The environmental health movement could in fact be the greatest unifying force since the great progressive and social democratic movements that swept the world over the past two centuries before they were founded on the twin rocks of the totalitarian perversion of social democracy in communism and the growing power of the global market system.

Photo credit: Michael Pettigrew

The environmental health movement has the potential to generate coalitions that include religious and spiritual groups, environmental groups, health professionals and affected health constituencies, labor unions, women's groups, civil rights groups, social justice advocates, consumer groups and progressive corporate interests in a new progressive political majority.

Environmental health concerns could trigger the first fundamental realignment of the political balance of power in the industrial democracies since the fall of the progressive coalitions after World War II when they could no longer protect their constituencies from the forces of the global market and when the "new social movements" fragmented their shared concerns with the interests of working people.

9. Four Futures That Will Shape Environmental Health Awareness

Photo credit: Andres Rodriguez

Four possible futures will shape what happens to environmental health consciousness in the Age of Extinctions. The social movements for environmental health will likely develop differently in different countries and in different segments of the emerging global culture, depending on national or global sectoral conditions.

One of the most important fields to develop in recent decades has been future studies. Large corporations have driven development of the field of future studies because they have an imperative economic need to plan for the future. Future studies have shown corporations that they cannot predict the future but that they can develop plausible future scenarios that increase their capacity to adapt rapidly to changing political, economic, social and ecological conditions. Michael Marien's seminal monthly publication Future Survey summarizes developments in this vital field.

While the number of possible future scenarios that will shape the environmental health revolution is unlimited, we can use four scenarios that the global civil servant William MacNeil of the Brundtland Commission once described to me: Business as Usual, Descent Into Chaos, a Sustainable Future, or Artificial People on an Artificial Planet.

In fact, it is a reasonable speculation that the real global future will not follow one of these scenarios, but some unknown combination of all four. If this is true, then the global struggle is about the proportions of these different futures that we will experience ourselves and leave to our children.

The balance of these four futures will shape the fate of environmental health consciousness and the social movements associated with it. To the degree that the world descends into chaos, people will be too preoccupied trying to survive war, terrorism, poverty and starvation to worry as much about our bodies being laced with toxic chemicals. To the degree that we become artificial people on an artificial planet, we may decreasingly believe in the possibility of, or perhaps even the desirability of, sustaining whatever remnants there are of what was once called nature. Even the best future will be a very difficult one.

For one of the ultimate paradoxes is that the "edenic trope" of a sustainable future is in many respects the most artificial future of all. A just and sustainable future will require the most remarkable feats of coordinated global management.

While sophisticates mock the fears of some disenfranchised Americans that U.N. troops in black helicopters will appear over the horizon to take their freedom away, it is far more useful to understand that these folk myths of the disenfranchised often represent a perception that global bargains may take shape that will seriously infringe on the freedoms that Americans rightfully cherish. At best, as the great scientist Rene Dubos foresaw, humans may have to manage the world like a global garden, or, to use a more vivid contemporary metaphor, like a global theme park, in which we consciously choose to preserve different human cultures and different biomes in different parts of the world because we psychologically and physically need both human and natural diversity.

A recent New York Times Magazine article on what is happening to wildlife in Africa neatly illustrates this trend. Wildlife is increasingly surviving in Africa because of its economic value in great game parks. We cannot simply leave nature alone when we are the dominant species on earth. We can only leave nature alone if nature decimates our numbers and our technologies so completely that we lose our dominant biospheric role.

But we cannot flinch from looking at the tension between sustainability, equity and human rights.

The disenfranchised in America and around the world are right to fear that, in the struggle for a sustainable future, their interests may once again be the last to be taken into consideration. All of history confirms the legitimacy of their suspicion.

10. Two Basic Divisions In the Global Environmental Health Movement

Photo credit: Raymundo Ochoa

To succeed in becoming a majoritarian force both nationally and internationally, some fundamental sense of shared goals of the emerging parallel environmental health movements must be achieved and sustained.

Two basic divisions will challenge the achievement of shared goals for the environmental health movements. One division will be between those committed to private goods and to public goods in facing the environmental health challenges. There will necessarily be those who seek primarily to insulate themselves, their families, and their communities from the greatest environmental health threats. There will be others committed to systemic changes that ensure the health of all.

