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You know: you give up smoking only to realise you’re inhaling a couple a day just by breathing that inner-city smog.....

Green issues are health issues
Personal health doesn’t stop at the boundary of the human body, of course. We’re inextricably linked to the environment, and any process that poisons our air, water or food obviously has the potential to harm us too. Green issues are health issues, and we need to wrest back control of the former to ensure the latter.

Fine. But don’t we already have pretty good control over the environment and health – certainly compared to previous times in history? The Present’s not perfect, sure, but no one seriously wants to trade it for Ancient Rome’s twenty-something life expectancy, teeth pulled on street corners, chamber pot contents dumped out of windows, scurvy and syphilis and leprosy and leeches. Surely humans are better off now than ever before?

More of us do live longer and healthier lives (in developed world contexts, anyway), and medical science has brought some of the dread scourges (smallpox, for example) to heel.

But one of the great ironies of our time is that these glittering successes are tarnished by increased rates of other diseases and disabilities – cancers, heart disease, depression, respiratory conditions, allergies, chronic fatigue and certain infectious diseases – induced or exacerbated by the pollutants, radiation, climate change and stresses of an increasingly degraded environment.

And the scientific advances themselves often bring unforeseen health problems in their wake. Antibiotics save millions from infection, but we’ve used them with such abandon that new, resilient bacterial strains have appeared. Cell phones mean we never need feel alone again, but it’s anyone’s guess what they’re doing to the developing brains of a whole generation of children. And so on.

Then why aren’t we more worried?
The human race is like an overweight smoker who, tucking into burger and chips, has convinced himself his arteries aren’t silting up, or, if they are, that medical science will step in and unclog them in good time. And like the human body, nature can take a surprising amount of abuse before it caves in completely and we’re forced to take notice.

While we’re young, most of us get away with some wild living and almost manage to convince ourselves of our immortality. But the earth (to keep leaning on the medical analogy) is in late middle-age: the heart-attack hasn’t happened yet, perhaps, but we’re starting to feel the chest pains...

The trouble with environmental problems is that they just don’t often present themselves as particularly...urgent. True, some of the crises and their impacts are immediate and spectacularly obvious: toxic chemical spills, nuclear reactor meltdowns, bioterrorism attacks. They give good press copy, and the victims and perpetrators are reasonably easy to identify.

But most of the key issues just don’t make snappy media soundbites. Take global warming: it’s complex, vast in extent, has no clear beginning or end as a good story should, and the goodies and baddies are confusingly one and the same: ourselves. And how the plot does drag; the greens seem to have been droning on about climate change forever, and nothing really awful's happened yet.

But tedious as the cry-wolf environmentalists may sometimes be, their message is not: the crisis isn’t pending, it’s upon us. The wolf’s at the door. Those of us able to log onto Health24 have the means to still pretend it isn’t happening most of the time. Nothing obviously dreadful has happened to most of us in environmental terms, yet. But the swelling numbers of environmental refugees - the tens of millions* forced from their homes by increasingly severe floods or droughts, denuded and eroded land, industrial accidents and injudicious development - are already living everyone’s future nightmare: a lost species, wandering rootless on a desert plain.

So what are we supposed to do about it, exactly?
The EnviroHealth Centre offers some simple ways we can improve the planet’s health, without a desperate, unrealistic alteration in lifestyle.

We don’t have to revert to living like pre-industrial hermits, masticating muesli in caves lit by guttering tallow candles. But we do need to reign ourselves in a bit, pay a bit more attention to our actions, be a bit more (sigh) grownup. Again, it’s very like what you’re already doing to take care of your health. The goal – vitality, longevity, LIFE – is noble, but the struggle involves few grand gestures, alas, and many mundane daily decisions. Those sordid little Gollum-like wrangles with the self:

Q: Should I eat that eclair?
A: NO. I don’t need it. But that luscious chocolate, that soothing cream. Not so soothing in your arteries. Don’t care had a hard week deserve a little treat. No you don’t you greedy swine leave me alone you self-rightous prig no yes no yes NO. Made it that time. Now, should I go to gym or watch TV?

But at least: environmental issues are health issues, so you can often strike a single blow for both causes:
Q: Should I walk to the cafe rather than drive this time?
A: Yes, and Yes.

- Olivia Rose-Innes, EnviroHealth Expert, Health24, updated June 2007
 

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