The latest issue of Rachel's Environment & Health News reviews the Data Quality Act and concludes with this sharp observation: In other words, corporations have now succeeded in getting themselves "regulated" by a set of laws and rules that effectively paralyze government regulators. Regulation of chemicals has effectively ended. The regulatory system now regulates not industry but environmentalists, in the sense that it narrowly defines and restricts the responses that they can make to corporate harms. By channeling environmentalist responses into industry-defined activities, the regulatory system makes environmentalists entirely predictable and therefore manageable. But all is not lost. Industry's strategy for ending government regulation has an Achilles' heel. The whole strategy rests on the assumption that, when the science is uncertain, we should proceed with "business as usual" until harm can be proven to a scientific certainty. The precautionary principle turns this assumption on its head, saying, "When the science is uncertain, but there is evidence of harm, we have a duty to take precautionary action to prevent harm." If the precautionary principle were adopted, industry's elaborate strategy for paralyzing government would crumble. Could this be why the chemical industry and the Bush administration have mounted a coordinated campaign to discredit, demonize, and derail the precautionary principle? You think? Writing the precautionary principle into local laws -- and perhaps more importantly into corporate charters -- would fundamentally change the balance of power between people and money. What a worthy fight this is! The coda to the article also announces a new Rachel's newsletter focusing on the precautionary principle.