Condensed translation from Chinese by Sherwin Lu

EDITOR’S NOTE: While science and related technologies have facilitated man’s daily life in many ways, they have also wreaked havoc on the ecosystem of our planet in such a degree that their harms might offset or even far outweigh their benefits in the long run, just because, philosophically speaking, modern science is based on the dualistic and confrontational mind-matter split and the scientific mind lacks on the whole so far an awareness of the fact that such a split inevitably restricts and distorts its perception, and an unconditional worship of and belief in thus much distorted “scientific” perception of the world has become a new kind of superstition. Mankind needs an ideological revolution to become aware of the oneness of all existence and stop thinking in a confrontational way. (See “The Mind/Matter Issue in Eastern Philosophical Perspective”, 3-3. Philosophical theory of knowledge (2): From scientism to deconstructionism)


The Book:
The Precautionary Principle in the 20th Century: Late Lessons from Early Warnings
By Poul Harremoës
Earthscan, 2002 - 268 pagesI. Alarming Consequences


THE TEXT

II. Wishful Thinking Running against a Wall
III. The “Original Sin": A Mechanistic Worldview
(Subheadings are the translator’s)


About the relation between science and human society, people would usually say: Humans have needs and science and technology can satisfy such needs; When people’s needs are satisfied, their sense of well-being is enhanced and the society moves forward; When people come up with new needs, science and technology are promoted to advance further; With the continuous progress of science and technology, the society keeps moving forward and human life getting better and better. However, since 1962, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, such a view has been challenged and gradually replaced by one comparing science and technology as a double-edged sword, i.e., a new consensus recognizing the negative side of science, to the effect that:

The negative effects of science and technology are all temporary, incidental and avoidable, which will surely be removed with and only with the further development of science. Though new negative effects will certainly appear with the adoption of new technologies, they will be further mended by still newer science and technology in the future, and it makes no sense to give up eating for fear of choking. In the final analysis, science and technology’s contribution far surpasses their harm to human society, not to say that such harm is still being eliminated.

Remarks based on such an optimistic prospect have been repeated for many years and are still part of the mainstream discourse today, keeping alive a hope against hope in people’s hearts while blunting their vigilance, like cooking frogs in slowly-heated up water. Therefore, we need a new understanding of the situation. Fortunately, this book, of which a Chinese version has recently come out, provides me with substantial evidence for my new assessment, though unexpected.


This is a shocking and alarming book with cool-minded and detailed presentations of the harmful effects of many a chemical product, such as benzene, asbestos, polychlorinated biphenyl, halogenated hydrocarbon, diethylstilbestrol, sulfur dioxide, methyl tert-butyl ether, tributyltin (marine antifouling biocide). While their names are mostly not familiar to us, they are, nevertheless, not far away from us. On the contrary, they have penetrated deep into our daily life in an all-round way and become ubiquitous, without which our modernized way of life of the present moment is totally impossible. However, they are all gravely harmful to human and ecological health without exception. Here are two examples:

First about benzene. Of the above, this one is more or less familiar to us. It takes one whole chapter in the book. In early 1910s, its first use was discovered, that is, as solvent in rubber industry. During World War I, as needed by the production of explosives, its output shot up. After the war, It was used in large quantities as solvent in manufacturing imitation leather, rubber, glue, hat, gravure, paint, adhesive, coating, car, tin cans, in dry cleaning, and more and more in fields like organic synthesis, making of petroleum products, engine fuel, etc. Without it, none of these industries could run properly. Thus, modern life has been gradually built up on the basis of these industries, and on the existence of benzene.

At the same time, the harmfulness of benzene to human beings was detected as early as 1897: In Sweden, a young woman engaged in bike tire production fell sick with regenerative anemia, and a young man in France running a dry cleaning business suffered from massive hemorrhage. Since then, benzene has been regarded as an extremely toxic substance which can damage bone marrow. Long-term exposure to benzene can lead to leukemia, aplastic anemia, etc. But it has been in large-scale use all the time. Cases of benzene poisoning cropped up in large numbers early last century. According to a 1923 report, some people were diagnosed with benzene poisoning weeks after they got their first job; some died months after.