The second division will be between those principally concerned with ending climate change, ozone depletion, the threat of toxic chemicals and habitat destruction, and those who will not rest until poverty and injustice are recognized as equally important threats to environmental health. Ultimately these two inevitable divisions of the environmental health movement tend to be divisions between rich and poor, both within and among nations.

Although the divisions between those focused on privatistic solutions and those focused on public solutions to the threat to human health are inevitable, we often overlook the fact that these are complementary as well as competing strategies for human survival.

The truth is that the global management of the biosphere that will unquestionably be needed to protect human health cannot be achieved privatistically on any scale. Privatistic solutions that do not address global issues of poverty and injustice are ultimately doomed to failure because, as virtually all close observers of these issues recognize, the Northern industrialized countries cannot save the biosphere for itself if it does not join in addressing the critical problems of poverty both at home and in the Southern countries. The "dirty" development of the South, following in the footsteps of the "dirty" development of the North, ultimately will doom any privatistic approach to environmental health in the North.

Privatistic solutions undertaken without an equally strong commitment to public solutions drive the world toward the future scenarios of Descent into Chaos and Artificial People on an Artificial Planet.

1. They leave the disenfranchised no choice but that of depredation of the environment and desperate rebellion against their exclusion from the spheres of safety.

2. They leave the privileged no choice but to become artificial people on an artificial planet, and to abandon their commitment to a world that nourishes all life.

11. The Environmental Health Movement as a Unifying Force

Photo credit: Davide Guglielmo

The divisions between public and privatistic approaches to the threat of the Age of Extinction to human health are inevitable. But the potential environmental health movement can also be a unifying force for both progressive and conservative constituencies in both the North and the South.

The environmental health movement could in fact be the greatest unifying force since the great progressive and social democratic movements that swept the world over the past two centuries before they were founded on the twin rocks of the totalitarian perversion of social democracy in communism and the growing power of the global market system.

The environmental health movement has the potential to generate coalitions that include religious and spiritual groups, environmental groups, health professionals and affected health constituencies, labor unions, women's groups, civil rights groups, social justice advocates, consumer groups and progressive corporate interests in a new progressive political majority. Environmental health concerns could trigger the first fundamental realignment of the political balance of power in the industrial democracies since the fall of the progressive coalitions after World War II when they could no longer protect their constituencies from the forces of the global market and when the "new social movements" fragmented their shared concerns with the interests of working people.

If environmental health consciousness and related social movements achieve their promise, a new progressive era could emerge fundamentally driven by the shared interests of citizens of the industrial democracies of the North and the developing nations of the South in controlling direct biospheric threats to the health of their families and communities.

Forces of reaction and inertia will, of course, do everything possible to prevent environmental health coalitions from achieving their potential.

While the forces of reaction cannot prevent the development of these parallel environmental health movements, they can and will seek to limit their scope and prevent them from achieving the political, economic and social hegemony they will require to institutionalize the deep changes that a more sustainable and healthy future would require.

Even if the environmental health movements survive the forces of reaction, there will be equally grave threats from within these movements, and in the interaction of these movements with the profoundly complex issues of policy, technology and social choice that are involved in creating a sustainable future.

Social theorists from the Greek philosophers onwards have known that social movements are often ultimately self destructive. Ultimately, it is useful to distinguish between

(1) the almost inevitable long-term global development of environmental health consciousness

(2) the potential and the historically inevitable vicissitudes of the emerging environmental health movements; and

(3) the daunting complexity of actually enacting environmental health change.

These three forces -- consciousness, social movements, and social-technological change -- may through their interaction play a key role in shaping the future of the earth and our species.

12. Who Will Lead the Environmental Health Movement?

Photo credit: juan santiago

Assume for a moment that these environmental health movements emerge. Who will lead them?
What will be the leading sectors that define the goals and set the strategies for the environmental health movements?

Assuming also for the moment that we will live in a world where the hope of preserving nature and what it presently means to be human persists, the list of the possible leading sectors in the environmental health movements would include: The environmental movement; The human rights, civil rights and environmental justice movements; The women's movement; Advocates for children; The religious and spiritual communities; The labor movement; The social development constituencies; The medical and public health constituencies; The mind-body health movement; and Progressive corporate interests I have not listed these movements in order of importance, and the list is deliberately incomplete for reasons of space. Let us briefly consider the contribution of each of these sectors to the environmental health movements.

