precautionary principle

Big Green Purse

Stopping Toxic Exposure Before It Happens

November 6, 2008 at 9:43AM By Diane MacEachern | comment

A new social networking forum called The Prevention Agenda is urging President-Elect Obama to do what few other presidential administrations have done in recent history: make preventing threats to the environment and human health a top priority.

The forum is amassing recommendations to prevent climate change, toxic exposures, food contamination, water pollution and other dangers that affect both people and the planet. The recommendations will ultimately be synthesized into an Agenda that will be submitted to the Obama transition team. The goal is to help focus the Obama vision for change into a commitment to make preventing environmental crises before they occur a cornerstone of the new administration.

As the catalyst behind The Prevention Agenda, I hope the forum will help revolutionize the government's traditional, "after the fact" approach to addressing threats to human health and the environment. It is extremely expensive and usually completely inadequate to attempt to fix problems after they've taken hold. While we certainly must address the dilemmas that already exist, if we don't make prevention a priority, we will never make any true progress. ...

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tags: obama, precautionary principle, prevention agenda

5 Green Sleeper Issues in the 2008 Election

August 26, 2008 at 5:15PM By Diane MacEachern | comment

Will the next president do more for the environment than focus on energy?

It may be sacrilege to say so, but there’s more to protecting the environment than stopping global warming, especially where women are concerned.

I admit this acknowledging that climate change is probably the pre-eminent environmental issue of our time. Melting ice caps, catastrophic hurricanes and droughts, rising sea level, and changing weather patterns are altering the very nature of Nature. By and large, scientists agree that the window of opportunity to reverse the atmospheric build-up of hothouse gases like carbon dioxide is rapidly closing. Predictions for an overheated future grow more dire every day.

Still, moment to moment, our lives are affected in a more immediate way by other environmental threats that have been completely ignored by the Bush Administration. Will the next president have the foresight to tackle them sooner rather than later? ...

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