After that, cases of benzene poisoning kept increasing. Although somebody suggested replacing benzene with other substances as solvent, what industry administration has actually been doing is only setting increasing limits on the quantity being used. In 1946, the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists suggested 100 ppm as the maximum limit for benzene exposure in workplaces. The limit was lowered to 50 ppm the next year, and further down to 35 ppm in 1948. But in that very year, a document published by the American Petroleum Institute pointed out that the absolute safety level should only be zero.

During 1990s, the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) and China Academy of Preventive Medicine jointly published a series of research papers on Chinese workers exposed to Benzene, pointing out that, as proved by direct observation, even very low average benzene exposure (for instance about 1 ppm) would also pose very high relative risks for leukemia, Myelodysplastic Syndrome and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

But benzene is not likely to be prohibited for use, because our much lauded modern life has been based on such substances.

In 1987, United States Department of Labor set a new benzene standard at 1 pmm.

In 2001, people came to realize that, as benzene is also contained in gasoline, actually none can escape from exposure to benzene, not only workers in the frontline of production but also everybody wherever there are motor vehicles running.

Obviously, the actual process of using such substances as benzene is not so rosy as the scenario painted by scientists, who have anticipated that later new technologies can remove the negative effects of earlier ones. What we see is only continuous adjustments of work safety standards. The harm which has been done can no longer be undone: one cannot bring back to life those who died of benzene exposure. As to the continuously occurring harmful effects from the use of such a substance, state administrators are just turning a blind eye to them, because it is an indispensable part of the present-day social life. Benzene follows wherever the chariot of industrial civilization goes. At the same time we hear repeated the familiar stage lines: There is no alternative but to make minor sacrifices. Things will turn better in the future when new technologies are developed.

Next about Methyl tert-Butyl Ether (MTBE), a name, I believe,  most people have never heard of and of course know nothing about. Because of this strangeness, people may think that is far distant from our life. But as a matter of fact, like benzene, it is everywhere, mainly used to replace lead as gasoline antiknock agent. This is an instance of later technology displacing earlier ones.

The toxicity of lead was known as early as the time of ancient Greece, but had been used for long in gasoline, because “there was no alternative”. Of course, people set some quantity limit for self-consolation, believing it to be safe within that limit. Now that we have MTBE, lead can be banned from being used in gasoline, marking the progress of technology. How does it come out, then?

At the beginning, this new material was considered to have many good qualities: cheap in cost, easy to make, having good transmitting property and good mixing effects (it can be made in refineries, easy to mix with gas, no longer separate, and be transmitted through existing channels after that), and enabling fuel to burn fully, thus decreasing the emission of carbon monoxide and ozone precursor.

During 1970s, MTBE started to be manufactured for trade purposes in Europe and America. In 1995, it was the third major organic chemical product in the U.S. with a yearly output of 8 million tons. In 1999, global yearly output was about 21.4 million tons, of which 3.3 million tons were made by EU countries.

Not long after that, however, it was found that this chemical does not have so many merits as anticipated. What is even worse is that, as is like its predecessor, i.e., lead, c is also harmful to environment and human health. After 1990s, it came gradually to be confirmed that this high-tech achievement can induce cancer, asthma, and other diseases. Because it has the “merits” of being water-soluble, flowing easily and lasting long, it would stay stable for long after finishing its work and coming out of the steam cylinder of the engine, floating around everywhere. On touching water, it is dissolved immediately and thus pollutes our underground water. Though it has a special odor and can be easily detected, once its density in the headwaters reaches a certain threshold, the water can no longer be used. In Denmark, the threshold has been set at 180 micrograms per liter, while in California, U.S.A. it is much lower at 5 micrograms per liter.

As with benzene, what the science community and state administrators can do about MTBE is only to repeatedly set detectable limits and it is out of the question to forbid its use because there is no other alternative.

