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Thirteen municipalities, but only one planet

Dr. Trevor Hancock

6 March 2017

702 words

The CRD’s Regional Growth Strategy has been rejected, but I will not be mourning, it was never the right strategy anyway. First, the very name tells us all we need to know; a growth strategy. Not even a growth management strategy, and certainly not the sustainability strategy it originally was meant to be. But what we actually need is a One Planet strategy.

What does not seem to have penetrated the consciousness of many councils in the region – and the provincial government, for that matter – is that we only have one planet. So we need to learn to live within the constraints of this one small blue dot that we call home.

Our governments also fail to accept that we are entering The Anthropocene, which encompasses more than just climate change. We face a rapidly growing ecological crisis that will undermine the economic and social wellbeing and the health of today’s young people and their descendants, unless we take swift action.

Business as usual is not an option, we cannot grow our way out of this situation, since growth itself is the problem. Consider the increase in resource demand that will be seen by an infant born today, if current patterns of population and economic growth continue. They can expect to live about 80 years – or they could if ecological constraints, obesity and other problems don’t reduce their life expectancy.

Population growth in Canada and globally is now just over 1 percent, which means over 80 years the population will more than double. The economic growth that economists and governments often aspire to, and which largely means an increase in our ecological footprint, is 3 percent. An annual growth in real GDP of 3% over 80 years would result in a 10.6-fold increase. Together these would result in an increase in impact on the planet during their lifetime of more than 23 times the starting point (2.2 x 10.6).

Even if our technology became 5-times more efficient in terms of resource use and pollution reduction, as some believe is possible, the impact over this infant’s lifetime would more than quadruple. But we already use the equivalent of 4 or 5 planet’s worth of ecosystem goods and services, which is clearly not sustainable. Another 4-fold increase – never mind a 23-fold increase – is clearly out of the question.

Which is why for the past couple of months I have been organising a series of ‘Conversations for a One Planet Region’ at the Robert Bateman Centre. Because we need a conversation across the Region, and especially with young people whose future this concerns, about how to reduce our ecological footprint dramatically to take only our fair share of the planet’s resources, while preserving a good quality of life and good health for all.

We began with Jennie Moore from BCIT – who with Cora Hallsworth will be estimating the ecological footprint of Victoria and Saanich this year – that food and energy use accounts for most of our footprint, using a consumption-based approach.

When she did this for Vancouver, she found that to get to a ‘One Planet’ footprint, Vancouver would need to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent, improve building energy efficiency by 40- 60 percent, triple urban density, make 86 percent of trips by walking, cycling or transit, reduce by half the consumption of goods (e.g. paper), change to a low-meat diet to reduce the carbon footprint of food by half and reduce post-purchase food waste by half.

In subsequent sessions, we heard how this could be accomplished from Tom Hackney, Policy Director of the BC Sustainable Energy Association, Todd Litman of the Victoria Policy Transport Institute and Jeremy Caradonna, a UVic Professor and sustainable food systems expert.

This coming Saturday, March 11^th, we will take this Conversation further in an IdeaFest event at New Horizons in James Bay (1.30 – 4.30 PM), and in particular discuss how to sustain, broaden and deepen the Conversation in the coming months. Plans are already underway for a Phase 2, kicking off with Guy Dauncey discussing the sort of economy we need for a One Planet Region (March 20^th, 5 – 7 PM at the Bateman Centre). For further information visit the Conversations website at https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/oneplanetconversations/

© Trevor Hancock, 2017

 

Healthy corner stores – well, why not?

Dr. Trevor Hancock

27 February 2017

699 words

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at a conference in the US on adolescent health. One of my fellow speakers spoke with energy and passion about the need for young people to eat a more healthy diet. But it was a very American speech, rooted in an ethos of personal choices and individual responsibility. While noting that our food is laced with fructose and high levels of sugar and fat (oddly, I don’t recall her mentioning salt or lack of dietary fibre) she did not suggest that we should be regulating the food industry that provides this unhealthy diet.

I pointed this out rather firmly, suggesting that we should. Repeating Nancy Milio’s famous phrase, I said we need to make the healthy choice the easy choice. But all too often we make the unhealthy choice easy – and then wonder why people make unhealthy choices. Unsurprisingly, this suggestion was not met with much enthusiasm. Nor was another questioner who wondered how people in low-income communities, faced with ‘food deserts’, could make healthy choices when all they had were corner stores and fast-food restaurants. The speaker suggested they should create community gardens.

