planet Earth together with its surrounding atmosphere, so far down, and up, as any form of life exists naturally.40

  The biosphere is very thin, extending only from the ocean depths, where the most primitive forms of life exist, to the upper stratosphere. The entire length of the biosphere envelope is less than forty miles from ocean floor to outer space. Within this narrow band, living creatures, and the Earth’s geochemical processes, interact to sustain each other.

  In the 1970s, an English scientist, James Lovelock, and an American biologist, Lynn Margulis, expanded on Vernadsky’s theory with the publication of the Gaia hypothesis. They argued that the Earth functions like a self-regulating living organism. The flora and fauna and the geochemical composition of the atmosphere work in a synergistic relationship to maintain the Earth’s climate in a relatively steady state that is conducive to life.

  Lovelock and Margulis use the example of the regulation of oxygen and methane to demonstrate how the cybernetic process between life and the geochemical cycle works to maintain a homeostatic climate regime. They remind us that oxygen levels on the planet must be confined within a very narrow range or the entire planet could erupt into flames, destroying all living matter, at least on the land surface. The two scientists believe that when the oxygen in the atmosphere rises above a tolerable level, a warning signal of some kind triggers an increase in methane production by microscopic bacteria. The increased methane migrates into the atmosphere, dampening the oxygen content until a steady state is reached again. (Methane acts as a regulator, both adding and taking away oxygen from the air.)