Dr. Trevor Hancock – Healthy people, healthy communities, a healthy planet

Co-operation has been key to the success of the human species

Dr. Trevor Hancock

20 August 2024

701 words

In addition to a commitment to intergenerational equity, which I discussed last week, the recent UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report ‘Navigating New Horizons’ also calls for “a new social contract reinforcing shared values that unite us rather than divide us” and “a new global emphasis on wellbeing metrics rather than pure economic growth.” What would that look like?

The report notes that a social contract is the web of trust and reciprocity that binds different parts of society together. It is hardly a new concept – the report notes it is “found in cultures and religious traditions across the world” – and is rooted in the fact that humans are social animals. One of the things that has made us such a successful species is our social cooperation.

In a 2016 commentary on the Leakey Foundation website, Stuart West, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Oxford, discussed the evolutionary benefits of cooperation. In part, it is because of the benefits of “reciprocity, where people are more likely to help individuals that have helped them.” Another factor is that cooperation helps the group survive because they can hunt and forage more efficiently and defend themselves from attack – whether by predators or other humans.

Indeed, West notes, competition and conflict between groups can also lead to cooperation within groups. We are all familiar with this, it is used – sometimes maliciously – in a variety of social contexts, including sports, business, politics and war. “However,”, notes the UNEP report, “this social contract is being ignored in many places of the world, where short-term profit and individual success have become dominant, to the detriment of most of the world.”

One key part of a new social contract, the report suggests, is to engage a more diverse group of stakeholders and enable “the active participation of individuals and groups in the decision-making processes that affect their lives.”  This needs to begin at the local level, from where it can filter up. It requires greater transparency and accountability from leaders and the use of tools such as digital platforms, citizens’ assemblies or participatory budgeting.

A second key element, closely related to the first, is to give young people a stronger voice. After all, it is their future we are talking about. Youth assemblies or youth councils – the City of Victoria has one – are a place to begin. But we need to expand this to engage youth in helping to design the communities and the society that they will be living in for decades to come. These are important ways to demonstrate inter-generational equity.

Both these elements can also contribute to another priority identified in the report, namely “promoting agile, adaptive governance”, particularly at the local level.  I will return to this  in a couple of weeks, when I look at what all this means for the Greater Victoria Region.

A third important approach is “the idea that the social contract should include a focus on humanity’s relationship with the environment.” The idea that a social contract should expand to include our connection with nature is not new to Indigenous communities, where a relationship with the Earth and with other species – ‘all our relations’ – is a central aspect of their beliefs and way of life. Indeed, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has stated: “Reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians, from an Aboriginal perspective, also requires reconciliation with the natural world.”

In addition to a new social contract, the UNEP report proposes we need a new economic framework with an emphasis on wellbeing metrics rather than just on GDP. Governments at all levels will need to put planetary health and human wellbeing at the heart of their economic policies and budgets.

This new economic system involves expanding our concept of capital to include natural, social and human capital – also known as ‘inclusive wealth’. It also involves “a fundamental reimagining of the role of businesses and markets.” Instead of being narrowly focused on short term profits, they need to become “engines for prosperity, social cohesion and healthy environments.”

Interestingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, “the demand for alternative economic and wellbeing measures was strongest among young people”, the report notes; yet another reason to adopt an inter-generational equity approach.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Think how the presence of such an act might affect the election platforms of the parties in the Oct. 19 B.C. provincial election.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

13 August 2024

699 words

The UN Environment Programme’s report ‘Navigating New Horizons’ is sub-titled “A global foresight report on planetary health and human wellbeing.” In her Foreword, UNEP Executive Director Inger Anderson makes an important distinction: “the point of this report is not to predict the future [but] to foresee the future.”

The difference is important. “Prediction is passive”, she notes, “it means locking in a vision of the future. Foresight is about imagining the future and then looking at how to change it.” So having identified eight critical shifts that threaten to disrupt planetary health and human wellbeing, the report turns to suggesting solutions.

“Humanity”, the report states, “has a stark and urgent choice to make: continue to destabilise planetary health and risk losing humanity’s life support system, or build a future that embraces equity, addresses the underlying drivers of environmental degradation and achieves sustainable development. What humanity decides now will shape the world that future generations will inherit.”