I have nothing against community gardens, indeed I welcome them for all sorts of good reasons; at their best they strengthen community relationships, provide exercise, green havens and links to nature, even vegetables and fruit – and they might save some people some money. But I don’t see them as a viable solution for people who live in low-income food deserts.

Instead I suggest another approach: The Healthy Corner Store. This approach was pioneered in 2004 by the Food Trust, a Philadelphia-based non-profit, in partnership with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. The Food Trust noted that in low-income communities, where supermarkets are often lacking, “families depend on corner stores for food purchases. The choices at these stores are often limited to packaged food and very little, if any, fresh produce.”

So they set out to change that, working with local stores and their communities. The Philadelphia network now involves more than 600 corner stores. A 2014 evaluation of the Philadelphia initiative found that it resulted in “healthier choices, healthier businesses and healthier communities” and the network has now gone national.

This approach is now underway in Canada, with an initiative launched by the Toronto Food Policy Council in 2014 and by the Food Policy Lab and others in Newfoundland in 2015. The Toronto initiative began by mapping areas of the city where there was lack of access to healthy food and where low income populations live.

They selected a pilot convenience store in a high-rise complex in East Scarborough whose owners were keen to sell healthier and more affordable food. Working with the local community, including the youth, they identified local healthy food preferences and worked to strengthen relationships between the community and the store owners. Then they worked with the owners to improve their business planning, including purchasing, marketing and signage.

The product will be a ‘how to’ toolkit they hope to take to some of the other 2,000 convenience stores across the city. The intent is to boost sales and profits in the store, which makes it an attractive option for other stores to adopt, although it is too soon to tell how much this will change people’s diets.

The Newfoundland project is based on the recognition that “Newfoundland and Labrador has the most corner stores per capita, as well as the highest proportion of corner stores in rural areas, of all of the provinces or territories in Canada”, according to the Food First NL website. In rural communities, they note, these stores are also important community hubs, which means these stores can help strengthen community as well as improve healthy food choices. As in Toronto, they have started with a pilot store from which they are learning, but then plan to expand across the province.

Of course, changing our food culture takes a long time, especially in competition with the powerful marketing of fast food and junk food. But this seems like a worthwhile effort that could readily be adopted in BC, both in big cities such as Vancouver and in small, rural communities.

© Trevor Hancock, 2017

 

Primary care is the heart of healthcare

Dr. Trevor Hancock

20 February 2017

702 words

I spent the first 4 years of my career working as a family physician, both in rural New Brunswick and in a community health centre in Toronto. It was very satisfying work and I enjoyed it greatly, but my wish to move further upstream and prevent rather than treat and manage illness took me into public health. While I have never regretted that choice, I have a soft spot for primary health care, which I see as the heart of health care, and the key to an effective health care system.

Primary care is the point of first contact for most health care, handles most of the patient load and is the gatekeeper for access to specialty care. Good primary care systems can and should coordinate care at home and in the community, and should be able to follow their patients into and back out from the hospital and specialty care.

The late Dr. Barbara Starfield, one of the world’s leading researchers on primary care, noted in 2008 that countries with strong primary care systems have better health outcomes, lower costs and greater equity in health. She also noted that “within countries, areas with higher primary care physician availability (but NOT specialist availability) have healthier populations” and that “more primary care physician availability reduces the adverse effects of social inequality”.

So it is distressing to see that family practice is not in good shape here in BC, or for that matter across Canada. A 2012 report from the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement noted “Despite significant progress since 2000, the performance of Canadian primary care trails that of many other high-income countries”. This is bad for patients, bad for the health of the population and bad for society as a whole. It’s also bad for doctors, who want to practice in a better way.

Last year, two experienced family physicians here in Victoria were so concerned about the state of primary care that they were moved to write opinion pieces in the Times Colonist. In June, Dr. James Stockdill, a family doctor here for 37 years, identified a number of problems including, above all the need to “very quickly to establish nurse practitioners in a community-care role”. But he concluded “The institutions that could favourably deal with this crisis have failed to implement effective policies that would alter the course of this downward spiral in primary care”.

