Precautionary information-generation in science and the law.
An information-generation system should be part of precautionary approaches to protecting the public's health and the environment. Such a system would include inventories or surveys of health and the environment, monitoring of them, as well as scoping out or scouting for threats or other harmful things that could occur and providing sentinels to try to identify threats before they materialize. I, then, suggest some ways in which such strategies could be adopted in science and the law as part of a precautionary approach. Doing more to generate information in an anticipatory way will assist implementation of the precautionary principle and help remove some of the uncertainty in environmental and public health protections.
Cranor
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Department of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside 92507, USA. carl.cranor@ucr.edu
D004777:Environment; D004782:Environmental Health / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D033181:Information Dissemination; D011634:Public Health / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D012106:Research; D018570:Risk Assessment; D035501:Uncertainty