Words and Ideas: Commitment, Continuity and Irreversibility 161To take the rocks example, the short-term gain from blasting the rocks near
Delhi or Hyderabad for building contributes to current livelihoods and GDP
(gross domestic product), but is at the cost of cultural, aesthetic, recreational and
spiritual experiences of future generations forever. And these generations, let us
hope, will be billions of people over thousands, if not millions, of years. To destroy
such rocks manifests an extreme of blinkered and myopic philistinism.
As articulated, the precautionary principle does not fit, and is too weak for this
context. There is no lack of certainty. And the term cost-effective leads us astray for
two reasons: first, we are concerned with incommensurable values not susceptible
to economic calculus; and second, discounting overvalues the clear short-term eco-
nomic gains and ignores millennia of future benefits. To offset this weakness, much
depends upon social and ecological responsibility, access to information, the exer-
cise of imagination, and commitment to the democratic representation of future
generations who, we must hope, will dramatically outnumber us, giving their
interests a very high weighting.
Any broader formulation of the precautionary principle risks a comprehen-
siveness that could be used to support a conservationism that would discriminate
against today’s poor people. Nothing that follows should undermine the moral and
practical case for participatory conservation (see, for example, Ghimire and Pim-
bert, 1997). The concern has to be a balance of the social and environmental, of
values and actions, and of the present and future. Each of us might wish to think
through and elaborate our own version of a revised precautionary principle. Here
is mine:
In the interests of poor people, future generations and the planet, where there are threats
or certainty of serious or irreversible environmental damage or loss, neither lack of full
scientific knowledge nor short-term economic gain shall be used as a reason for post-
poning preventive action that is socially and ecologically responsible. The more irrevers-
ible the damage or loss, the greater the urgency and the higher the cost justified to
prevent it.This formulation is a provocation for reflection, not final words, and surely for
debate. Not least, there are questions of what is damage and what is social and
ecological responsibility. There will also always be trade-offs. But this at least can
be concluded: irreversibility is a practical concept; it needs more analysis and elab-
oration; and it should have more weight in decisions and actions. In understand-
ing and applying it, the key is, perhaps, to struggle, and to struggle in every context
and in every generation, and to act in ways which are responsible, socially and
ecologically, both for the present and the future.
Cinderella concepts and criteria
In the contexts reviewed above – of settlement schemes and other bounded projects,
of staff motivation and performance, and of the environment – ideas of commitment,