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If we are responsible for the Stewardship of our own upstreams and downstreams, as seems reasonable, why take any risk at all?
Isn't it appropriate for us to use our buying and selling power to procure the best available services, providing the best possible standards?
If so, why shouldn't our society, in essence, assign a liability for bad consequences to corporations we buy from? Why shouldn't we ourselves remain legally liable for anything we once owned? This concept is behind the "precautionary principle", championed in Europe:
The precautionary principle or precautionary approach states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action. [wikipedia 2011.11.20]If the individual making the purchasing decision suspects risk, and there is a vacuum or absense of scientific consensus, the burden of proof (liability) might dictate we should "avoid bad neighborhoods". In the "absence of scientific consensus" we have reputation, news reports, green fingerpointing upon which to formulate our cognitive risk. EPA enforcement cannot happen (in the USA) in absence of science. Perhaps we need Watchdog organizations to boost our collective sense of liability. Whether or not what we did was responsible for the watershed pollution in Blackstone, Louhrajang, OK Tedi, or Guiyu rivers, perhaps we need watchdogs who bark falsely, to keep us on our toes.
Or so said the lawyer for the boy who cries wolf...
Populist Cognitive Risk: The "suspected risk" of the precautionary principle has boiled down to racial profiling. Reputations of Africans for "waste tourism", "organized crime", burning computers they purchase for thousands of dollars after spending thousands of dollars to ship them over the ocean and through customs... Given most Americans command of language and geography (most would place Mauritania next to Malawi, Madagascar, and Mozambique...), a photo of a sad child or sandalled woman elevates the "suspected risk". A friend of mine in Massachusetts, a recycler of conscience, said to me that if there was even a chance that a computer exported wound up in Guiyu, that she couldn't sleep at night if a computer her town collected might wind up there.*
[see Bambauer, "Shopping Badly: Cognitive Biases..." 2006)