Obviously, the process of the invention and application of MTBE did not match that wishful rosy scenario either: It is continuing to cause damages to environment and human health while the problems left over by its predecessor lead still remain unsolved despite its use.

Such chemical products as the above two can be found everywhere. The said book also discussed asbestos, Polychlorinated biphenyls, halogenated hydrocarbon, diethylstilbestrol, antifouling agent tributyltin, etc. There have been striking similarities between their histories and those of benzene and MTBE: The science community and state administrators are well aware of their harm to the environment and to people but cannot ban their use. What they can do is only to repeatedly set limits to the amount being used.

This is the actual current situation about how scientific and technological products are being used in today’s industrial society.


Not long ago, people thought that they were “enjoying the conveniences” brought about by all those chemical products and felt lucky to be living in the times of well-advanced science and technology, few being aware of the problems that such products were giving rise to. Or they would rather take chances, placing hope on even more advanced future technologies. Or they tried to console themselves thinking that only a few products had problems while most were beneficial. But when we go through all these high-tech products one by one, however, we find that not a few but the overwhelming majority of them are problematic and most of the problems have never been solved but are still there and worsening off, and triggering even more problems.

Therefore, a more appropriate description of the scenario should be like the following:

The harmfulness of scientific technology to ecology and humanity is immanent in nature, is inevitable and irreversible. On the whole, their negative consequences cannot be reversed with the further development of science and technology; but on the contrary, new technologies will surely yield new negative effects, doing even more severe damages to ecology and human health.

In other words, it is debatable at least whether scientific technology has done more good than harm to human society.

It has been half a century since the publication in 1962 of the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which is widely credited with helping launch the contemporary American environmental movement. Have the negative consequences of scientific technology over the globe been reduced or aggravated since then? The fact of the matter is: We can never overestimate in the least the severity of global ecological and environmental problems confronting us today.

In a word, we need a new overall assessment of the pros and cons of science and technology.


Why is the harmfulness of scientific technology immanent and inevitable in nature? This is because the current universally applied technologies have stemmed from mathematical-physical sciences, whose mechanistic view of nature is destined to be in conflict with nature itself. The more powerful scientific technology grows, the more violent the clash.

Mathematical-physical sciences have been represented by Newton’s classical physics, which is based on a mechanistic, determinist and reductionist worldview. In the times of Newton, there was the saying “God is a watchmaker”, which implies that the whole cosmos is viewed as a machine which consists of a series of mechanistically-assembled component parts and thus is material in nature and void of inner life – this is being “mechanistic”; This machine can be dismantled and re-assembled – a “reductionist” view; So long as all the details of all the component parts are known, the whole process of the machine’s operation can be anticipated through mathematical calculation with absolute certainty – “deterministic”.  According to this worldview, the whole cosmic machine is running in compliance with given uniform laws of physics, which can be recognized by human beings and translated into mathematical equations. Through the computation of such equations, math-physical sciences claim to be able to make accurate analyses and predictions of the world of nature and, further, through the application of scientific technology, make direct interventions into its operations. Consequently, nature becomes the target of research, analysis, calculation, control, remolding and restructuring by human beings, a pure object deprived of its original predominance, whereas human beings are confident of their own ability and authoritative power to control and remake nature.

In the social structure of industrial civilization, capital appreciation is set by the whole society as the highest goal and highest code of conduct, which includes the remaking of nature by humanity through the application of science. Math-physical science provides not only ideological support (mechanistic view of nature, anthropocentrism, social progress theory, etc.) for industrial civilization, but also techniques that help capital circulation and appreciation. And the society in turn gives support to such science and technology by providing even more resources, so that efforts to control and reform nature is further strengthened.

Technologies based on math-physical sciences are, however, in fundamental conflict with the world of nature, with the same approach in their practical operation: to cut out a part from nature while disregarding its relatedness to other parts to establish an idealized model and then use math equations to delineate this part of nature represented as “scientific law”. American philosopher of science Joseph Rouse indicates that science is also a kind of local knowledge, one originated from the lab, which is imposed on nature by humans (nature being distorted to fit the lab) and disrupts its wholeness. But nature will certainly not yield to this brutality, will not follow such laws deduced from its localized parts in a reductionist way. Thus the long-term effect of such human acts will inevitably develop into global environmental problems and ecological crises.