And then in September a clearly frustrated Dr. Robert Brown, a family physician in a clinic in Sidney, wrote that primary care in BC is not working because it “operates in a foundational and structural vacuum”. He memorably described the present system as operating “much like a tent city — disorganized and not meeting anyone’s needs”. He called for the creation of ‘medical homes’ – what I would call community health centres. These would be facilities designed for teams of family physicians and other primary care providers (he suggested nurse midwives, nurse practitioners, licensed practical nurses and social workers), serving a patient population registered with the practice, and able to “adequately provide for all the needs of their patients at all times”.

But while the province claims that primary care is a priority, it has not been getting anywhere near enough attention. The Ministry of Health’s 2015 Discussion Paper on a strategic policy framework for primary and community care in BC begins by admitting that “This is the first time that the Ministry of Health has attempted to capture the significant and sometimes loosely connected initiatives and policy that make up efforts to improve primary care and home and community care”. But there is no mention of either ‘medical homes’ or community health centres – only ‘team-based family practices’. And it does not sound as if there is any sense of urgency; the recurring theme is about being opportunistic and incremental.

So in the coming election campaign, we need our political parties to take a clear and strong position in support of primary care, and to commit to strong and urgent action on primary care reform. They must recognize primary care as the heart of the health care system, and its practitioners as the key to an effective and well-functioning system, and treat it and them accordingly.

© Trevor Hancock, 2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

The new public health entrepreneurs

Dr. Trevor Hancock

12 February 2017

702 words

There is a lot of money to be made from making us ill. The number one example is the tobacco industry, whose products, if used as intended, are bound to make us ill. But close behind them is the food industry, which for years has been selling us both too much food and the wrong sorts of food. Then there are the alcohol industry, the car industry, the firearms industry and many others; on top of that are all the businesses that reduce their costs by causing pollution or occupational injuries and illnesses – it’s a long list!

Our standard response – and it’s a valid one – is to educate people about the hazards they face and to regulate, tax or otherwise seek to control these industries. But a new approach is emerging, not to replace these approaches, but to complement them: Compete with these pathogenic businesses in the marketplace and perhaps in the process induce them to change their ways.

To some extent that has been happening for decades; health food stores, low-fat or low-sugar products, low alcohol or de-alcoholised drinks and so on. In the past few years, however, this has been taken further with the advent of public health entrepreneurs, as part of the wider interest in social entrepreneurship.

Social Enterprise Canada says that social enterprises are businesses that “create community impacts and social values”; moreover, “they limit or don’t have distribution of profits and assets to individual shareholders”. As such, their bottom line is both financial and social – “the simultaneous achievement of both economic and social values”. Here in Canada, the concept of social enterprise has recently caught the attention of the Institute of Population and Public Health (IPPH), which is part of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

In early 2015 the IPPH held a workshop on ‘New pathways to health and well-being through social enterprise’. Their understanding of social enterprise is that it includes a focus on the common good and on addressing social vulnerability, with profits used for social or community benefit. The workshop participants identified many potential health benefits, noting that social enterprises could focus on broad social determinants of health such as food and housing as well as benefits from local employment and improved community relationships.

This concept is now beginning to go mainstream within public health. Several US Schools of Public Health offer courses or programs in social entrepreneurship, although many of them seem in practice to be focused on health care as much as on improving the health of the population. And here in BC Paola Ardiles, a lecturer in SFU’s Faculty of Health Sciences, together with Shawn Smith from the Beedie School of Business, has been teaching a course called Health Change Lab in which students create projects designed to impact health and wellbeing in the community.

In a 2014 article in Public Health Reports, the authors defined public health entrepreneurs as social entrepreneurs “with a specific emphasis on achieving health impacts” and as “enterprises rooted in health promotion, disease prevention, health-care services, and the social determinants of health”. They identified a number of industries that they felt were “ripe for public health entrepreneurs”.

These included the design and development of healthy homes and healthy urban revitalization; sustainable approaches to water, waste, energy, and food production; the creation of healthy food stores, food co-ops, and cooking and food preparation classes, and alternative/active transportation options. Other industries they mention are education and social services, fitness and recreation, holistic health, information and communications, organizational support services and consulting, and product development.