That latter point reflects one of the key changes the report calls for; we must adopt the principle of “intergenerational equity, which is concerned with generations not yet born.” This principle is embedded in the very definition of sustainable development, created in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of futuregenerations to meet their own needs.”

So we need to consider the needs of future generations in every policy and in every corporate decision we make. This is not a new idea; The report points to the concept of ‘seven generations’  thinking, “attributed to Native American Haudenosaunee (Iroquois)” and other Indigenous philosophies.

One practical way to do this has been demonstrated by the Welsh National Assembly. In 2015 they passed the Well-being of Future Generations Act. Among other things, the Act establishes the position of Future Generations Commissioner and establishes “a legally-binding common purpose – the seven well-being goals – for national government, local government, local health boards and other specified public bodies.”

Under the Act, these public bodies “must set and publish well-being objectives . . . then take action to make sure they meet the objectives they set.” Moreover, each government Minister must set national indicators, establish and regularly update ‘milestones’ (objectives) and publish an annual progress report.

The role of the Commissioner is to “to act as a guardian for the interests of future generations in Wales”, The Commissioner can provide advice to the public bodies listed in the Act on how to achieve the well-being goals, carry out research, conduct reviews of the work of the public bodies and make recommendations for action.

In addition, the Commissioner “must publish, a year before a Senedd [National Assembly] election, a report containing the Commissioner’s assessment of the improvements public bodies should make to achieve the well-being goals.”

With a provincial election coming up October 19^th, think how useful it would be to have such an Act and a Commissioner’s report. How would the B.C. government stack up? What would the report say about their commitment to expanding LNG exports and the associated greenhouse gas emissions? Their failure to fully implement the report of the Old Growth Strategic Review and fully protect old growth forests? Their failure to bring in a Species at Risk Act, as they promised to do years ago?

Think how the presence of such an Act might affect the election platforms of the parties. How could the Liberals (sorry, BC United) and the Conservatives put forward platforms essentially committed to ‘business as usual’, when we know this leads to damage to both planetary health and the wellbeing of future generations.

But we don’t have such an Act. It’s time we did. So if you share my concern with the direction we are headed, for the wellbeing of today’s young people in the decades ahead and for generations yet to come, I suggest you insist that all candidates and parties commit to bringing in a Wellbeing of Future Generations Act. Your children, grandchildren and their descendants will thank you for it. 

Next week, I will look at two other key solutions the report recommends; a new social contract and a new global emphasis on wellbeing metrics.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• Published as  “Misinformation, declining trust and polarization undermines democracy”

Misinformation and disinformation, increasingly powered by AI, are identified as the most severe global risk over the next two years by the World Economic Forum

Dr. Trevor Hancock

6 August 2024

697 words

Last week I summarised five of the eight critical shifts identified in a recent UN Environment. Programme (UNEP) report, ‘Navigating New Horizons’, which is “a global foresight report on planetary health and human wellbeing.” I also touched on a sixth critical shift; persistent and widening inequalities.

This week I will dig deeper into this sixth challenge, as well as two remaining challenges that are really about governance: Misinformation, declining trust and polarization (to which growing inequalities doubtless contribute) and polycentricity and the diffusion of governance.

The UNEP report is blunt: “Immense inequalities of income and wealth intensify within and between countries worldwide.” For example, “while the top 10 per cent account for more than three quarters of total global wealth, the bottom 50 per cent of the world population own just 2 per cent or almost nothing.” Moreover, “between 1995 and 2021, the top 1 per cent captured 38 per cent of the global increase in total wealth, while the bottom 50 per cent again accounted for just 2 per cent.”

In particular, the report notes, “inequalities of wealth and income lead to ecological inequities.” with marginalised populations experiencing “unequal access to clear air and water, fertile soil, stable climate and vibrant biodiversity” – and that in turn exacerbates forced migration as places become uninhabitable due to ecological changes.

This level of inequality can only exacerbate polarisation and distrust, the seventh critical shift we face. It does so in two ways: First, “this growing concentration of wealth . . .  confers huge economic and political power on a tiny elite.” But even worse, it contributes to “social stratification and undermining public institutions and social solidarity”, thus undermining confidence in governments.

