My recent columns on the need to reduce inequality and social injustice by, among other things, increasing taxes on the rich and introducing or expanding wealth taxes, have elicited responses from some people along the lines of “you advocate stealing from the rich.”
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“Reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians, from an Aboriginal perspective,” wrote the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015, “also requires reconciliation with the natural world. If human beings resolve problems between themselves but continue to…
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The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the materials and energy we use — they all come from nature. We are part of the web of life, and as the Duwamish elder Chief Seattle is recorded as saying more than 150 years ago: “Whatever we do to the web of life, we do to ourselves.”
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I was fortunate to be born in a fairly peaceful high-income country. I had a high standard of living while growing up, with enough energy, food, water and other resources to lead a good life. I am fortunate to have never experienced war, real hunger or starvation, serious poverty or homelessness.
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More than 40 years ago, in my major paper for my master’s degree, I sought to identify the fundamental principles underlying public health. I concluded there are two: ecological sanity and social justice. The pursuit of these principles has defined much of my work to create a healthier society ever since.
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UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned last month the world is in “a life-or-death struggle” for survival as “climate chaos gallops ahead,” while the World Health Organization calls climate change “the single biggest health threat facing humanity.”
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One of the five great turnarounds proposed in the recent Earth For All report to the Club of Rome is the energy turnaround. So with COP27 — the annual UN conference on climate change — opening in Egypt, this is a good time to look at this issue.
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The new Club of Rome report Earth For All addresses the two greatest challenges facing humanity: the massive and rapid ecological triple crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution — to which I would add resource depletion — and the social crisis of massive inequality.
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Way back in 1977, the World Health Organization declared the goal of achieving Health For All by the Year 2000. This should be understood in the way the U.S. Public Health Service defined a goal in 1980: “a timeless statement of aspiration.” learly, Health For All was not achieved, and is still not achieved today. But nonetheless…
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There is an apocryphal story of a mother taking her young daughter out into the backyard. The child looks up from her iPad and says: “Where are we?” Her mother replies: “It’s called outside.” The point is obvious: We have become so screen-oriented that we…
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It is said that it takes a whole village to raise a child, not just the family and the school. Similarly, the most important message in the decades-old global Healthy Communities movement that I helped to create is that it takes efforts at all levels and across all sectors to create a healthier community.
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While community safety is about more than crime and violence, it is nonetheless where people’s minds often go. They are greatly assisted in that by the attention paid to crime and violence by the media, often amplified by what we might call the “law and order” brigade, for whom the answer is more and better policing.
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One issue we are likely to see a focus on in the upcoming municipal elections is community safety, often focusing on crime and violence. But important though that is, community safety is about much more than that. I recall, as a consultant working on the Healthy Cities initiative with the World Health Organization in the 1980s and 1990s…
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There is a concept in health promotion called victim-blaming — blaming smokers for their habit, for example, when in reality they are the victims of a sophisticated marketing campaign. The same concept applies to the tendency by many to blame the City of Victoria for problems such as homelessness, mental health and addictions problems, park camping and crime and violence.
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One of my professional roles throughout most of the 1980s and 1990s was that of a health futurist. Often that involved working with scenarios of plausible alternative futures. In addition to helping people understand the implications of past, current and future actions, these scenarios are useful in exploring their values…
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Even the human species is probably not at risk, although we should remember that, over time, pretty much all species become extinct. But we are a highly adaptable and tough species, able to survive and indeed usually thrive in habitats as diverse as the Arctic, equatorial jungles, deserts and high altitudes.
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In North America, we spend on average 90 per cent of our time indoors. So the design and operation of the immediate built environment where we spend the vast majority of our time is of great importance for our wellbeing.
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Active transportation is a major focus of public health action, and has been for some decades. The health benefits include increased physical activity (in turn linked to reduced obesity and improved heart health), improved air quality (linked to improved heart and lung health), and reductions in injuries, noise and greenhouse gas emissions.
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This week, I will begin to explore our “Five Big Ideas” in more detail, from the perspective of human wellbeing and its achievement within the Earth’s ecological boundaries. These ideas are intended to provide a balanced and holistic perspective and be implemented together. We want to create a city-region that…
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In November 2021, the City of Ottawa completed the process of revising its official plan. My attention was drawn to Ottawa’s plan through a recent news posting by the Canadian Public Health Association, which focused on the role of public health in the development of the new plan.
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I have had it with letters to the editor that seem to be trying harder and harder to be nastier and nastier about people who are, for whatever reason, down on their luck and living on the street. Too often, recently, I have seen references to such people as “bums,” or worse, “undesirables.”
Read moreWe have missed other important environmental goals. An independent scientific report prepared for the recent Stockholm+50 conference examined progress across a range of environmental goals agreed since 1972, and found that “typically only one-tenth of targets show significant progress or can be considered achieved.”
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Rising concern about the impact of humanity on the environment led to the first UN conference on the environment in 1972. However, the issue of sustainability itself was barely touched on at the conference, with only one mention in the 80-page conference report. Nonetheless, publications prepared for the conference, such as Only One Earth and The Limits to Growth, as well as the conference itself, led to a much-heightened awareness of the challenges we faced.
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The concept of a carbon bomb is pretty simple: It’s a potential source of a large amount of CO2 that could be released quite rapidly (or the loss of important carbon sinks), accelerating global heating and taking us beyond the 1.5 C and even the more damaging 2 C targets that have been internationally agreed upon.