Fresh Fare, one of the winners from an annual “Innovation in Action” competition at the University of Michigan School of Public Health that began in 2013, gives a sense of what is possible. They establish links “between grocery retailers and a rideshare program to enable transportation-limited individuals to shop for healthy foods in well-stocked grocery stores”. This points to another approach that has also been tried in the US, the Healthy Corner Store, of which more in the coming weeks.

Clearly, there is much scope for health promoters both to work with and indeed, work within these and other business and non-profit sectors that, collectively, are working to create a healthier future.

© Trevor Hancock, 2017

 

Our descendants need protection from us

Dr. Trevor Hancock

5 February 2017

703 words

The Iroquois Confederacy’s Great Law is said to include the principle of making decisions taking into account impacts on the seventh generation, which means thinking 140 – 175 years ahead. That is a far cry from our politicians, who can barely think past the next election, never mind our businesses and stockmarkets that are too often focused only on the next quarter’s bottom line.

As Canada celebrates its 150^th anniversary, it seems a particularly good time to think about the next 150 years. Of course we can’t predict that far ahead; imagine how much of today’s world we could have predicted in 1867. But there is no doubt that what we do today will have impacts at least 150 years into the future, and probably much further.

The largest impacts are likely to be the result of the global ecological changes we are causing because of our current destructive economic system and the underlying social and political values that drive it. Climate change, ocean acidification, resource depletion and species extinctions, all of which are underway, will have significant impacts on people living in 2167, unless we change our ways dramatically and swiftly.

The good news is that there are many examples already in place of governments that have taken steps to safeguard the future, and many ideas of stronger, better steps we could take. The bad news is that the BC and federal governments have taken none of those steps. So here are some ideas to get them started.

First, recognise the right to a healthy environment and include it in the Charter of Rights. Mooted at the First UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972, it is now included in the constitutions of 100 nations. David Boyd, who literally wrote the book on this issue in 2012, notes: “All told, 181 of the UN’s 193 member nations recognize that their citizens possess the right to live in a healthy environment”. Sadly, Canada is one of a dozen who do not.

Happily, the David Suzuki Foundation has a plan to change that. Their Blue Dot Campaign aims to get municipalities, then provinces, to recognise the right to a healthy environment. Only then would we try to change the Charter. So far, over 100,00 people and nearly 150 communities have signed on. The next BC government should commit to being the first province to recognize the right to a healthy environment in law.

Another step is to adopt the Earth Charter, which was formally launched in 2000. It is intended to “guide the transition towards a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world”. There are 16 principles organized in four broad themes: Respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, social and economic justice, and democracy, non-violence and peace.

A campaign is underway in Victoria to have governments in the Capital Region endorse the Earth Charter (see http://www.victoriavoice.ca/earth_charter), joining more than 7,000 organisations worldwide that have done so, including local governments and international organizations. Again, this is something the next BC government should also endorse.

But we need to go further in ensuring that we act responsibly to protect future generations. For this we could follow the example of Wales, which in 2015 adopted a Well-Being of Future Generations Act. The Act recognises that “Sustainable development is about improving the way that we can achieve our economic, social, environmental and cultural well-being”.

The Act places a legal duty on all public bodies, including Ministers, to carry out sustainable development, including setting and publishing wellbeing objectives, which they must pursue. They are also required to publish annual progress reports and respond publicly to recommendations from the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales. Accountability is further ensured by requiring Ministers to set national indicators and report publicly on progress.

Finally, the Act requires, Ministers to publish a ‘Future Trends Report’ within twelve months of an election containing “predictions of likely future trends in social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being of Wales”, taking into account “the UN’s sustainable development goals and the impact of climate change on Wales”.

Adopting such legislation both provincially and federally would be a suitable 150^th birthday present for Canada, and a commitment to protecting the wellbeing of the next seven generations.

© Trevor Hancock, 2017

 

Nature is speaking – but are we listening?

Dr. Trevor Hancock

30 January 2017

700 words

Over the past couple of years, Conservation International (CI) has released a series of brief but powerful videos that give nature a voice. And what voices they are; movie actors such as Harrison Ford (The Ocean), Julia Roberts (Mother Nature), Robert Redford (The Redwood) and Penelope Cruz (Water), accompanying beautiful and powerful imagery.