In addition, and further contributing to the loss of trust and faith in governments, these inequalities are a failure of governance: “income inequality is rising due to unequal access to education, limited employment opportunities and inadequate social services, as well as regressive tax policies”, the report notes. 

Turning then to the seventh critical shift – misinformation, declining trust and polarization – the report notes: “Misinformation and disinformation, increasingly powered by AI, is identified as the most severe global risk over the next two years in the latest Global Risk Report of the World Economic Forum (2024), undermining social cohesion, trust in institutions and fuelling political divides.”

This situation is due in part to the decline of mainstream media, “further undermining the ability to provide accurate news”, as well as the deliberate campaigns to undermine science, especially climate science, coming from some political and corporate sectors. The resulting weakening of trust in science undermines democratic institutions, the report notes, making it “much harder to design and deliver effective policies to tackle societal challenges, including the climate crisis.”  

The final critical shift is a diffusion of governance, partly because of “a recognition that national governments have been unable to address global sustainability challenges—either operating individually or multilaterally.” But also governments have “allowed some relocation of power and responsibilities” in the face of a plethora of non-state actors that have been engaged as “agents of change.”

Such diffusion of power, creating a more polycentric governance system, is not necessarily a bad thing if it is genuinely a sharing of power and not just an abdication of responsibility. But it does require an assurance of “very high levels of transparency, accountability and integrity”, which is not often apparent.

But surprisingly perhaps, in the face of these eight critical shifts, the message of the UNEP report is not one of despair. On the contrary, there is hope: “The good news”, states the UNEP, “is that just as the impact of multiple crises is compounded when they are linked, so are the solutions.”  Thus we can “shift the momentum from the brink of polycrisis to polystability.”

The report suggests there are two key changes we need to make: “a focus on intergenerational equity and a new social contract reinforcing shared values that unite us rather than divides us.” A third important change that will help bring about the needed transformation, UNEP notes, is “Placing a new global emphasis on wellbeing metrics rather than pure economic growth.” I will examine these key changes next week.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• Published as “Water scarcity, forced displacement among challenges we face”

Humans face multiple challenges beyond climate change, from resource scarcity to rising armed conflict and mass forced displacement.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

30 July 2024

703 words

The UN Environment Programme’s new report, Navigating New Horizons, produced in partnership with the International Science Council, is not easy reading. It’s not just that it is a dense 100-page document, but because it paints a grim picture of the challenges we face. However, towards the end, the report notes a shift that is both hopeful and relevant to local action, as I will discuss in a couple of weeks’ time.

But first, what of the future challenges? Unsurprisingly, given it is a report from the UN’s environment agency, there is a strong focus on the environmental challenges we face. But there are also important social and governance challenges, and all these challenges are not only growing and speeding up, but converging and “appear to be synchronizing”, becoming a polycrisis.

The first challenge is the shifting relationship between humans and the Earth, such that “continuing environmental degradation and systemic shifts are pushing natural ecosystems and humans to limits.” The UN speaks of a ‘triple planetary crisis’ of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. In addition to the well-known challenges of climate change, it has been estimated that by 2050 less than 10 percent of the Earth’s land area will remain free from significant human impact, while “humans will have eliminated 38–46 per cent of all biodiversity”.

Pollution is a particular concern, with “350,000 chemicals and substances listed for production and use”. Moreover, of the thousands of chemicals “registered as being toxic, or persistent, by a few countries . . . the vast majority have not been measured in the environment or in humans.” As a result “the hidden health and ecological costs [are] likely underestimated”, and are particularly serious for infants and children.

A second and related challenge is scarcity of and competition for critical resource. While oil, gas and, more recently, rare earth minerals have gotten a lot of attention, more worrying is scarcity of such fundamental determinants of wellbeing, indeed survival, as food, water and land. “Climate change exacerbates water scarcity”, which not only damages food production but will “increase the likelihood of conflicts.”

Indeed, a new era of conflict is a third challenge: “Armed conflict and violence are on the rise.” Not only are there “fifty-nine state-based conflicts across 34 countries . . . higher than any time since 1946”, but “increasingly, conflicts are propagated and sustained by the engagement of non-state actors, political militias, domestic criminal groups and terrorist organizations.” And as we see only too well, drones, satellite imagery, AI and other technological changes are changing the nature of conflict.

