Underground Ecocriticism Liveblog 18

Molly Wallace, “Precautionary Reading.”
Beck's risk society: excavates a structure that underlies risk--isomorphic: technoscientific innovations as responses to threats end up producing their own disasters, often revealed years later in slow violence as gradually accumulated hazard >> sudden catastrophe
Hand sanitizers >> superbugs
Precuationary reading: incalculable and calculable risk
Principle 15 of Rio declaration of 1992
"precautionary approach" 
"lack of scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation"
Hard to paraphrase!
Calculability of cost effectiveness vs incalculability of massive enviro damage
Sounds like an alibi for not doing much
need to bring speculative imaginary to bear on global risk
Incalculable in Derrida. We don't want to lose its promise. But also nb the frequency of "precaution" in Derrida.
Latour: precaution doesn't just mean we stop taking action until we are assured--because this would still be a performance of mastery. Instead, as Whiteside puts it, we need "uncertainty made conscious"

Manifesto:
1. Attention to economics.
2. Reading for future in present. 
3. Incalculability, to fear as well as to affirm.
4. Grounded in the real. cf the hyperobject.
5. Interdisciplinary.