As the Flower says, “Life starts with me. You see, I feed people”, while the Coral points out “I am the nursery of the sea . . . I am the protein factory of the world” and the Soil says “Without me, humans could not exist. But you treat me like dirt”. The over-arching message from CI is simple: “Nature doesn’t need people. People need nature.”

Mother Nature says “When I thrive, you thrive, when I falter, you falter – or worse”, while the Ocean points out “If nature isn’t kept healthy, humans won’t survive. It’s as simple as that”. And Mother Nature again: “Your actions will determine your fate, not mine. I am nature, I will go on, I am prepared to evolve – are you?”

This takes me to a point I often make in talking to students and various audiences: We don’t need to ‘save the planet’, it is 4 billion years old and nothing we do can destroy it. We also don’t need to save life on Earth; life has been around for a billion years and survived 5 Great Extinctions, it will survive the Sixth Great Extinction that we are creating.

We don’t even need to save the human species; we are a weed species, like cockroaches and rats – tough, resilient and adaptable. We have spread around the world from our origins in Africa and found a way to live in almost every terrestrial ecozone; we have weathered ice ages and near eradication, and doubtless some of us will still be around in all but the most extreme – and unlikely – circumstances that our unsustainable practices might create.

What we do need to save – although some may debate the merits of it – is our modern civilization, which is endangered. Because when ecosystems decline or collapse, so too do the societies and communities embedded in and dependent upon them. Just ask the Easter Islanders, or the ancient Maya, or the cod fishermen of Newfoundland.

But the problem is that it is our present way of life that is undermining the natural systems upon which we all depend for our basic needs. So we will have to dramatically transform our way of life and indeed our very understanding of what it is to be civilized in the 21^st century. Unfortunately, in most parts of the world, we aren’t listening.

The US has just elected a President who doesn’t believe humans are causing climate change (he thinks it’s a Chinese hoax) and has appointed climate change sceptics to head up the EPA and the Department of Energy and an oil company CEO as Secretary of State. He is going to ramp up the fossil-fuel industry and exacerbate global warming, supported by a business elite that celebrates a big business agenda and economic growth that we know will bring in its wake more environmental destruction.

Under Trump Americans, more than ever, will believe that we can dominate nature, a belief reflected in and bolstered by the Old Testament. In Genesis 1:26, God gave man “dominion over . . . all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth”. It is a philosophy that underpins our modern technological society and economy – and it threatens our societies and communities around the world. If this arritude prevails, we – and by that I mean humans and nature – are in for a rough and nasty ride; the consequences for our health are profoundly troubling.

So if we are to preserve a civilised way of life and good health and wellbeing, we need to replace ‘dominion over the Earth’ with stewardship of the Earth or – since that is still hubristic – partnership with the Earth. Just as dominion has a spiritual dimension that underpins our values, so too must we evolve a new spirituality, one that sees the sacred in nature. We need to listen to nature’s voices when they speak.

© Trevor Hancock, 2017

 

When inequality becomes too great . . .

Dr. Trevor Hancock

22 January 2017

706 words

One of the key principles of population and public health is social justice and equity. We recognise that inequalities in health exist, but that when they are unfair, unjust and preventable, they are unacceptable. Moreover, we recognise that such health inequity is rooted in unacceptable inequalities in environmental, social and economic conditions.

These inequalities must be remedied not only because they are morally unacceptable, but because history has taught us that when such inequalities become unacceptable to a large part of the population the result is social unrest, even revolution. Indeed, the remarkable social, political and economic reforms seen in Britain in the mid-19^th century can be seen as the establishment’s largely successful attempt to fend off revolution.

So ever since I first heard it some 30 years ago I have always valued a quote attributed to the philosopher Raymond Aron: “When inequality becomes too great, the idea of community becomes impossible”. If you want to create a healthier community, you need to address this issue head-on.

This is a thought worth considering in a week when a billionaire has been inaugurated as US President and has appointed other white male billionaires and millionaires to his Cabinet, and when the World Economic Forum in Davos – an international organization for public-private cooperation – has again brought together the world’s “foremost political, business and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas”.

