Framing Anthropogenic Environmental Change in Public Health Terms

It is widely understood that anthropogenic environmental change has great potential to adversely affect human health. But the processes and pathways leading to illness are often (at least initially) poorly understood, which makes calls for reversing behavior that causes environmental change difficult. Yet despite the ever-present risk of confounding those they seek to persuade, scholars and activists from a broad range of disciplines and issue areas are nevertheless increasingly framing environmental issues in public health terms.

Can concern over adverse health outcomes attributed to human activities be an effective motivator for social change? If so, can such concern catalyze changes within institutions charged with managing human-environmental interaction? The three books reviewed in this essay suggest three conclusions. The first is that concern for public health is indeed an effective catalyst for initiating debate on environmental issues. Second, framing environmental change through its health consequences depends on analysis from a range of disciplines, which runs the risk of confusing, instead of convincing, target audiences. Third, despite the inherent analytical complexity, concern for public health will increasingly be used to justify attempts to radically alter the governance of human-environmental interactions.

Framing adverse anthropogenic environmental change as a public health threat featured prominently in early influential work associated with the emergence of environmentalism as a social movement oriented towards institutional change. While Silent Spring is best remembered for illustrating how indiscriminate pesticide use threatened the existence of particular species and the integrity of ecosystems, another principal message it conveyed was that pesticides were playing a prominent role in the changing epidemiology of human cancers throughout industrialized societies.¹ Similarly, in The Closing Circle, Barry Commoner frequently cited examples of how byproducts of industrial production threatened human health in his bid to convince readers that the dominant economic paradigm premised on continuous economic growth is fundamentally at odds with laws of ecology.²

Whether these and other past attempts to frame environmental problems as public health threats were ultimately successful is debatable. Demonstrating cause and effect for many illnesses suspected as resulting from environmental harm is challenging. Vested interests benefit from the activities that cause environmental degradation, and challenges to the status quo result in competing discourses of how to interpret anthropogenic environmental change.

The three books reviewed here either examine or employ the language of public health to examine how human activities adversely affecting the natural world might be restructured. Together, they effectively illustrate both the potential challenges, as well as the rewards of framing humanity’s adverse environmental impacts in public health terms.

In Global Warming and the Political Ecology of Health, medical anthropologists Hans Baer and Merrill Singer have modified Barry Commoner’s call to arms over the dangers posed by entrenched modes of production and levels of consumption to reflect their experience in studying determinants of health within marginalized populations. They approach their analysis from an unabashedly socialist worldview, informed by ecological principles. They view global capitalism as the underlying cause of climate change. They point out that its resulting ecological changes (such increased frequency and severity of floods, droughts, heat-waves, etc.) and associated adverse health effects (such as increased prevalence of water-borne disease, famine and heat-related mortality) are disproportionately borne by the world’s poor and historically marginalized. Although most of the book is devoted to cataloguing both known and potential health effects of increased mean global temperatures, Baer and Singer never explicitly discuss the merit of problematizing the global environmental crisis in public health terms, or examine whether concern for health is effective at increasing ecological consciousness within societies.

The authors propose an alternative social-economic paradigm to that of industrial-capitalism: a democratic order based on what they describe as ecosocialist...