People's Health Assembly - December 2000
Moderators Opening Remarks: Environmental Survival
December 8, 2000
To introduce today’s topic, I will offer a framework, which I hope, will help focus our discussion on environment and health.
Our physical environment supports our health in 4 ways.
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As a source (reservoir of) for energy and materials.
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As a service for water, nutrients and carbon recycling.
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As a sink for pollutant and other wastes.
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As a space in which we can live, work and enjoying the beauty of nature.
Establishing a sustainable relationship with our physical environment in each of these 4 categories is essential for good health.
So for instance a supply of renewable energy, clean water, clean air, unpolluted soil, the maintenance of a stable atmosphere and the preservation of our beautiful bio diverse globe are all-important determinants of our health.
In each of these 4 areas, there are clear physical limits to the capacity of the environment to support the continuing health of all peoples. When we exceed these limits, we will inevitably damage our collective as well as our individual health. It follows that to ensure we and our descendants have hood health, we need to live within these environmental limits. And of course the environment is for everyone and every being, not just the rich few.
So in an environmentally sustainable just and therefore healthy society, each individual will have an equal right to his or her share of this limited environmental space.
Unhappily, there is as much environmental injustice around the globe as there is social injustice. It’s really a repeat of a familiar story. The rich with our affluent consumer life styles use a disproportionate (unfair) and excessive amount of the global environmental resources, and the poor disproportionately suffer the consequences. Indeed environmental and social injustices have the same distribution, many of the same origins and are equally damaging to our health. These injustices are obviously closely interrelated, and often reinforce each other.
It follows that in moving toward a healthy society, we need to pay equal attention to combating environmental as well as social injustice, and we need to be careful not to advance the cause of one to the detriment of the other. Fortunately, in the same way as the causes of these injustices are similar, so are the solutions.
With that introduction, we are now going to hear 8 testaments, from people who have either direct experiences or policy insights or both into the links between environment and health, and which will illustrate some of the issues which I have just touched on.
All these 8 have agreed to talk for no longer than 7 minutes, same less, and 3 will require some additional time for translation. The contributors have agreed to keep to this time so that we can have around 40 minutes for discussion before Suad in the chair winds up the session. During the discussion, I hope that we can all learn from and share the vast experience which is in this hall particularly regarding the various ways in which many of you have improved your environment to the benefit of you health.
So now to our first story.