The potential interest of the environmental movement in environmental health is evident. The environmental movement played a major role in launching the vision of sustainable development as a way of framing the global bargains between North and South that will be necessary for a sustainable future.

It would not be too much to say that the environmental health movement actually is, in certain respects, the sustainable development movement in new and improved form. The truth is that the sustainable development movement, while it made significant inroads in countries around the world, has failed to achieve the decisive traction it needed to drive the reforms at every level of human society that a sustainable world requires.

What fundamentally differentiates the environmental health movement from the original sustainable development movement is that it frames the need for sustainability in the very concrete terms of the effects of unsustainable development on the health of all people, not at some future time, but right now.

The human rights movement has a great deal to gain from recognizing environmental health as the next great human rights issue. The language of human rights will perhaps best capture the issues of environmental health for the coming century. For example, the right of women to have toxic-free pregnancies, and to be able to breast feed their children without passing onto them dangerous loads of highly toxic chemicals, is arguably one of the most fundamental human rights. We have not consciously granted to corporations the right of chemical trespass into our bodies, or the right to perform uncontrolled experiments with pharmacologically active endocrine disrupting chemicals on our unborn children. We should have a right to go out in the sunlight in nature without fearing that the thinning ozone layer will give us and our children skin cancers and deplete our immune systems. For the purposes of this discussion I regard the civil rights movement in the United States simply as one expression of the human rights movement around the world.

The women's movement is to a large extent a human rights movement, as is the gay rights movement. The environmental justice movement deserves special emphasis in the family of human rights movements, as do the deeply parallel international efforts among southern countries to pose environmental justice concerns in the face of the historic depredations of northern industrialized countries. The environmental justice movement emerged among communities of color and other front-line communities in the United States and internationally. It has pioneered the linkage between human rights and environmental health.

Environmental health is an issue that these front-line community activists have struggled to support for decades. Among all of the human rights movements, the one that may offer the greatest contribution to the environmental health revolution is the women's movement.

In the years following the Earth Summit in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, when the global bargains needed to achieve a sustainable future were first tabled together as part of global high diplomacy in front of heads of state gathered from around the world, the women's movement emerged as by far the most powerful, effective and coherent of all the sectors that have engaged together in the struggle for a more just and sustainable future. In retrospect, the ascendancy of the women's movement within the emerging international civil society movement can be readily explained. Women's groups alone claim the potential allegiance of half of the world's population.

The women's movement alone carry the genetic and cultural transmissions that make women on the whole more concerned with the fate of families and children than men are. Two leading strata of the women's movement are likely to lead the way in building the alliance among diverse social movements with shared environmental health agendas. They are the breast cancer activists and women's reproductive health rights activists.

The breast cancer activists have been the most successful group moving a specific health agenda in the United States in recent decades. A significant minority are already deeply committed to environmental health concerns. The women's reproductive rights activists were the most successful international group moving a specific health agenda over the past decade. Together, these two groups are likely to lead the national and international women's movements toward leadership in environmental health.

The leadership of the women's movement on environmental health is also likely because women are best placed to reach out to other sectoral constituencies, and to reach across the political spectrum,. This natural leadership potential of the women's movement in the environmental health revolution simply reflects the fact that women are already active in the leadership of all of the key sectors that will constitute the national and global environmental health movements.

Another dimension of the power of the women's movement for environmental health is the simple fact that women are generally closer to the rearing and education of children than men are. In many respects, their values -- as mothers and school teachers -- are likely to shape children's values related to environmental health.

Few things are more profoundly important to the future of environmental health than the consciousness and education of children. Advocates for children are likely to play a key role in the emerging environmental health movements. The well-being of children is a concern that has an almost unique capacity to bring otherwise disparate communities into effective coalition. The fact that so many of the environmental threats to human health, most notably developmental and reproductive toxins, affect children first and foremost, is likely to energize pediatricians, educators, and many other children's advocates as spokespeople for environmental health.

The religious and spiritual communities are also destined to play a preeminent role in the coming environmental health movements. The Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church recently became the first leader of a major faith to denounce human destruction of the creation we have inherited as a "sin," in a moving pronouncement that Paul Gorman of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment hailed as opening a whole new realm of theological discourse.

The religious community has historically played an absolutely central role in the development of core beliefs and values recast to meet the needs of changing times. Its role in the labor movement, the human rights and civil rights movements, the women's movement and the environmental movement has been of critical importance.

