Green space is good for children. A study to be published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that children in neighborhoods with more greenery had better health over a two-year period. The study tracked 3,800 children between 3 and 18 years old. In a novel approach to measuring how green a neighborhood was, the researchers used satellite-based mapping technology previously used for agriculture, forestry, and malaria research.
Sadly, the researchers bought into the obesity-is-a-disease hysteria by using weight gain as the measure of health. Instead they should have used the incidence of all disease among these children. In fact, they should have measured children’s actual health—that is, children’s capacity to thrive. That approach is beyond the imagination of most researchers in whose research world health is measured by the absence of disease. But I digress.
It shouldn’t surprise us that exposure to a robust natural environment is good for children’s health. In addition to providing recreational venues, trees, shrubs, and other plants provide direct health benefits. Plants absorb air pollutants. They cool the air. They affect mood directly. And a significant body of science shows that contact with plants reduces stress, a major cause of many chronic health risks including weight gain.
The outcome of this research should also be no surprise because, after all, for all but the past century or two, the vast majority of human beings have lived in direct contact with trees, shrubs, and other plants. And animals, too. So people who by circumstance live exclusively in urban neighborhoods are engaged in a grand experiment in life out of balance. Unfortunately, very few people—researchers included—see it as an experiment at all. Someone should ask: is this experiment safe for children? I guess I just did.
These grand experiments on children are part of a grander experiment, that of drawing people into cities for the purpose of creating a pool of labor at the service of industrial political economies. A consideration of what’s safe for children is not part of that experiment because it’s not a need felt at the heart of those industrial political economies.
I’ll give you an example. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has petitioned the FDA to ban 8 artificial dyes from processed foods. All of these dyes and many more have been shown to cause neurological disruption and damage in children. There are safer alternatives. And why do foods need to be colored, anyway?
A food scientist who consults for the industry said that the industry has “the ability to do it, but they don’t want to put any effort into it. It is more expensive.” He went on to say that the industry will change only when forced by the FDA.
This is not evil men and women committing evil deeds. The men and women are likely indistinguishable from people you know. They’re simply part of the labor pool that does the job of ensuring that the food industry prospers. That’s their job.
I’ll give you another example. The lead article in the current issue of Environmental Health Perspectives is titled “Contaminants in Human Milk: Weighing the Risks against the Benefits of Breastfeeding.” The risks consist of chemicals that are the effluent of industrial political economies. These chemicals make their way into breast milk not by the irresponsible consumption of the mother but by common and ubiquitous exposures in air, water, soil, food, personal care products, and other commodities. The article concludes that the benefits seem to outweigh the risks.
But why should we have to weigh those risks at all? There are alternatives to the use of those chemicals. But limiting the freedom of companies that produce them—whether as an ingredient in a product or as waste from production—would violate a core cultural value: the belief that the invisible hand of the free market is the best possible social arrangement for meeting people’s needs. What moves the hand is personal and corporate gain.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be an arrangement that’s safe for children.
