Re: Precautionary Principle

[Steven Dapra <sjd@swcp.com>]

Jan. 27



	I looked at that SEHN website (http://www.sehn.org/about.html).  Here's a

few comments about the staff and Board of Directors, with material cut and

pasted from the site.  (SEHN stands for Science and Environmental Health

Network.  It was founded in 1994, and has 42 organizational members and

"hundreds of volunteer scientists.")



	Staff member Carolyn Raffensperger M.A., J.D. worked for the Sierra Club.

"She began working for SEHN in December 1994. As an environmental lawyer

she specializes in the fundamental changes in law and policy necessary for

the protection and restoration of public health and the environment."



	She also "is at the forefront of developing new models for government that

depend on these larger ideas of precaution and ecological integrity. The

new models include a vision for the courts of the 21st century and the

public trust doctrine."



	"[F]undamental changes in law" -- what is that supposed to mean?  Just

makes you feel tingly all over, doesn't it?  Just like that "vision for the

courts of the 21st century".  I'll bet you anything it doesn't include any

reduction in the size and power of government.



	Next is Ted Schettler, M.D., M.P.H.  He "co-chairs the Human Health and

Environment Project of Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility."



	Next is  Nancy Myers, M.A.  She is "a former managing editor of the

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists".   She also "works part time so she can

commune with trees and watch wildflowers bloom in her patch of woods in

southwest Michigan."



	Then we have Lynne Fessenden, Ph.D.  She "directed a Rockefeller

Foundation resident fellowship program at the University of Oregon

entitled, Ecological Conversations: Gender, Science and the Sacred. The

program hosted scholars, writers, scientists, theologians and grass-roots

activists from around the world and created a venue for a series of dynamic

conversations in which visiting fellows and university students and faculty

explored the complexities of human-environmental relationships."



	The president of the Board of Directors is Peter Montague.  He is the

editor of Rachel's Environment and Health News, New Brunswick, N.J.  This

organization is named after Rachel Carson, and one of its objectives is to

blame certain types of cancer on chlorine.  Peter Montague is also somehow

entangled with the Southwest Research and Information Center of New Mexico,

an organization which has worked for over 20 years to prevent the Waste

Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) from opening.



	Another Board member is Martha Dina Arguello who is the Director of Health

and Environment Programs for Physicians for Social Responsibility of Los

Angeles, CA.



 	SEHN has links to six or eight organizations including Physicians for

Social Responsibility; and the Loka Institute, whose purpose is "Making

Research, Science & Technology Responsive to Democratically Decided Social

& Environmental Concerns."  Again, what is this supposed to mean?



	I would urge RADSAFErs to visit the SEHN site and look around some,

especially at its Public Interest Research proposals and its Program Areas.  

SEHN's attack is primarily on chemical pollutants and the chemical

industry, but we may rest assured that they are anti-nuclear as well,

especially with Physicians for Social Responsibility on board.



Steven Dapra

sjd@swcp.com





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