Beyond traditional religious constituencies, the new "spiritual" movements in countries around the world will play a critical catalytic role in the environmental health revolution. In a time of shifting social identities, when many people have lost their roots in traditional religious practices, those who find direct experience of the importance of spirit in their lives, either renewing traditional religious commitments or creating new forms of contemplation and worship, are frequently engaged with the search for the connections between personal and planetary healing.

The labor movement has been in decline for decades since its power was shattered following the end of World War II both by the declining power of nation states to protect labor constituencies from the globalizing economy and by the rise of the "new social movements" -- the civil rights, environmental, women's and gay rights movements -- that fragmented its once near universal appeal.

Yet now, even in the face of the increasing power of the forces of globalization, labor is showing new strength, reaching out to disenfranchised communities to organize them rather than feathering the nest of the well organized traditional labor groups. Environmental health has, of course, long been a key concern of organized labor, enshrined in the concepts of occupational health and safety. This niche has long held a critical set of tools that the emerging environmental health movement will call upon.

Organized labor as a whole is unlikely to lead the coming environmental health movement, simply because of the tension between its economic and environmental health interests, but visionary unions like the Oil, Atomic and Chemical Workers Union have resisted the enormous efforts of industry to purchase their allegiance and have stood up for environmental health. As the environmental health movement gains traction, organized labor, which brings many relevant skills and resources to the table, can provide both the political muscle and the negotiating experience to help bring environmental health issues into the mainstream and to enact new social and political agendas.

Labor is a constituency of enormous importance to the future of this work.

The social development constituencies committed to helping less developed countries and poor people in developed countries have been a critical voice within the dialogue on sustainable development. Development advocates actually proved far more naturally inclined to work out what sustainable development actually means than environmentalists, because development, rather than conservation, is their fundamental concern.

Environmental health has long been a key index of sustainable development for social development constituencies. In the Southern countries particularly, development advocates will likely lead any effort to put the precepts of a sustainable environmental health agenda into practice. They will also deeply influence the positions of Southern countries who take these agendas seriously in international dialogues on the global bargains necessary to finance and guide these outcomes.

The medical and public health communities are also key potential leadership constituencies for the environmental health movement. In one sense environmental health is essentially a public health movement, since it takes a population approach to both human health and the health of other species, as opposed to a purely clinical biomedical approach. A recent report from the New York Academy of Medicine recounts the historic phases of the sometimes tense and sometimes collaborative relationship between medicine and public health in the United States.

In recent decades the success of biomedicine and the economic interests that favor profitable treatment approaches over politically contentious prevention strategies gave medicine a powerful upper hand over public health. Now, once again, the resurgence of many health conditions that can only be approached by public health strategies may signal a new era of cooperation.

If the medical and public health communities come again to speak with one voice on environmental health issues, it will signal a turning point in environmental health consciousness. That is why the recruitment of enlightened leadership from these two communities is a critical dimension of the environmental health agenda.

The mind-body health movement also has a critical role to play in the coming environmental health revolution, primarily in the advanced industrial countries. This movement has been one of the most influential grass-roots movements to emerge from the historic explosion of the new social movements in the 1960s. Its singular power is that mind-body health tends to unite people rather than divide them.

Progressives and conservatives alike can agree that mind-body health approaches to health promotion, disease prevention, and self-care in treating disease, are apolitical social goods that can benefit all inclined to use them. The mind-body health movement has deep links both to the organic and sustainable agriculture movement and to the new spiritual tendencies that infuse most of the progressive sectors described above.

The essentially holistic vision of personal and planetary healing that many but not all of those identified with mind-body health hold is also a fundamental contribution to the emerging environmental health revolution in human consciousness. Like parts of the environmental movement, however, parts of the mind-body health movement can be challenged for elitism. That is natural for a movement that reaches across the political spectrum, and can be as strong among conservatives as among progressives.

Some mind-body health practitioners seek essentially privatistic solutions to environmental health problems. They drink bottled water, install water and air filters, eat organic food, and avoid chemical products. Others can be found in the front lines of the struggle for systemic responses to both ecological and economic injustice. To the extent that the mind-body health movement comes to incorporate an environmental health consciousness, it will drive some of the most important changes of mind and heart that the environmental health movements will require to achieve majoritarian status in industrial democracies.

