Most challengingly, when we find ourselves asking the inevitable question ‘But surely they wouldn’t allow all this stuff to be sold if it was dangerous?’ we need to face up to the answer: yes, they would, and they do.
There is no ‘they’ looking after us; companies are just looking after their profits, while governments look the other way. It’s up to us.
But where is the medical profession in all this? Shouldn’t they – we – be on the frontline of the battle for human health? It has struck me that, of the books I’ve read about the devastating effects of environmental pollution on our health, most have been written by investigative journalists, not medics.1
There are campaigns to save the whales, the hedgehogs, the bats, the birds, the beetles, tigers, rhinos and rainforests – quite right too. But there is no campaign that I know of to Save the Humans. I guess we imagine that the issue of human health is ‘covered’ by the existence of doctors, hospitals, the NHS – God bless. But they won’t do it for us. They just pick up the pieces. But our species, homo not-very-sapiens, is endangered.
When I ask GPs and other fellow medics what they think are the main environmental determinants of disease and death, they say cigarette smoking and excess alcohol. Those are very important indeed, but not environmental in the sense I mean it in this book. Some of the more aware doctors may add that iatrogenic illness, illness caused by medical treatment, is the fifth leading cause of death in the world.2
This is mostly due to adverse drug reactions, or ADRs. Perhaps I should have included them in this book; drugs as human poisons. After all, I did mention what those drugs are doing to the fish in our rivers! But space is limited.
Overall, the attitude of the medical profession at large is one of fatalism: ‘Doctor, why has this happened to me? To my body?’ ‘Oh, it’s just bad luck.’ That is an astonishingly common response my patients have had from their GPs or hospital consultants, and it’s remarkably unscientific.
Science is supposed to be all about cause and effect. Yet we are not trained, in medical school, to wonder about causes, and thus prevention, of illness.
This fatalism has filtered through to the general public. So, when someone we love becomes seriously ill, what do we do with the inevitable sadness, despair or rage that follows? We don’t ask why, but we channel our compassion and natural desire to help, to do something, into the outlets our society provides. We wear a pink ribbon, run marathons to raise money, or wear a hat on
Wear a Hat Day. I salute the love and caring that are the source of these activities, but I worry. I worry that the money raised goes to charities that simply fund the research of the drug industry, which is looking for futile but profitable ‘magic bullets’, not at causes.
I worry that wearing a pink ribbon does not prevent breast cancer, the causes of which we have seen in this book. And I worry that Wear a Hat Day will not prevent or cure a single brain tumour. But the people in the ads look incredibly cheerful; ecstatic, in fact. And the hats are very cool.
I haven’t been able to discover when Wear a Hat Day began, but I’ll bet it was pretty recent. Ten years ago, I knew nobody with a brain tumour. Now, sadly, I know (or know of ) many. Wear a Hat Day is one response to this rapidly increasing incidence. This book is another.
All the world’s great spiritual traditions tell us that we are one with nature, with each other, with all beings. From Buddhism in the East to the Native American wisdom of the West, that is the message.
The great Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh called it ‘interbeing’. We are not separate. If we attempt to separate ourselves, disaster follows. If we get hooked on money and power and ‘stuff’, we lose touch with our mother the earth; we lose the plot.
As the Native American botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it: ‘All flourishing is mutual. We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world.’
When we finally realise that the decline in our loved ones’ health is coming from the self-same causes as the forest fires on the other side of the globe, the same causes as the melting Arctic ice and the drowning tropical islands, the same causes as the missing dawn chorus and the mysteriously withering trees in our own local park – then perhaps we will see that it is all one fight: our right to a healthy life along with that of all our fellow beings on this planet.
Healing our bodies and repairing the earth are one and the same project.