Martin McKee on the Manifesto for Planetary Health One of the most fascinating things I read recently was The Lancets Manifesto for Planetary Health (printed in full at the end of this post). For one of the most august and respected medical journals to argue that the idea of unconstrained progress is a dangerous human illusion, to call for a new vision of cooperative and democratic action at all levels of society and to state that our patterns of overconsumption are unsustainable and will ultimately cause the collapse of our civilisation is remarkable, and timely. Heres a short video in which The Lancets editor, Richard Horton, explains more about the Manifesto: We talked to Martin McKee, Professor of Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and one of the reports authors. Reading around in other things about the manifesto, there’s a term that comes up that I’d not come across before, which was “social medicine”. What’s social medicine? Social medicine is a term that actually goes back to at least the 1920s and the 1930s. In more recent years it’s been termed public health. This is essentially the idea that we should be looking at the health of populations and in particular that governments have a role to play in promoting health. Quite simply put, there is such a thing as society and individuals do need the support to make healthy choices. As has been said before, we all do make choices but not always in the circumstances of our own choosing. Is the Manifesto arguing that capitalism is bad for our health? If you look back historically, back to the late 1980s, we saw that one of the alternatives, communism, clearly was very bad for people’s health. Life expectancy was stagnating under the communist regimes and I think there is now really no doubt that the model of communism that had been implemented in the Soviet Union and in the countries of Eastern Europe had failed and was rejected by the population. If we look at the model of capitalism – and I stress I’m not talking about either of these in their totality – but if we look at the particular model of capitalism we have at the moment and we look at the way in which it brought about the economic crisis with essentially as Adair Turner said, the global stock markets serving “no socially useful purpose”, we can see that that particular model has failed. Failed in terms of delivering benefits to the wider population. The US and the UK have seen virtually no increase in median earnings over the last three decades, so it’s certainly not working in terms of the economy. There’s no doubt that both the communist system that was in place before 1990 and the capitalist system that led to the economic crisis have both failed abysmally and we need a new way of doing things. Is the capitalist system that we have at the moment bad for our health? Well clearly it is because we’re seeing a vastly more unequal society. People are not sharing equally in the game. The French economist Thomas Picketty has written a damning critique of the system as it is, showing that things are going to get worse. So although I’m not talking about capitalism in its totality I would refer back to the work of people like Adam Smith, he of “the invisible hand of the market”. He balanced his call for markets in his second book A Theory of Moral Sentiment recognising that free markets have many problems. The capitalist system has potentially within it the seeds of its own destruction unless it can balance whatever its dong with some socially useful purpose. In the Manifesto, you write at the end ‘together with empowered communities we can confront entrenched interests and forces that jeopardise our future.’ Is there a case, do you think, that Transition groups and such initiatives could actually gain more profile and by arguing what they do not just in terms of sustainability but in terms of public health? Yes, I think so. The very heart of what we’re advocating is the idea that the two are linked. We cannot have a healthy population without a healthy planet, but the difficulty is that one of course needs to frame one’s argument differently for different audiences. In the past, the public health community has very much focused discussions on the way better health is better for the economy. But we also have to realise that we need to square that circle to some extent. I was very interested in the bit about ‘the idea of unconstrained progress is a dangerous human illusion.’ With people like Matt Ridley’s book about The Rational Optimist and James Delingpole writing this week about how young people today have never had it so good and they should stop moaning and just be aware that they live at the pinnacle of civilisation. That’s a really dangerous and complacent perspective isn’t it? It also ignores the basic laws of physics. And we go back to the issue of entropy. Whenever the earth was formed, without getting too mu... buff.ly/1hsZ4…
Posted on: Wed, 28 May 2014 10:05:17 +0000
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