No LLM generated, heavily assisted/co-written, or otherwise reliant work.
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I’ve been an environmental lawyer for three decades, mostly representing indigenous and conservation groups in their goals to slow or stop fossil fuel development in the Arctic. One of my foundational approaches has been the precautionary principle, which has various formulations but essentially says, “where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”
This was appealing to me because I had seen what irreversibility actually looks like. We are living through a human driven wave of species extinction, including the loss of genetic information built over evolutionary time. In Alaska, ancient caribou calving grounds and migratory paths have been disrupted by oil and gas development and subsistence communities have lost cultural continuity and food security. Precaution was the conclusion I reached after watching confident predictions of "manageable impact" fail repeatedly. The asymmetry felt obvious: if we're wrong about caution, we've delayed development; if we're wrong about risk, we've lost something that doesn't come back. My professional life was organized around making that asymmetry visible to courts and agencies, and it worked often enough that I never questioned whether the frame itself might be incomplete.
NEPA is the procedural cousin of precaution: it is intended for us to look before we leap. This orientation is where my professional tribe lives, where my identity formed, and how my career made sense. My ethics and my professional incentives aligned perfectly, which I eventually noticed was suspiciously convenient.
Nate Silver’s framework of the village and the river led me to examine my priors more carefully. "Village" people optimize for stability, known quantities, and downside minimization. "River" people tolerate variance, seek upside, and accept losses for potential gains. I realized my version of precaution had the village's default settings. I had treated it as self-evident that when it comes to nature and human health, we should always be risk averse.
The question that started bothering me was: am I attracted to precaution because it's correct, or because it matches my dispositional risk-aversion and aligns with my professional role and tribe? One thing I’ve learned over the past few years is when a belief is convenient for me or my tribe, I should apply extra scrutiny to it.
The Costs Precaution Doesn't See
Eventually I realized there was an accounting asymmetry at precaution's core: it is designed to foreground the harms of acting, but it has no native language for the harms of not acting. It doesn’t naturally count foregone benefits, innovations not pursued, or problems left unsolved because we didn’t build the tools.
This was an epiphany for me. Precaution can shift risk rather than eliminate it. By reducing one category of harm, we can increase exposure to another, and the framework itself doesn’t force that tradeoff into view. It doesn’t account for the losses of not acting because they are difficult to quantify.
The nuclear story made this concrete. Fear of low-probability, high-salience nuclear accidents contributed, among other factors, to policy choices that slowed deployment in many places. In the counterfactual where nuclear scaled faster in the late twentieth century, it’s plausible we would have burned less coal and gas and suffered less climate damage as a result. Precaution about one risk can, in practice, increase exposure to a different risk. Even if you ultimately still oppose nuclear on other grounds, the point is that the tradeoff exists, and precaution doesn’t automatically surface it.
None of this means precaution is wrong, only that it is incomplete and it needs a complement that can take the costs of not acting seriously.
Abundance: The Solomon Insight
As part of the conversation critiquing Trump’s embrace of zero-sum economics, Noah Smith recently recounted the story of the Judgment of Solomon as an economic lesson: some things are worth more than their divisible pieces, and value is often emergent rather than additive. The abundance agenda draws on a related claim: economic and environmental goods aren’t necessarily zero-sum because human ingenuity can create surplus that didn’t exist before. When people assume the pie can’t grow, politics becomes a fight over slices. But if innovation expands what’s possible, then “abundance” isn’t naive optimism.
What if my precautionary instincts were just pessimism dressed up as wisdom?
But . . . Planetary Boundaries
What I couldn’t make fit was the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s planetary boundaries framework.
The framework identifies nine domains: climate change, biosphere integrity, biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), land-system change, freshwater change, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and novel entities. Recent assessments suggest that several (and possibly a majority) of these boundaries are now exceeded.
I can’t unsee this framework. Precaution is about decision-making under uncertainty. Abundance is about the nature of value: emergent rather than fixed. Planetary boundaries are about the biophysical preconditions that make any value possible.
I don’t think the Solomon parable completely works here. The baby metaphor assumes a functioning room with oxygen. Planetary boundaries are about whether the room remains habitable.
