A Working Group of the Canadian Public Health Association led by Dr Trevor Hancock has been deliberating on the implications of the environmental and ecological trends that are apparent to all of us. These trends have consequences for public and population health, indeed for everyone's personal health. The Working Group has produced a Discussion Paper, available at http://www.cpha.ca/uploads/policy/edh-discussion_e.pdf. It is a brief, clearly written document, setting out the most obvious trends: climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion and increased ultraviolet radiation, resource depletion, especially fresh water for drinking and irrigation, environmental pollution, species extinction, reduced biodiversity, desertification. For more than 30 years beginning in the early 1980s I wrote and spoke a great deal on this cluster of trends and changes in our world and its life-supporting ecosystems. I chaired a study group of the Royal Society of Canada and an international workshop convened under the auspices of Health Canada, and was a special adviser to the World Health Organization. Occasionally I was an official Government of Canada reviewer of scientific reports of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A chapter on "Human health in a changing world" was the centre-piece of the 2nd edition of my book Public Health and Human Ecology (1997). Colin Soskolne at the University of Alberta helped me to expand and update this as Chapter 52, pp 925-937 in the 15th edition of the massive reference textbook Maxcy-Rosenau-Last Public Health and Preventive Medicine (2007).
The fire in my belly is beginning to subside into glowing embers and my expertise on these important topics is becoming dated and no longer carries much weight. Accordingly I was especially pleased to read Trevor Hancock's report. It is required reading for all thoughtful Canadians, especially those who care about the world we will leave to our descendants. Among much else, Trevor Hancock's report has political implications. Nobody who heeds its message could ever vote for a political party that regards life supporting ecosystems as irrelevant, or considers sustaining them to be an impediment to economic growth and business as usual. In the fire-eating mood that sometimes overtakes me, I regard political parties with that view of the world as enemies of life on earth. It's incomprehensible to me that such political parties attract support, let alone enough support to win elections as they often do in the USA and did in Canada last time. I would as soon take a dose of cyanide as vote for any candidate of such a party. Alluding to that sort of weltanschauung, in 1991 I entitled an article in World Health Forum "Homo sapiens - a suicidal species?" That message, and that article were well received by readers around the world.
There is often an omission from the litany of dangerous factors threatening the survival of the world as we know it. Many writers avoid any discussion of population growth and population pressure on fragile environments and ecosystems, or if they mention it, they pussyfoot around the edges, seemingly afraid of arousing the wrath of those who uphold what are often called "family values." Publishers' editors discouraged me in the 1980s when I wanted to discuss in depth the harsh reality that the population exceeded the earth's carrying capacity by at least an order of magnitude. Our present numbers, about 7.4 billion, are unsustainable. The world would be a more comfortable place to live, more peaceful withal, and a happier place for everyone, if instead of 7.4 billion of us, there were 740 million (or perhaps as few as 74 million, two orders of magnitude fewer). I have been concerned about population pressure since my medical student days in the 1940s. My very first professional publication, in 1949 a few months before I graduated from medical school, included a brief discussion of population and my concerns about the rate at which the world's population was increasing. At that time it was rising by about 10 million/year, trivial compared to the present annual increase of more than 70 million.
As I recall those times just after the end of the 1939-45 world war, I think of the clean air, the pristine beaches, the sparkling clear seas around the South Australian coast, the abundant fish in the sea, the thriving bird and insect life of the Australian bush. How everything has changed! Although parts of the world were scarred by the destruction of the 1939-45 war, it was a golden age environmentally speaking. The environmental and ecological deterioration that is so obvious now even to a casual observer such as me, had not begun in those immediate postwar years. The concept of global climate change hadn't even been imagined, and nor had any of the other global ecological and environmental changes that threaten all life on earth. I remember a night in, I think, 1948, when I was 22 years old. Petrol rationing had ended; On a limpid warm evening I had driven into the Adelaide hills with my girl friend of the time, determined to lose my virginity. I didn't succeed in that aim, but many my age did around then. The consequence was the Baby Boom. It began with a bang, a hyper-exponential population surge that very soon overloaded the world with more people than it could comfortably hold. The hyper-exponential surge has subsided but the increased numbers in the fertile years gave fertility rates enough momentum to maintain the unsustainable population growth rate. Vastly greater numbers now than a generation ago in China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, are affluent enough to afford automobiles to take their girl friends, their families, from cities to the countryside, and to use their cars to commute, rather than use public transit systems. Every one of them adds a moiety to the global burden of greenhouse gases that are changing the world's climate irrevocably. It's no wonder that polar and alpine ice caps are disappearing, glaciers are receding, sea levels are rising. At the same time pesticides intended to enhance agricultural production are exterminating insects including bees that are essential for pollinating many crops. Artificial fertilizers are causing huge dead zones around pelagic run-off regions from all the world's large rivers, monoculture - genetically homogenous - crops are reducing biodiversity; industrialized fishing methods are destroying fish stocks. And underlying it all, worst of all, the increased atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide from combusted carbon fuels is not only changing the climate inexorably, it is acidifying the world's oceans and lakes; and this is disrupting ecosystems and reproductive cycles, with consequences not much less dangerous than the global temperature rise that is now an absolute certainty. The world of my childhood and youth is lost to us forever.
Trevor Hancock's report is more positive than my gloomy prognostications, so read that rather than this blog post. I'll try to be more cheerful next time.
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