Here, our own Prime Minister flies off on vacation to a billionaire friend’s private Bahamian island, while our Premier, whose government has done very little to reduce poverty in BC, has happily taken an extra $50,000 annually on top of her salary, presumably just to make ends meet. While these Canadian examples are not in the same league as Trump, they all speak to the disconnect to which Raymond Aron was referring.

Timed to coincide with the Davos meeting, Oxfam released its latest figures on global – and Canadian – inequality, and they are staggering. They report that globally, “eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity”, while in Canada the two richest Canadians have as much wealth as the bottom 11 million.

But it is not just wealth where inequality is apparent. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives also released a report this month showing that the top 100 CEOs earned an average of $9.5 million in 2015. This is almost 200 times the average industrial wage in Canada – and more than 400 times the average minimum wage.

We should question the basis for these excessive incomes; the CEOs may be improving the short-term bottom-line, but if it comes at the expense of people, communities and the environment, as it often does, we should be penalising them, not rewarding them.

It’s hard to imagine the super-wealthy, or even the wealthy, having much shared understanding of the situation of their fellow citizens. This is compounded by the deliberate strategy, coming from the right, of labelling people as taxpayers rather than citizens. As taxpayers, people focus on their taxes, and are encouraged to resent paying them; this makes tax dodging and even tax-evasion socially acceptable.

 

Yet the whole point about community is a sense of shared identity and interest. But when the gap between the wealthy and the poor becomes so great there is no ‘we’, just ‘them’ and ‘us’. And pretty quickly ‘we’ don’t want to pay for ‘their’ children’s education, ‘their’ health care, ‘their’ public transit, roads or pavements.

But citizens, seeing themselves as part of a community, focus on their shared interests, common purpose and the common good. They understand, as US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it a century ago, that taxes are the price we pay for civilisation.

Revolution is an understandable response to exclusion and unacceptable inequality. Arguably, what we have just seen in the US is a revolution, although in this case a revolution from the right, j as was the case in Germany in the 1930s. But it’s not the best or healthiest way to change society. Here in Canada, we still have time for evolution and reform. If we want healthier communities and a healthier society, we need to embrace that opportuunity.

© Trevor Hancock, 2017

 

 

 

 

Local thinking and action on global issues

Dr. Trevor Hancock

16 January 2017

702 words

“Think globally, act locally” was one of the enduring slogans of the 1970’s environmental movement. But I believe that we need to think locally as well as act locally, and thus I am leading the organisation of a series of local Conversations on Victoria as a One Planet region, a concept I first suggested in my August 10^th column last year. The purpose is to explore the idea and begin the process of imagining a future for our community where we have a high quality of life and a low ecological footprint.

But this is no mere academic exercise, it has a very practical application. We are entering the Anthropocene, a new geologic epoch created by human activity. We have become a force to rival nature; in one telling line in a short video – Welcome to the Anthropocene – produced for a 2012 international conference in London, the narrator notes “we move more sediment and rock annually than all natural processes, such as erosion and rivers”.

On top of that, we are changing the climate, have made a hole in the ozone layer, manage three-quarters of the land outside the ice-sheets, and have started a sixth Great Extinction. Our rate of resource use and pollution is so high that if everyone on Earth lived the way we do, we would need three or four new planets to meet our demands.

We cannot blithely continue on like this. Nor can we say to the rest of the world – sorry, you must take less so that we can take more; it would be unjust and they will not accept that. So clearly we need to learn to live within the limits of the one small planet that is our home.

I recently came across Bioregional, a non-profit consultancy based in the UK. They have mainly been working with developers on ‘One Planet’ developments; Dockside Green, as orginally conceived, would have fitted right in. But more recently, some cities have been developing and adopting One Planet plans; of particular interest to us is Brighton and Hove, on the south coast of England, which has a population about the same as ours. And last Friday in Vancouver there was an event to begin to explore ‘How do we become a One Planet city?’ So our series of Conversations are right on target.

But getting from here to there will not be easy, because the changes we need are massive, transformative – and they have to happen quickly. However people are not going to willingly and easily make the changes that are needed if they see them as harmful. That is the dilemma – and the challenge – we face. Can we imagine and then describe a positive vision of what our region would look like if it had a high Happy Planet Index? And more to the point, what would our society be like, how would we reconceive our economy, what are the value shifts we would have to bring about?