Moreover, “armed conflicts consistently result in environmental degradation and destruction . . . triggering food and water insecurity, loss of livelihoods and biodiversity depletion.” These impacts are exacerbated by “the weaponization of access to water, food, energy and critical infrastructure.”

These changes contribute to a fourth challenge: Mass forced displacement. “Whether due to conflict, climate change or other external pressures”, the result is that home becomes uninhabitable, so people have “little choice other than to move.” Today 1 in 69 people around 115 million – are forcibly displaced, but the International Organization for Migration reports that that “environmental impacts and climate change alone . . . will force more than 216 million people across six continents to be on the move within their countries by 2050.” Women and children are disproportionately harmed in these situations.

Another key challenge is the digital transformation, including social media, AI and other technologies, the impact of which it is hard to estimate. On the one hand, “these innovations hold tremendous promise to accelerate improvements across various systems, from energy to mobility to food and beyond.” But we have also all seen the downsides of some of this technology, and the ability to manage the technology in the face of rapid change driven by private sector initiatives “looks increasingly difficult”.

A sixth challenge is persistent and widening inequalities, both within and between countries, which many of the other critical shifts only make worse. I will explore this challenge in more detail next week along with the two remaining critical shifts, which relate mainly to governance challenges, before starting to look at the potential for positive responses and the implications for local action. 

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• Published as “Decline and collapse is the future for ‘business as usual’

If we want that to change, we need a new global emphasis on wellbeing metrics rather than pure economic growth

Dr. Trevor Hancock

23 July 2024

703 words

The UN Environment Programme just published an important report called Navigating New Horizons, which is “a global foresight report on planetary health and human wellbeing” – precisely my main area of work. Moreover, it links up with another of my main areas of interest – my work as a health futurist, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.

Now good futures thinking isn’t about predicting the future, particularly when you are dealing with very changeable social and political systems, especially when you understand that such systems are subject to sudden, non-linear change; they can reach tipping points and change very rapidly and in sometimes unpredictable ways.

My work as a health futurist mainly involved helping people think about a range of plausible alternative futures. From there, people can think about which of the plausible alternatives they would prefer, which they would want to avoid, and what they might need to do to reach their preferable future.

One of the plausible futures we face – usually thought of as the probable future – is ‘business as usual’; basically, just more of the same, but bigger and better. So for years, decades in fact, ‘business as usual’ has meant a continuation of the system of economic growth and material consumption that took off after the Second World War, a process that the Stockholm Resilience Centre dubbed ‘the Great Acceleration’.

But more than 50 years ago we were warned by the Club of Rome, in their landmark report ‘The Limits to Growth’ that ‘business as usual’ would lead to decline and collapse in the mid-21st century – still a generation away. Now we are almost there.

So right now, what appears to be an increasingly plausible future is some sort of ecological, social and economic decline, or even collapse in some places. This is because, to return to my recent columns on values, “Ecosystems support societies that create economies”, as the Worldwide Fund for Nature has noted.

When we try to operate in contradiction to that dictum, we drive ecosystems into decline, or even into collapse, and with them the societies and communities that depend upon them. Increasingly, then ‘decline and collapse’ is the ‘business as usual’ future, the probable future, which is in itself an interesting shift in perception.  

One of the key messages of the UNEP report is that acceleration is itself accelerating: “The speed of change is staggering”, the report states, adding that “it has become clear that the world is facing a different context than it faced even ten years ago.” This is due to “the rapid rate of change combined with technological developments, more frequent and devastating disasters and an increasingly turbulent geopolitical landscape.”

Indeed, UNEP notes, “The world is already on the verge of what may be termed ‘polycrisis’—where global crises are not just amplifying and accelerating but also appear to be synchronizing..” The report identifies eight critical global shifts or phenomena that we need to understand and learn to manage; I will explore them next week.

Clearly, decline and collapse is not a preferable future, at least not from humanity’s perspective, although Mother Nature may welcome it as a way of ridding herself of a pest! But nor is ‘business as usual’ preferable, since as already noted, it leads to decline and collapse.

