Risk Future, science and the precautionary principle

The most prominent manifestation of intrasystemic ignorance is the concept of risk as situated in an impossible to know future. Ignorance of the future is a 'uniquely common' way in which every system familiarises itself with its limitations. While future as ignorance affects all systems, the future of each system is unique to each system. This is exemplified in the way every system situates its own future within its present and attempts to deal with it on the basis of its operations. This normal inclusion of the environment of the system within the system, in the form of a divinable part of the systemic horizon, is what I will be exploring in this chapter. Operationally, the future here appears as a generalisation of the concept of unutterance, since they both are attempts by the system to accommodate its environment within its boundaries. The fact that this operation is necessarily accompanied by uncertainty is a confirmation of the inevitable concession to incommunicability as the way to approach environmental ignorance. It is more than a word game to say that the ecological risks that the future harbours have reached the point of risk. Through the inherent threat they represent, ecological risks constantly bring social and conscious systems before bifurcations ridden with what Luhmann calls ecological angst, 1 which further affects them in extreme ways that range from technological regression to apathy. Such a situation simply confirms that risk is not merely a choice amongst options, but also a choice amongst risks, both in the sense that with every risk selection new risks open up, and also in that any risk selection as such is risky. In the past, systems used to externalise risk and attribute it to their environment, which would usually assume an extra-human guise. In view of the multi-leveled presence of risk, however, which is a relatively new phenomenon, externalisation is no longer a solution; instead, systems now internalise risk and its risks in their attempt to comprehend and prevent it from materialising. This is what environmental law does by employing the precautionary principle, a binding legal principle which operates as a form of postponement of decision in the face of scientific and environmental uncertainty. This is certainly not the only way the legal system deals with risks ( another way being liability, as exhaustively presented in Teubner et al.,(2) or traditional methods such as reversal of the burden of proof(3)) but it is an appropriate example of the way the environment is included in the system. Thus, the mechanics of the internalisation of absence as witnessed in the previous chapters are going to be advanced in two ways: first, in the way the system internalises its future risks; and second, in the way the precautionary principle concretely deals with the environment of the legal system, by combining systemic closure and openness without endangering the structure of the system. The above discussion, however, requires some preliminary remarks on the nature of time and more specifically systemic time, which will inform the description of risk as a projection of temporalities. After this, the discussion can carry on with the precautionary principle, but not conclude with it, since, as I show, ecological risk is a concept that appears in several systems at once, therefore rendering a discussion on politics and science necessary for the understanding of risk