Our Conversations, then, clearly need to be as much about philosophy, the humanities, the arts and the social sciences as technology and the natural sciences. We will need need visionaries, hope and imagination, innovation and new forms of entrepreneurship that make a profit while building natural, social and human capital.

These free Conversations start Monday, January 23^rd from 5 – 7 PM at the Robert Bateman Centre, 470 Belleville Street and continue weekly for 5 weeks. The opening Conversation will lay out some basic ideas and discuss the estimation of Victoria’s ecological footprint, an essential step in measuring the HPI. Over the following weeks we will discuss the Indigenous perspective on these issues (Jan 30) and what a One Planet energy system (Feb 6), transportation system (Feb 13) and food system (Feb 22^nd) would look like.

This will culminate in a UVic IdeaFest event on Saturday March 11^th at New Horizons in James Bay. But already ideas are being hatched for more Conversations: What is the role of the arts in contributing to this transformation? What do the various faith communities have to say about a One Planet way of life? What sort of economy fits a one Planet region- and many more issues. The Conversation is just beginning.

© Trevor Hancock, 2017

 

Making money by creating health

Dr. Trevor Hancock

9 January 2017

700 words

Twenty years ago I attended the World Health Organization’s 4^th global conference on health promotion. This was at a time when neo-conservative influences were pushing WHO to be more receptive to private sector funding, so the pharmaceutical industry was there as a sponsor. But this got me thinking: What could their interest be in health promotion, given that if we did our job right – if everyone lived in good health to a ripe old age and then just dropped dead – they would be out of business?

Their interest, I supposed, was that they would be able to sell us medications that would either prevent disease or control it, enabling us to live longer, healthier lives. But there is not necessarily a lot of money to be made in preventing a disease, whereas chronic diseases are a god-send to the pharmaceutical industry; we can be on their medications for decades, a steady and reliable source of income.

So fundamentally, I concluded, we did not share the same bottom line. Their bottom line interest was a long life in chronic ill health, while ours was a long life free of illness. Yet they were purporting to be our partners, just as soft drink companies want to be our partners on physical activity and sporting events such as the Olympics, even though their drinks are very unhealthy.

And that got me thinking: Who should public health professionals and organisations partner with? Who does make money out of good health? So I wrote an article called ‘Caveat partner’ – beware of your partner – in which I tried to figure that out. Sadly, I concluded there were many ways to make money out of bad health, but not so many ways to profit from good health.

First there are the corporations that profit by selling us stuff that sickens or injures and ultimately kills us, from tobacco to junk food, alcohol to asbestos. Add to that the fact that corporations regularly complain about and try to undermine or avoid what they see as unnecessary regulations, many of which are there to protect us or the environment; think of the resistance on the part of car makers over the years to new safety regulations, or of a wide variety of industries to pollution controls or occupational health and safety measures.

A third category of unhealthy corporate actors are those who pay their workers as little as possible, making it hard for them to live a decent life, or move their production to countries that have low wages and lax environmental and occupational health laws and enforcement, so they can maximise profit.

But I did identify three categories of business that share our bottom line, who make more money when the population is healthier. First are industries whose profits depend upon a healthy population and environment, including the life and health insurance industries; if we pay them premiums and don’t use their products, that would presumably be profitable. Also, the leisure, recreation and tourism industries, since we generally need to be healthy to use their services.

Second are what I call the real producers of health; the people who build our homes, grow our food, keep our water safe and our environments clean, educate our kids, keep our communities safe and produce all the other goods and services that are the roots of good health. Of course, they don’t necessarily do these things in a healthy way (there are lots of unhealthy homes and unhealthy foods, for example), but they could.

Finally, at least in theory, the entire private sector – and society as a whole – profits from good health. If people are healthy they will likely be more productive and more creative, they will not miss work or retire early due to ill health or stress, they will remain independent, pay taxes and contribute in many other ways to society.

So we need taxes, incentives and regulations that both punish the private sector financially, ensuring they lose money when they harm health, and reward them financially for actions that improve health. We need to make health creation profitable, and we need a new breed of health-enhancing entrepreneurs to do this, a topic I will explore in future columns.

© Trevor Hancock, 2017