But the message of the UNEP report is not one of despair. On the contrary, there is hope: “The good news”, states the UNEP, “is that just as the impact of multiple crises is compounded when they are linked, so are the solutions.”  Thus we can “shift the momentum from the brink of polycrisis to polystability.”

The report suggests there are two key changes we need to make: “a focus on intergenerational equity and a new social contract reinforcing shared values that unite us rather than divides us.” A third important change that will help bring about the needed transformation, UNEP notes, is “Placing a new global emphasis on wellbeing metrics rather than pure economic growth.”

If you understand intergenerational equity as referring in particular to the state of the planet we pass on to future generations, then it is noteworthy that once again we are talking about transformations in values relating to the Earth, each other and the economy.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• Published as “Core-value change has to come from the grassroots”

Rights-based arguments such as those used to fight the tobacco industry could be a powerful tool — including the rights of future generations to a healthy environment

Dr. Trevor Hancock

16 July 2024

701 words

It is said that every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it gets. If so, then our current system seems perfectly designed to push us beyond planetary boundaries in a variety of Earth systems, while creating widespread and worsening inequality. This presents a massive threat to the wellbeing of current and future generations.

For the past few weeks I have been exploring the underlying core values that drive many of our systems, institutions and choices. When I look at the state of the world today, and in particular our relationship with nature and with each other,  it is clear we are being driven by a set of core values that are not fit for purpose in the 21^st century. And I have suggested a set of core values that are compatible with ensuring a healthy, just and sustainable future for all, while protecting and restoring the planet’s vital systems.

All well and good, but how do we bring about these massive and rapid value shifts? How do we, as the late Will Steffen put it, reach social tipping points before we reach ecological ones? One thing for sure, there isn’t an app for that! But I do have some thoughts.

I spent a chunk of my time in the early 1980s in the fight against the tobacco industry. The social tipping point for smoking came when smoking came to be seen as an abuse of the rights of non-smokers. So using rights-based arguments could be powerful. There have been calls for the recognition of the right to a healthy environment. Indeed, B.C.’s own David Boyd, as UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, championed this through the UN, with the General Assembly recognising in 2022 that a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a human right.

Then there are the rights of future generations to a healthy environment. Several court cases around the world have successfully argued that case with respect to government failures to slow or stop greenhouse gas emissions, while the Welsh National Assembly passed a Wellbeing of Future Generations Act and created a Commissioner to oversee it.

Beyond that, we need to consider the right of nature and of other species to exist. A number of countries around the world have recognised land and water systems as persons (e.g. the Whanganui River and Te Urewera in Aotearoa New Zealand); after all, if corporations can be considered persons, why not the much more obviously alive ecosystems?

Related to all this is the need to expand the powerful set of values concerning social justice to include inter-generational, inter-communal and inter-species justice. The 1987 Brundtland report on sustainable development stated we should “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

But when we deplete a resource, poison an ecosystem or create long-term change in vital Earth systems, we are acting in an unjust manner towards other people and places, future generations and other species.  

But core value change cannot be imposed from above, it has to come from the grassroots. Earth For All, about which I wrote a series of columns between October 2022 and September 2023, was clear on what is needed: “fresh conversations in every home, every school, every university, every city, every parliament. What is the future we want? How can our operating system get us there?” And, I would add, what we value and what our values should be.

Because the root of this series of columns on values was my homily at the First Unitarian Church, I want to end with specific reference to the role of faith communities. After all, faith communities are all about values, about our relationship with ‘creation’, however that is understood, and about community, the very things I have been writing about.

They can play an important role in initiating and leading explorations and discussions about the  new ethical frameworks for society that reflect the constellation of values – human solidarity, quality of life, and ecological sensibility, as The Great Transition Initiative puts it – that we need.

Such work is essential if we are to achieve the great turnaround in societal values we need, locally and globally.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

If we want government and corporate leaders to change their values, we need to change ours

Dr. Trevor Hancock

9 July 2024

700 words

As I near the end of my series of columns on values fit for the 21^st century, I return to my May 26^th column, in which I took our government and corporate leaders to task for reflecting and embracing a set of neoliberal values that are incompatible with planetary health and societal wellbeing in the 21^st century.

