Here’s a cartoon I did for SEHN, the Science and Environmental Health Network. I had to make it a bit smaller than I’d like to fit it on my blog; a slightly larger version, which shows off the art better, can be found on the Z Magazine website.
“When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”
For more, here’s a good FAQ about the precautionary principle.
By the way, if you had to guess, what racial/ethnic backgrounds would you guess these two characters have? I’ve been having trouble getting the character on the left to register as non-white.
I knew I should have put the coffee down first.
What’s the “precautionary principle”?
Ron, I’ve updated the post with some explanation, which should answer your question.
Mythago, thanks! No higher compliment to a cartoonist than coffee on the keyboard.
I would guess it was two white gals, one with a tan and one without. But I wouldn’t be shocked to be told that the darker woman was Hispanic or Sephardic or of mixed race.
You horrible minority-erasing bigot.
[shrug.] Alison Bechdel once commented that IRL, you frequently can’t even tell the gender of a person standing half a block away. You can always invoke your own variation of that point vis-a-vis race.
The blonde woman strikes me as 100% white (she’s pale, too). The black haired one looks mixed, probably with part black and part hispanic. Although sometimes I think she looks South Asian.
I’m really horrible at guessing people’s races. So I won’t say. I am however, awesome at figuring out their hair color. You seem to have drawn a brunette and a blonde.
Actually, the character on the left looks like many Greek women I know (my own family included, though leaving aside the “typically American”-to me- gestures). However, I have to admit that I usually assume that whenever similar characters come up in your work, they represent a Native American woman.
Context, of course, matters a lot: the women I’m talking about pass for Spanish, Maghrebin, Latina, Indian and whatnot, depending on the interlocutor’s level of knowledge and prejudices.
I find it interesting that you wanted to “get the character to register” simply as “non-white”.
The woman on the left registers with me as Latina. It is also possible she might be Mediterranian (southern Italian, Greek, etc.), Middle-Eastern, Southeast-Asian, or Philipino, if I could make out better what her facial details were like. She definitely doesn’t register as “white” to me. The woman on the right appears of northern-European descent to me.
I enjoyed the cartoon!
Every time I’ve seen this thread today it has looked to me as though the title said “Porgress” rather than “Progress”.
And just now, I realized that I’m misperceiving that because the title says “torwards” instead of “towards”.
No it doesn’t!
(Whistles, walks away).
When you’ve drawn her before, I had always registered the woman on the left as latina. It never occured to me to think that she might be ethnicly European. My assumpsion on the other woman would be German/British/etc.
Cheater!
I’ve seen a couple/few of this semi-series of cartoons with these two women in it, and I always think of the darker woman as being Barry, and the blonde gal as being Charles.
Both women registered as Caucasian to me when I first read it. If you ask me to think about it, I would guess that the one on the left was Italian. There were a lot of Italians in my home town when I grew up; my father’s sister married one and gave us 11 cousins. Then there was my boss at the pizza/Italian restaurant I worked for when I was in grad school. During the summer she and her kids’ skin would turn a gorgeous dark olive color. The first girl I ever dated was Italian, too.
Another clue is what’s going on during the discussion. As we used to say back in the day, “If you want to shut an Italian up, tie their hands together.” I think the Greeks are known for this as well, but then I didn’t have much exposure to Greeks when I was a kid.
So, I read the FAQ on the “precautionary principle”. Once again, this is the kind of judgement that people use all the time in their own lives, and it’s a basic question; what do you do when you have to make a decision based on incomplete data?
There was one question that I didn’t see addressed in the FAQ, though; how is it determined in the absence of definitive scientific evidence that a given activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health high enough to justify legislation, regulation, etc.?
We had an activity for the kids at Cub Scout Adventure Camp where they would throw and catch a tennis ball using cut-off plastic bottles. Used bleach bottles served excellently for this purpose because of their size, the stiffness of the plastic and their molded-in handles. But I was told one day that we could no longer use old bleach bottles because some parents had feared that some residual bleach in the bottles might be harmful to their kids. Never mind that a rinse or two removed any bleach; that wasn’t good enough for these parents. I guess they could still smell some residual chlorine. And so we couldn’t use bleach bottles any more. Milk bottles didn’t work as well, and we couldn’t find anything else readily available, so we had to drop a fun game for the kids.
I wonder if those parents had ever been to the rifle/BB range ….
So how do we judge “Well, we don’t have good scientific evidence that there’s a problem here, but we have enough indications that it might be that we should do something.” I quite agree that such a point can exist, and that the examples in the FAQ and many others are real and action on them has benefited American society. But nothing’s for free, so the people who have to pay will demand some kind of evidence. And don’t think that it’s the evil corporations; they just pass the costs on to you and me, so one way or another consumers and taxpayers pay for everything.