Latour Redux

After I posted a review of Bruno Latour's lecture on Ecology and Democracy at the blog 'French Politics,' an observer of the French scene wrote:

"I'm pretty skeptical about the PP, which to my mind has always been a peg to which all kinds of political posturing can be attached. The recent banning of GMO corn is a good example. José Bové and his minions went on a hunger strike, it was making big headlines, so Sarko jumped all over his own review panel and strong-armed the chair into saying that there was "sufficiently grave doubt" to invoke the PP and ban the stuff. Easy enough to do, since it accounts for less than 1 pct of French corn production and all of it was going to Africa anyway. And who likes Monsanto, an American corporation. So, for me, this "democratic" use of the PP was just a cover for "screw the Yankee corporation" and shut up some troublemakers at low political cost. But Bové is the head of an authentic social movement, so I guess if you want to call that democracy, I'd have to agree.

Meanwhile, the Rhône is so polluted with PCB that you can't eat fish from it anymore, but nobody's about to invoke the PP to shut down Péchiney, DuPont, Alstom, CGE, etc."

Where I agree with the commenter is on the difficulty of doing what Latour argues. While there is merit to the way the precautionary principle forces us to think about the uncertain and unpredictable side of human intervention into nature, a democratic appropriation of the PP is a bridge too far. Not only is it too closely wedded to the pessimistic 'precautionary' ethos of environmentalism to be prized away, towards a more humanistic approach. The other side of the political spectrum for the PP is, as the commenter notes, not democracy but opportunism. Nonetheless, if Latour is wrong to suggest we can democratically re-appropriate the PP, he is right to argue that the discussion needs to be less about what scientific experts tell us (though not ignorant of science), and more about the values and ideologies that often hide behind the science.