Progressive business interests have, ultimately, enormous power to drive an environmental health movement both nationally and internationally.

The deep concern of the insurance industry with climate change, which threatens to destroy profitable insurance opportunities, is a single example of how major industrial sectors can line up in support of powerful environmental health agendas. But their are enlightened business people all over the world who share a deep concern with personal and planetary healing.

The failure of many nonprofit environmental health advocates to seek common ground with the enlightened business community is as serious a failure as their disconnect with enlightened labor groups. There is no possible way to create a majoritarian environmental health movement without the deep engagement of both business and working people.

As the global environmental health movement gains momentum, the economic opportunities it offers will grow dramatically. Organic food markets are the fastest growing segment of the American food industry. Ecotourism is one of the fastest growing segments of the tourism industry.

Mind-body health is the fastest growing sector of the American health care industry. But it is above all consumer consciousness and consumer interests that may drive business toward an environmental health ethic. The grassroots, consumer driven push toward ways of living that support personal and planetary healing may well prove an irreversible business force.

13. How Might the Environmental Health Movements Come Together?

Photo credit: Tom Denham

Assume again for a moment that these environmental health movements do emerge as a significant force. How might they come together? It is by no means inevitable that they will. Yet many factors favor a merging of their agendas, even in the face of both the inevitable divisions in the environmental health movements and the inevitable opposition of some corporate interests to a majoritarian environmental health movement.

As the conditions described in this essay play out over the coming decades, the ever increasing threat of the current global economic system for the health of the earth and the health of humanity will make common interests ever more vivid, and the urgency of organizing ever more clear. These three basic facts -- that overlapping constituencies with shared interests have independent means of communications -- suggest that classic and innovative organizing techniques may help to bring the environmental health movements together.

14. Strategies to Support the Environmental Health Movements

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Suppose thoughtful people representing these diverse sectors gathered to ask themselves what investments should be made on behalf of an emerging environmental health movement. What investments would they recommend? I will take the United States as a primary model for these investments, and suggest a few that would be particularly useful.

There is no question that legislative and policy victories for environmental health will continue to need those centralized investments. But because the environmental health agenda must ultimately come from a citizen base, nurturing the grassroots will be fundamental to the health of this movement.

15. A Loaf of Bread

There are many ways to look at our human response to the cataclysmic encounter between human activity and the fate of the natural systems that support our life and all life on earth at the end of the millennium.

Photo credit: hortongrou

The lens of environmental health, of InterBeing, is only one of the perspectives that we can apply to the brave new world that we are creating. There is nothing special about this perspective unless it turns out that using it makes a difference. "If God came to India," Mahatma Gandhi once said, "He would have to come as a loaf of bread."

That was Gandhi's simple way of acknowledging that the highest human and spiritual truth of any time and place must fit the greatest need of that time and place. We know that this is an era of incredibly rapid and unprecedented globalization of the world economic system and that the transformations of the earth's life support systems presently being wrought by this globalization are completely unsustainable.

We do not know whether there is a common language, a common perspective, that will enable us successfully to mobilize the resources of mind and heart that humanity needs to turn the corner toward a healthier and more sustainable world. What is Gandhi's loaf of bread for our time?

Is it our deep shared interest in ending the poisoning of us and our children and achieving a world that is safe for humans and safe for all life?

I'll end with this. From my point of view, the only real choice we have is whether to accept the degradation of life on earth that the Age of Extinctions is inflicting on us at increasing velocity or consciously to choose to struggle against it.

Perhaps the perspective of environmental health can make a contribution to our struggle. There is nothing certain about whether we will succeed in the work in which we are engaged. Only one thing is certain. For many of us, this is simply the most interesting way to live.

End of Part 2 [of 2]

Part I. Click here to view Part One of this article.

Originally Published By
Michael Lerner, on October 2001 as "The Age of Extinction and The Emerging Environmental Health Movement" on Commonweal.org

About the Author:

Michael Lerner is president of Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, California, and co-founder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, featured by Bill Moyers on his PBS series "Healing and the Mind." He is the author of "Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Cancer Therapies" [MIT Press]. His work on environmental health is now focused on "Collaborative on Health and the Environment", an international partnership for people with a serious interest in what toxics and other environmental agents are doing to our health and what we can do to protect our families, our communities and our world. Readers can join CHE free at www.healthandenvironment.org.