Choose a safer future!

Our eco-communal sense of purpose runs deeper than human-created (and human-run) social and economic insititutions. As a result, there can exist no tradeoff between material gains and survival. This means that "market exchange" can not provide proper guidance toward safe progress. The economics of decision under the potential for creating high-stakes risks is rather a matter of maintaining the balance of nature. In a complex society, this balance can only be achieved via proactive planning based on a commitment to the precautionary avoidance of existential risks.

Maintaining natural risk levels entails the identification of safe alternatives early on in the process of planning for progress. And plan we must, for leaving our course to selfish interests is a prescription for disaster. The challenge of a genuinely precautionary science is identifying these pathways to safe progress. At the same time, planning remains a completely natural endeavor: Organism implies organization.

To suggest that there can be "no progress without risk" is to proceed headlong into the unknown without consideration of future problems. The paradox this view presents is that utopia can only be achieved under the threat of ultimate doom. The motive behind such irresponsibility? Short-term gains for some, at the cost of simple assurances of safety for all. The end of progress lies in accepting too many risks, not too few.

The ecological philosophy (ecosophy) of life is based on equality and autonomy, enforced only by the authority of nature itself. In this sense, the choice to follow nature is obvious.

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