That left me with an uncomfortable question: if planetary boundaries are real and binding, what does that imply about political strategy?
The Crux: Decoupling
For me, everything turns on one empirical question: Can economic growth be absolutely decoupled from material throughput and boundary transgression at global scale, on consumption-based accounting, fast enough to matter?
Relative decoupling is when GDP grows faster than resource use (efficiency improves), while absolute decoupling is when GDP grows while total resource use declines in absolute terms.
If absolute decoupling is achievable at global scale within relevant timeframes, then the abundance agenda is essentially right, and precaution can become counterproductive if it impedes the innovation that actually reduces impacts. If absolute decoupling isn’t achievable at the needed scale and speed, abundance can become a sophisticated form of denial, because it papers over genuine tradeoffs between growth and the physical limits of Earth systems.
My overall sense is that while we have made progress in relative decoupling, there is less evidence that we’ve made progress in absolute decoupling. Our global material footprint continues to rise.
Gus Speth, one of the architects of modern US environmental law, once remarked to me that solving climate change with abundant cheap and clean energy could be the end of biodiversity unless land-use constraints tightened at the same time. I took his point as a warning about friction and rebound: remove one constraint and scale expands into the next limiting factor. That’s one reason absolute decoupling is such a high bar: efficiency can lower costs and expand scale unless countervailing constraints actually bind.
The answer to this question seems fundamental to me. And yet even if I decide that the math doesn’t pencil out, I run into another constraint: politics.
Politics and Pragmatism
My perception is that "degrowth" has not yet shown a path to durable governing power in major democracies. Slack —the margin for error that lets a person or society take risks, absorb losses, and plan for the long term—is something Switzerland has in abundance. Wealthy, stable, insulated from the immediate consequences of ecological overshoot: if any country could afford to experiment with constraint, it's Switzerland. And yet in February 2025, the Swiss rejected exactly this approach. The referendum would have required the economy to operate within planetary boundaries within ten years. Nearly 70% voted no. People sometimes accept constraint under acute threat, but they do not easily sustain "less" as a peacetime identity project. Even if contraction were technically required, treating it as the central public message may be strategically self-defeating if it guarantees political failure.
I think that abundance framing may be the only viable vehicle for social and environmental progress in the near-term, even if it's partially wrong about biophysical reality over the long term.
Another reason why I’ve leaned more towards an Abundance orientation is because of how I’ve been thinking about contingency. Brian Klaas uses that term for the idea that historical outcomes aren’t deterministic: small changes can send systems down radically different paths. The implication isn’t just that prediction is hard. It’s that we can’t know whether the path that looks “correct” in the abstract is actually optimal, because we can’t see the futures it forecloses.
Contingency cuts both ways. An abundance framing doesn’t guarantee success, but it doesn’t guarantee failure either. Under genuine uncertainty, insisting on certainty before acting becomes its own kind of error. Uncertainty here isn’t a rhetorical move for either side; it’s a real condition that any strategy has to operate within.
Where to go from here?
Here's where I've landed for now. The abundance framing may be politically strategic and it may be a correct way to view the tensions between environmental protection and development. I need to continue to examine whether an abundance approach is working. If it leads, even non-linearly, to helping us stay within real biophysical constraints, that’s great. But if it is just a way to greenwash economic growth, it's cover for doing nothing.
Three questions I think I need to pay close attention to are: Are emissions in wealthy countries falling or just getting exported? Do planetary boundary transgressions stabilize or continue to accelerate? And are abundance coalitions passing laws with teeth, or just funding innovation and hope?
Even when my professional role requires me to argue for precaution, I want to have privately stress-tested the tradeoffs. And when I'm speaking as myself - in policy discussions, in writing like this - I'll resist defaulting to precaution without asking what it costs. And if I argue for constraint, I think I need to have an answer to the political feasibility question - not dismiss it as someone else's problem. Above all, I need to keep an open mind and be ready to adjust my thinking as the evidence comes in.
I haven't fully resolved the tension between my instincts and my analysis. But I've stopped pretending I am certain about the answers.
