You Better Look Before you Leap!
It’s a sad fact of life that, where money is concerned, there is almost no limit to the risks that politicians and corporations are willing to take with our health and well-being.
Open a newspaper, pick a story – you’ll find this is true. My topic of choice in the news this week is the Precautionary Principle, an approach to risk and uncertainty that is embedded in European law. This concept is one reason why the EU has not gone down quite such a perilous road – for example in terms of toxic chemicals and GMOs – as other parts of the world.
Now a shameful, self-interested army of sceptics (paid and unpaid), politicians, CEOs, global trade organisations and corrupt “scientists” and “regulators” has decided wage war on the Precautionary Principle. Step by step they are trying to reframe it as “unscientific” and an obstruction to “progress” and “innovation”.
Indeed, if you read and listen carefully these days, you will regularly hear the concepts of “precaution” and “innovation” being presented as if they are polar opposites.
They are not. You are being manipulated.
This is a classic ploy – abusing language to conflate the pursuit of something unworthy, unproven and risky (such as GMOs and growth hormones in beef and milk) with something that we perceive as positive, such as “progress” (whatever that is!). Most people never question how the language is being abused, but those who consider themselves independent thinkers absolutely should.
Make no mistake, objections to the limits that Precautionary Principle sets – even when they come out of the mouths of so-called scientists – have nothing to do with science. They are about money, politics, profit, secrecy and continuing to do business in the same toxic way that has caused so much misery and loss of well-being in civil society over countless decades.
I have some strong things to say about this and my thanks to the Ecologist which has allowed me to expand on the themes first raised in this week’s NYR Natural News article.
Click here to read the, GMOs – Throwing precaution to the wind, on this site.
