We’re all understandably worried about climate change. Information is churning away in our information age about what it means and what we can do: reduce our carbon footprint, purchase carbon offsets when we can’t, and support legislation that forces manufacturers to offer low greenhouse alternatives. Without these actions, scientists like those who sit on the Nobel Prize winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict significant effects on public health such as increased incidence infectious disease.
What I want you to recognize is that what I’ve described is a biased perspective on the problem that reflects an equally biased perspective on health generally. It takes some effort to see this as a perspective at all instead of simply the way things work. Purchasing products to lower our carbon footprint and greenhouse gas reducing standards for industry leaves in place the social processes that actually make those choices seem natural.
I was reminded of this by a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week that looked at who benefits and who suffers from ecological damage. The damage these researchers identified is what’s called in economics an externality: a cost or benefit from producing or consuming a product that isn’t accounted for in its price. For example, the loss of forests increases damage from flooding: the timber company buys the land, cuts the trees, and is paid for the lumber; when heavy rains fall, there’s little left to keep that water from wreaking destruction downstream.
You should not be surprised to learn that nations like Bangladesh with a low per capita income bear the burden of damage and little of the benefit while high income per capita nations like the United States reap most of the benefit and little of the damage. This story of unequal exchange is an old one, much older than our current era of globalization. It really starts with the expansion of European imperialism centuries ago.
Climate change is only one of the six so-called drivers of ecological damage that these researchers examine. But it is what has our attention and imagination right now. Thinking ecologically, it’s easy to see how climate change is linked to the other drivers of ecological damage: agricultural expansion and intensification, ozone depletion, deforestation, overfishing, and mangrove forest destruction.
Ecological damage makes a place uninhabitable. This is damaged health in the most profound sense. As areas of nations become uninhabitable, some people will die, some will adapt, and others will migrate. Some will migrate from the country to the city. Some will migrate, with or without permission, from one nation to another.
While activists and political leaders and even some corporate leaders exhort personal choices and government standards that reduce our carbon footprint, few societies are preparing for the onslaught of mass migrations that is likely over the coming decades. No doubt activists and artists and some politicians will put on spectacular events to raise money for those who suffer. I can guarantee that no events will be scheduled to alleviate the social inequities that are at the root of these migrations.
To do so would question the sanctity of market capitalism as a way to provide people with the things they need. It’s that sanctity that makes it difficult for us to look beyond personal decisions about what we buy—both literally and figurative—as solutions to what are clearly social and global problems. Let me be clear: these personal choices are far from irrelevant. But they are only half the picture. The other half is what we do together as communities that determines the alternatives from which we get to choose.
The sanctity of the market and its operations create a world for us, a world of consumption, that makes it look like what we buy brings health, that commodities give us our health, that even health itself is a commodity—something for us to purchase. I invite you to examine your own health choices in order to see the social ecology in which they are embedded. Then act to make that ecology healthier.