If we view nature as an organic one, we will see a more straightforward account of the present-day environmental problems and ecological crisis:

The biosphere of the planet earth is an interrelated whole, with a huge variety of living things evolving in a co-related way and all forms of material matter being mutually convertible in an ever-continuing dynamic process towards a general balance. If counted from the Cambrian period, the history of life has been as long as about half a billion years, and so has that of interconversion and interaction among all the forms of existence in the biosphere. If counted from the emergence of the human species, it has been about one million years, a length of time beyond imagination as well.

In a traditional society, the materials people used were all readily existing in the world of nature; they came from nature and easily went back to nature. But since the beginning of industrial civilization, human beings has been depending more and more on man-made materials; especially since the appearance of chemical industry, man has greatly changed the chemical composition of material things on the planet. Such man-made substances as benzene and MTBE have never been parts of the material cycle of nature; nor are they able to be absorbed into this cycle as natural forms of matter, but on the contrary will definitely interfere in and disrupt the normal cycle of material nature itself.

Of the massive chemical substances produced by man, some have never existed in nature, while some others have existed in limited quantities under specific circumstances. Human bodies have never come in contact with such substances, nor have the enzymes to convert them; nor has nature ever contained them or matching microbiological population to convert them. Hence, they are bound to harm the health of organisms and the environment, resulting in global ecosystem disorders.

 While the benefits brought about by the application of a new technology is easily visible at the very beginning, its negative effects may not be noticed immediately. Here are the reasons: In some cases, it takes time for such effects to reveal themselves; in others, such effects are diffuse, i.e., not manifested intensely in one single consequence and thus hard to be traced; in many other cases, victims of the negative effects and beneficiaries of the positive ones of such chemical products are not the same group of people, for instance, urban white-collars may benefit while blue-collars in the frontline suffer; in still more cases, it may not be human beings but the natural environment that is victimized, but the latter cannot protest in words; and lastly, the victims might not be born yet as the harmfulness may not show up until long afterwards, but, because of this hysteresis, once they show up, it is already too late to be remedied nor to be reversed.

With the change in our understanding, our overall judgment of science and related technology, our attitude towards science would naturally undergo a change.

Be vigilant against science and against scientists. When scientists tell us they have invented something novel, our first reaction should not be shouting and jumping for joy, not singing praises, but watching out. Only thus would there be possibility for us to prevent harms science and technology might cause to ecological wholeness and human health before they take effect.

This book intentionally lists the negative effects of twelve scientific technologies as “twelve belated lessons”. Besides many a chemical products, it also presents issues like overfishing, exposure to radiation, chemical pollution around the U.S. Great Lakes area, etc., showing an awareness of the seriousness of science and technology’s negative consequences, and then proposes “learning from history”, “the precautionary principle” and other like concepts. However, it still pins hope on future science and technology, attempting to reduce or prevent harms from their negative effects by measures such as strengthening supervision and helping people foresee possible highly costly consequences and weigh better between the pros and cons of a technological innovation so as to minimize undesired consequences. While on the one hand it seems to this reviewer that the book does not go deep enough in rethinking about and critically reassessing science and technology, on the other hand, nevertheless, the abundance of information provided by this book has amounted to the threshold of a break through the ideological bondage imposed on itself toward a thorough understanding of the built-in inadequacies of science and related technology.

The industrial civilization which started three centuries ago are already afflicted with all ills. Patch-up remedies in social structure in an attempt to retain its inner core would not be able to reverse the course of human civilization towards its ruin. The mankind has to make a thorough critique of the industrial civilization to gain a clear awareness of the intrinsic nature of science and related technology, so as to turn onto a new course leading towards the development of an ecological civilization for his salvation.