I’ve been an environmental lawyer for three decades, mostly representing indigenous and conservation groups in their goals to slow or stop fossil fuel development in the Arctic. One of my foundational approaches has been the precautionary principle, which has various formulations but essentially says, “where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”
This was appealing to me because I had seen what irreversibility actually looks like. We are living through a human driven wave of species extinction, including the loss of genetic information built over evolutionary time. In Alaska, ancient caribou calving grounds and migratory paths have been disrupted by oil and gas development and subsistence communities have lost cultural continuity and food security. Precaution was the conclusion I reached after watching confident predictions of "manageable impact" fail repeatedly. The asymmetry felt obvious: if we're wrong about caution, we've delayed development; if we're wrong about risk, we've lost something that doesn't come back. My professional life was organized around making that asymmetry visible to courts and agencies, and it worked often enough that I never questioned whether the frame itself might be incomplete.
NEPA is the procedural cousin of precaution: it is intended for us to look before we leap. This orientation is where my professional tribe lives, where my identity formed, and how my career made sense. My ethics and my professional incentives aligned perfectly, which I eventually noticed was suspiciously convenient.
Nate Silver’s framework of the village and the river led me to examine my priors more carefully. "Village" people optimize for stability, known quantities, and downside minimization. "River" people tolerate variance, seek upside, and accept losses for potential gains. I realized my version of precaution had the village's default settings. I had treated it as self-evident that when it comes to nature and human health, we should always be risk averse.
The question that started bothering me was: am I attracted to precaution because it's correct, or because it matches my dispositional risk-aversion and aligns with my professional role and tribe? One thing I’ve learned over the past few years is when a belief is convenient for me or my tribe, I should apply extra scrutiny to it.
The Costs Precaution Doesn't See
Eventually I realized there was an accounting asymmetry at precaution's core: it is designed to foreground the harms of acting, but it has no native language for the harms of not acting. It doesn’t naturally count foregone benefits, innovations not pursued, or problems left unsolved because we didn’t build the tools.
This was an epiphany for me. Precaution can shift risk rather than eliminate it. By reducing one category of harm, we can increase exposure to another, and the framework itself doesn’t force that tradeoff into view. It doesn’t account for the losses of not acting because they are difficult to quantify.
The nuclear story made this concrete. Fear of low-probability, high-salience nuclear accidents contributed, among other factors, to policy choices that slowed deployment in many places. In the counterfactual where nuclear scaled faster in the late twentieth century, it’s plausible we would have burned less coal and gas and suffered less climate damage as a result. Precaution about one risk can, in practice, increase exposure to a different risk. Even if you ultimately still oppose nuclear on other grounds, the point is that the tradeoff exists, and precaution doesn’t automatically surface it.
None of this means precaution is wrong, only that it is incomplete and it needs a complement that can take the costs of not acting seriously.
Abundance: The Solomon Insight
As part of the conversation critiquing Trump’s embrace of zero-sum economics, Noah Smith recently recounted the story of the Judgment of Solomon as an economic lesson: some things are worth more than their divisible pieces, and value is often emergent rather than additive. The abundance agenda draws on a related claim: economic and environmental goods aren’t necessarily zero-sum because human ingenuity can create surplus that didn’t exist before. When people assume the pie can’t grow, politics becomes a fight over slices. But if innovation expands what’s possible, then “abundance” isn’t naive optimism.
What if my precautionary instincts were just pessimism dressed up as wisdom?
But . . . Planetary Boundaries
What I couldn’t make fit was the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s planetary boundaries framework.
The framework identifies nine domains: climate change, biosphere integrity, biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), land-system change, freshwater change, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and novel entities. Recent assessments suggest that several (and possibly a majority) of these boundaries are now exceeded.
I can’t unsee this framework. Precaution is about decision-making under uncertainty. Abundance is about the nature of value: emergent rather than fixed. Planetary boundaries are about the biophysical preconditions that make any value possible.
I don’t think the Solomon parable completely works here. The baby metaphor assumes a functioning room with oxygen. Planetary boundaries are about whether the room remains habitable.