Their self-interested blind adherence to ‘business as usual’, I wrote, to an economic system and underlying core values that plainly work against our long-term interests, is because they get so much benefit – wealth, power, status – from the way things are. But while I think they need to change their values, I do not believe that this can happen if society itself does not change its values.

After all, while we may call them ‘leaders’, in many ways they are simply followers. An old adage in politics, after all, is not to get too far out ahead of the parade, and to always look back and make sure it is still following you.

At the same time, though, while keen to go along with what the society itself values, they are trying to shape societal values to match their own and their party’s ideologies, trying to persuade people it is in their best interest.

Meanwhile, corporate leaders are interested in promoting their products and selling more of everything so they can grow their profits and their power. So they too are trying to shape societal values to match their own and their corporation’s ideologies, trying to persuade people it is in their best interest.

As a result, the whole, society – aided and abetted by those ‘leaders’ – goes along with the mis-aligned set of values that are at the root of our ecological, social and economic crises: A lack of connection to and reverence for the Earth, the valuing of individualism at the expense of society, the derogation of government and of regulation and taxation, the valuing of a narrow concept of wealth and the continual growth of an economic system that harms the Earth and many humans.

So the fourth set of values that have to be transformed relates to an explicit set of priorities embodied in the World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) piece of ‘scripture’ that was the basis of my April homily at the First Unitarian Church: “Ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work the other way around.”

The sad truth is, however, that we try to make it work the other way around. By prioritising the economy, we allow it to distort society and harm the Earth’s natural systems that are the ultimate determinant of our health. In the set of dominant values today, it is clear that the economy usually comes first.

We see the Finance Minister and the budget dominating much of government and the news. We hear economics correspondents talking a lot about the GDP and whether it is growing or shrinking. We are fed business and economic data on a daily, even an hourly basis.

It is only recently – thanks to the intitative of Professor Rick Kool at Royal Roads University – and only on CBC’s ‘On the Island’ radio show, as far as I know – that the daily CO2 levels are also reported.

But nobody is giving us indicators of  the state of our local and global ecosystems, which  are largely excluded from the reckoning of our economic systems. And we certainly are not given the happiness or quality of life index or the wellbeing numbers on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis.

So what is it we actually value? Should money really take precedence over wellbeing for all and planetary health? Is that the sort of society we want for our children and grandchildren, and for future generations all over the world? I hope not, for their sake.

We need a conversation, in this region, across Canada and indeed around the world, about the WWF’s seemingly simple but profound statement, about the values that are incompatible with this simple worldview, and an exploration of the values that are compatible with “a planetary civilization rooted in solidarity, sustainability, and human well-being”, as the Global Scenario Group put it.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

We need to ensure the economy is subservient to, not dominant over, societal wellbeing and planetary health.

• Published as “The economy should serve well-being, planet health, not dominate them”
• The economy is not a natural phenomenon, it is a human construct, so if it doesn’t work for us we should change it

Dr. Trevor Hancock

2 July 2024

702 words

In exploring the need for a transformation of our values so they are fit for purpose in the 21^st century I have been using a piece of ‘scripture’ from the World Wide Fund for Nature’s 2014 Living Planet Report.

The third realm from my piece of ‘scripture’ is the economy, and the text makes an important but often over-looked point: Societies create economies. The economy is not a natural phenomenon, it is a human construct, so if it doesn’t work for us we should change it.

Well, this economy does not work for us. The Institute for Health Improvement, rooting its idea in systems engineering, states: “Every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it gets”. Our current economic system seems perfectly designed to damage and destroy the Earth’s natural systems while undermining society and heightening inequality.

At the heart of this problem are a set of values that prize money, wealth, greed, profit and ‘stuff’ above planetary health and societal and human wellbeing; that is opposed to paying taxes on principle; that covets and accumulates power by heightening inequality, and that adheres to the absurd notion of indefinite growth. 

Disastrously, the only wealth that is really valued is economic wealth, be it money or ‘stuff’. As I noted in an earlier column, natural capital is not included in most economic models, nor for that matter are human or social capital. The latter, by the way, is distinguished from human capital because human capital is all about the ‘wealth’ of an individual – their level of education, creativity, health, sense of compassion etc – while social capital is all about the extent and strength of our relationships with each other – the realm of community and society.

