Introduction
The world is currently facing an unprecedented health and environmental crisis. Despite progress in both the health and the environment fields, the situation is approaching the brink of global disaster. So extensive and far reaching are the problems that the future wellbeing of humanity, together with that of many other life forms on the planet, is in jeopardy.
On one level, individuals and communities -especially those who are poorest, most marginalised and suffering the most discrimination- are facing the direct consequences of local environmental destruction, which often result from exploitative business practices and destructive development projects. Those who are worst-off pay with their health for the destruction of their local environment.
On another level, people all over the world are beginning to be affected by regional and global environmental changes. These drastic environmental problems, e.g. the changing climate and the depletion of the ozone layer, are mainly the result of unsustainable lifestyles, overconsumption and unhealthy patterns of development. Also these environmental problems are likely to hit the poor and marginalised first -and with the most drastic consequences- but will sooner or later also affect the privileged. Unless curbed (through wide-ranging, structural changes) these global environmental trends threaten to cause havoc to whole ecosystems and essential life-supporting systems. This may in turn lead to an immense, unprecedented crisis for the whole of humanity.
It is thus of utmost relevance for everyone involved in the People’s Health Movement to understand the links and interconnections between health, the environment as well as underlying factors such as social, political and economic structures which determine the current patterns of development. Ultimately, the health and environment crisis relates to issues of social justice. Analysing health in an ecological and environmental framework calls for a broad, intersectoral, holistic understanding of health. It shows how many of the pressing health and environmental problems of today share the same root causes and the same barriers to being effectively tackled and solved. It encourages a long-term perspective on health and its future challenges. And it provides, through the experiences of the environmental movement, exciting examples of how people -or ‘civil society’- can successfully influence current thinking and policies.
Learning objectives
This topic has been developed to enable participants to gain:
- broad familiarity with the range of environmental issues facing humanity (from the local to the global), including the arguments and the politics of those issues;
- broad familiarity with work of the environmental movement; its structures, cultures and how it works;
- broad familiarity with the main intersections of concern between the people's health movement and the environmental movement; including the issues themselves (eg environmental issues with direct health implications) and the political economy of those issues and the links with the political and economic forces driving many global health issues;
- participants will be alert to the opportunities for collaborative projects and campaigns involving the people's health movement and the environment movement, at local, national and global levels.
Contents
Several topics are being developed under this module:
Readings
Acknowledgements
This topic developed by Miguel San Sebastian with inputs from Romeo Quijano and Jeff Connant.
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