That left me with an uncomfortable question: if planetary boundaries are real and binding, what does that imply about political strategy?
The Crux: Decoupling
For me, everything turns on one empirical question: Can economic growth be absolutely decoupled from material throughput and boundary transgression at global scale, on consumption-based accounting, fast enough to matter?
Relative decoupling is when GDP grows faster than resource use (efficiency improves), while absolute decoupling is when GDP grows while total resource use declines in absolute terms.
If absolute decoupling is achievable at global scale within relevant timeframes, then the abundance agenda is essentially right, and precaution can become counterproductive if it impedes the innovation that actually reduces impacts. If absolute decoupling isn’t achievable at the needed scale and speed, abundance can become a sophisticated form of denial, because it papers over genuine tradeoffs between growth and the physical limits of Earth systems.
My overall sense is that while we have made progress in relative decoupling, there is less evidence that we’ve made progress in absolute decoupling. Our global material footprint continues to rise.
Gus Speth, one of the architects of modern US environmental law, once remarked to me that solving climate change with abundant cheap and clean energy could be the end of biodiversity unless land-use constraints tightened at the same time. I took his point as a warning about friction and rebound: remove one constraint and scale expands into the next limiting factor. That’s one reason absolute decoupling is such a high bar: efficiency can lower costs and expand scale unless countervailing constraints actually bind.
The answer to this question seems fundamental to me. And yet even if I decide that the math doesn’t pencil out, I run into another constraint: politics.
Politics and Pragmatism
My perception is that "degrowth" has not yet shown a path to durable governing power in major democracies. Slack —the margin for error that lets a person or society take risks, absorb losses, and plan for the long term—is something Switzerland has in abundance. Wealthy, stable, insulated from the immediate consequences of ecological overshoot: if any country could afford to experiment with constraint, it's Switzerland. And yet in February 2025, the Swiss rejected exactly this approach. The referendum would have required the economy to operate within planetary boundaries within ten years. Nearly 70% voted no. People sometimes accept constraint under acute threat, but they do not easily sustain "less" as a peacetime identity project. Even if contraction were technically required, treating it as the central public message may be strategically self-defeating if it guarantees political failure.
I think that abundance framing may be the only viable vehicle for social and environmental progress in the near-term, even if it's partially wrong about biophysical reality over the long term.
Another reason why I’ve leaned more towards an Abundance orientation is because of how I’ve been thinking about contingency. Brian Klaas uses that term for the idea that historical outcomes aren’t deterministic: small changes can send systems down radically different paths. The implication isn’t just that prediction is hard. It’s that we can’t know whether the path that looks “correct” in the abstract is actually optimal, because we can’t see the futures it forecloses.
Contingency cuts both ways. An abundance framing doesn’t guarantee success, but it doesn’t guarantee failure either. Under genuine uncertainty, insisting on certainty before acting becomes its own kind of error. Uncertainty here isn’t a rhetorical move for either side; it’s a real condition that any strategy has to operate within.
Where to go from here?
Here's where I've landed for now. The abundance framing may be politically strategic and it may be a correct way to view the tensions between environmental protection and development. I need to continue to examine whether an abundance approach is working. If it leads, even non-linearly, to helping us stay within real biophysical constraints, that’s great. But if it is just a way to greenwash economic growth, it's cover for doing nothing.
Three questions I think I need to pay close attention to are: Are emissions in wealthy countries falling or just getting exported? Do planetary boundary transgressions stabilize or continue to accelerate? And are abundance coalitions passing laws with teeth, or just funding innovation and hope?
Even when my professional role requires me to argue for precaution, I want to have privately stress-tested the tradeoffs. And when I'm speaking as myself - in policy discussions, in writing like this - I'll resist defaulting to precaution without asking what it costs. And if I argue for constraint, I think I need to have an answer to the political feasibility question - not dismiss it as someone else's problem. Above all, I need to keep an open mind and be ready to adjust my thinking as the evidence comes in.
I haven't fully resolved the tension between my instincts and my analysis. But I've stopped pretending I am certain about the answers.