But in the 21^st century we have to value all these forms of wealth, which means we need at the very least to reform capitalism so it integrates all these forms of capital. Real capitalists increase all forms of capital at the same time, and they most certainly do not deplete natural, social or human capital just so they can increase economic capital – that is false capitalism.

Turning to taxes, nobody said it better than US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes a century or so ago: “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society”. So if you have a nagging feeling that society is less civilised than it used to be – and a society with the levels of hunger and homelessness we see today can hardly be called civilised – then there is your answer.

When it comes to the issue of continuous economic growth, Kenneth Boulding, a former President of both the American Economic Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told the U.S. Congress as far back as 1973: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

So the third set of value transformations we need has to do with the economy, which must a) be consistent with the reality of the finite and limited Earth on which we live, and b) be in service to society, thus creating the conditions that enable wellbeing for all, both now and for future generations.

Among other things, that means abandoning the absurd and impossible dream – actually, the nightmare – of perpetual and exponential growth, in favour of a steady state economy. That will mean valuing sufficiency rather than affluence and excess: As the late Herman Daly wrote, “Enough should be the central concept in economics,” where enough means “sufficient for a good life”.

We also need to find new and better ways to value progress. The GDP was never intended as a measure of social welfare, and it is profoundly misleading, since it includes many unhealthy and indeed harmful costs, such as the costs of cleaning up after disasters or all the money spent on tobacco as well as the costs of treating tobacco-related diseases.

Alternatives include the Genuine Progress Indicator, Gross National Happiness, as pioneered by Bhutan, and here in Canada, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing. But above all else, the economy must be put in its place – subservient to, not dominant over, societal wellbeing and planetary health.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the                                            University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

We need a re-awakening of our sense of kinship with and shared responsibility for our fellow humans, of a sense of community

Dr. Trevor Hancock

25 June 2024

699 words

I am exploring my ‘scriptural text’ from the Word Wide Fund for Nature’s 2014 Living Planet Report that was the basis of my homily for the First Unitarian Church back in April. The report stated: “Ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work the other way around.”

Many of our problems, I believe, stem from a mis-aligned set of values that are unfit for the 21^st century challenges we face. Those values relate to the three realms included in my chosen text: The Earth (ecosystems), society and the economy, and how we prioritise among them. Two weeks ago I discussed our need to develop a reverence for the Earth and all it contains, an awareness of a connection to nature that is, at its heart, spiritual.

The second realm from my bit of scripture is society, and thus about our relationship with each other. In recent decades, we have seen society and community de-valued and undermined by a radical neo-liberal philosophy that prioritises the individual over society and community; promotes the pursuit of self-interest and greed over the common interest, which it devalues; worships profit and wealth above all else; and sees government as a problem that gets in the way of private wealth accumulation.

I was born in 1948, the same year that the National Health Service was established in the UK. The years that followed, the years in which I grew up and went to medical school, were a time of public investment in housing, education and social welfare. But with the advent of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the triumph of neo-liberal values, much of that has been torn down.

In the pursuit of lower taxes, smaller government and increased private wealth, we have abandoned social housing and cut back on education funding (ask yourself why schools are scrambling to fund arts and music, why university departments of humanities are struggling to survive?). We have reduced unionisation, kept wages and social welfare low and pared back on benefits. Among other things we have seen the re-appearance of food banks and homeless encampments. Is the average person better off for these changes?

On top of all that, we have become a much more atomised, alienated and lonely society; in fact, loneliness is now recognised as a significant and growing public health problem! This is not only because of the emphasis on individual responsibility (which absolves the government and the corporations of responsibility), but also because of the insidious impact of what I have started to call the ‘anti-social media’ that have come to dominate so much of our lives.

Yet humans are perhaps above all else a social species. So the second set of transformed values I propose is the need for what the Great Transition Initiative calls ‘solidarity’, a re-awakening of our sense of kinship with and shared responsibility for our fellow humans, of a sense of community.

We need to value society and community, not necessarily above the individual but equally, seeking a better balance between individual and shared rights and responsibilities. Related to this, we need to value the common good – including in particular the common good of future generations – over the pursuit of short-term self-interest at the expense of others.