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B.C. likes to claim it has a wonderful, world-leading climate action plan. So it is perhaps surprising that the Sierra Club B.C. announced in February that it is taking the B.C. government to court “for failing to present plans to achieve several key climate targets, as required by its own climate change legislation.”
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Right now, globally, we have experienced global warming of about 1.1 C, and we saw last summer here in B.C. what that can mean. Two recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paint a grim picture.
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Housing is fundamental to health. That should not be a surprise, especially in a country with Canada’s climate. The health impacts of being homeless or living in poor-quality housing are well understood, and must be obvious to anyone. But it is not just homelessness that is a concern — there is a much larger problem of affordability. Lack of affordable housing can markedly affect people’s physical, mental and social wellbeing.
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Thursday, April 7, is World Health Day. The theme this year is Our Planet, Our Health. WHO wants to “focus global attention on urgent actions needed to keep humans and the planet healthy and foster a movement to create societies focused on well-being.”
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A few weeks ago, before Russia invaded Ukraine and began committing war crimes that have shocked the world (in a way that should have but, to our shame, did not shock the world when Russia did the same thing in Chechnya and Syria), I was writing about inequality and health in the context of creating a wellbeing society.
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I write my weekly columns a week or so before they are published, and submit them five days ahead. So when I wrote my column last week, while there was always the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine, there was still some hope that the Madman of Moscow would not actually do so.
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Given the well-documented relationship between high levels of inequality and poor health and social outcomes in high-income countries, which I discussed last week, high levels of inequality cannot be tolerated. But as I also noted last week, the World Inequality Report 2022 states simply: “Inequality is a political choice, not an inevitability.”
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That is also true globally: “Bonds across countries do not work when bonds within them are broken,” noted the UN’s recent report Our Common Agenda. Which brings me to the World Inequality Report 2022, released in December. The report is published by the World Inequality Lab, based in France, whose major funders include the…
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The World Health Organization’s December 2021 Geneva Charter for Well-being expresses “the urgency of creating sustainable well-being societies, committed to achieving equitable health now and for future generations without breaching ecological limits.” So far, I have mostly focused on the need to stay within ecological boundaries…
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Last week, I described the growing global attention to the concept of a well-being society and economy. The latter has already been the focus of work by several national governments. In particular, New Zealand (Aotearoa) was the first country in the world to develop and present…
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In the face of growing disquiet that our current economic system massively harms Earth’s natural systems while creating excessive inequality and insecurity for many, there is growing interest in the idea of an economy that puts people and planet first.
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In the more than 40 years I have spent working in public health, I have been guided by a key realization and two principles. The realization was that medicine, in which I was trained, while important, is not the main factor that contributes to good health.
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Even here in Canada, there are dramatic inequalities in health. A 2018 report from the Public Health Agency of Canada found a 4.1-year gap in life expectancy between those living in high- versus low-income neighbourhoods, and around 11- to 12-year gaps between areas with high or low concentrations of Inuit or First Nations people.
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… well, world peace, of course; an end to poverty, hatred and discrimination in all its forms; reconciliation with Indigenous people in Canada and around the world; serious action on climate change, an end to the ravaging of nature…
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On Sunday evening, I will gather with others in our neighbourhood at Lights on the Gorge, our annual event to mark the midwinter solstice. We will light some of the trees along Gorge Road, sing songs appropriate to midwinter and the solstice and have a lantern parade for the kids.
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We have just witnessed another Black Friday and Cyber Monday, an orgy of consumerism that kicks off the Christmas shopping binge. Every year, it seems, the consumption-fest gets worse, hyped by a marketplace that encourages greed and over-consumption because it desperately wants us to purchase more and more stuff.
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Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, has told us “humanity is waging war on nature.” The problem is that wars have winners and losers. But as the events this year have surely shown us, Mother Nature is more powerful than us, and bats last.
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It comes as a surprise to many people, including health-care professionals, that the health-care system has a large ecological footprint. But as I noted last week, if the global health-care system were a country, its carbon emissions would have made it the fifth-largest emitter on the planet, according to a 2019 report from Health Care Without Harm.
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Last week, I reported on the rally at the B.C. legislature organized by Doctors for Planetary Health — West Coast. The rally was timed to coincide with the COP26, the UN’s climate-change conference in Glasgow, where, for the first time — and at the behest of the U.K. government — health was one of three science priority areas.
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Inspired in part by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, who had called the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report a “Code Red for humanity,” we were there to declare a climate and ecological Code Red for B.C., noting: “The climate and ecological crisis is a health crisis. We stand in solidarity for a safe and equitable future for all living creatures and the planet.”
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UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres stated almost a year ago: “Making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century. It must be the top, top priority for everyone, everywhere.” In my view, this can only happen if we recognize, as Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos’ 1972 book put it, that there is “Only One Earth” and we have to learn to live within and not beyond its bounds.
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In this series of columns, I am exploring the UN’s call for humanity to make peace with nature. Last week, I noted that B.C.’s government is failing to act, or is taking inadequate action, on climate change. This week, I look at B.C.
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By recognizing that “humanity is waging war on nature,” the United Nations arrived at the idea of making peace with nature. Regrettably, the B.C. government pays little heed to calls to make peace with nature, whether from the UN or its own citizens.
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