A recent letter to this newspaper from David Conway expressed the same point at the national and international level. He was objecting to what is in essence a very whiny and selfish view; that Canada is so small that what we do does not matter – so let’s keep on expanding fossil fuels, driving big cars and so on. “I still believe that taking individual responsibility for doing my bit to shoulder the load is the right thing to do”, he wrote. And he challenged us: “do we still believe the same goes for our national responsibility to make the world a safer and more stable place?”

Moreover, as part of valuing our relationships with each other, we need to recognise the role of government as an agent for the common good, and particularly see its role to protect and promote interests of the disadvantaged and the vulnerable, both in Canada and around the world, now and into the future.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the                                            University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• Published as “Physician group fighting for health and planet marks 30 years”

Those of us who founded the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment in 1994 were ‘a bunch of environmentalists who just happened to be physicians’.

The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment: Working to better human health by protecting the planet.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

18 June 2024

700 words

In my time I have co-founded a number of organisations, but I am particularly proud to have helped start CAPE – The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment – thirty years ago. Three of us, independently, had started to develop the idea of some sort of doctors’ organization focused on the health of the planet in the early 1990s.

Warren Bell was – and still is – a family physician in Salmon Arm B.C., while Tee Guidotti was a Professor of occupational and environmental health at the University of Alberta (although he subsequently moved to Washington DC) and I was an independent public health physician in Toronto. We were, said Warren, a bunch of environmentalists who just happened to be physicians.

I had been calling for the creation of an organization of ‘Physicians for the Environment’ in my work in the early 1990s, as had Warren, and I had served with Tee on a Task Force on Human and Ecosystem Health for the Canadian Public Health Association in 1992. So we all got together in mid-1994 and by the end of 1994 had incorporated CAPE and become the Canadian affiliate of the International Society of Doctors for the Environment.

We started small, and all our work was voluntary, but we spoke out and had an important impact. In a 1996 brief to the National Forum on Health on the importance of ecosystem health as a determinant of human health we noted: “As physicians, we are concerned both professionally and personally about how the health of our patients may be affected by environmental degradation.”

But we also spelled out the wider aims of CAPE: “Our objectives as an organization are to better understand the health implications of environmental problems and global change, to educate physicians and the public on these health implications . . . and to encourage effective change in the way Canadians deal with environmental problems and global change so as to protect the health of the population.”

Today, having become a well-established organisation with 18 staff and 10 regional committees, CAPE continues to pursue its vision that “the health of people and the planet are prioritized in society and policy in Canada.” It does so by “mobilizing the credible voice of health professionals, health science, and evidence”; over the past 30 years, CAPE has “engaged over 25,000 supporters . . . with close to 16,000 having taken action on a campaign!” 

CAPE is an effective and powerful voice on a range of environmental issues, which in its latest strategic plan includes the three elements of the UN’s ‘triple planetary crisis’ (climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution), as well as the broader policy framing of social justice and equity and the need to create a wellbeing economy and society.

Some of CAPE’s highlights in the 2020s include becoming a founding partner in PaRx, Canada’s first national nature prescription program; advocating for successful passage of federal climate accountability legislation and convincing the province of Québec to reject a new LNG project.

CAPE also advocated with others to strengthen the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. The revised Act now includes the recognition, for the first time, of the right to a healthy environment. The Act also updates the framework for toxic substances, another CAPE priority campaign, requiring the federal government to consider the cumulative impacts of toxics, and their effects on vulnerable populations.

In 2022 CAPE launched a campaign to ban fossil fuel ads, a call that was joined earlier this month by UN Secretary General António Guterres, who called on countries to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies.

Additionally, CAPE filed a complaint with the Competition Bureau to investigate green-washing by the fossil fuel industry and joined a complaint to Ads Canada about misleading pro-LNG adverts. The latter led to a recent ruling that the ads “paid for by Canada Action, are inaccurate, misleading, and distort the true meaning of statements by scientists.”

Many Canadians, and others around the world, have benefited from CAPE’s work over the past 30 years to better human health by protecting the planet. It is hard to think of a more important task today, so it is vital that CAPE continue this important work in the years ahead.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the                                            University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy