Health and the Environment
Shall we change the subject?
Nick Fox
University of Sheffield
Introduction
• How health and environment interact.
• Anthropocentrism vs. anti-humanism.
• An anti-humanist approach to health and
the environment.
• Changing the subject.
Approaches to ‘Health and the
Environment’
1. Human health is threatened by
environmental factors e.g. climate change.
2. Improving the environment can enhance
human health.
3. Improvements in health threaten the
environment (e.g. population growth,
economic development).
4. Initiatives can reduce the environmental
impact of health care.
Contradictory forces?
• Are human health and environmental
health potentially antagonistic?
• How can human health and environmental
health be complementary?
• Should human or environmental health
have priority?
Anthropocentrism
• Gives priority to human bodies, human
subjects and human experience.
• Reflected in:
•
•
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•
Humanism
Romanticism
Individualism
Popular politics
Anthropocentrism and health
• Most health care and medical theory is
inevitably anthropocentric.
• Health has become a ‘good’ that is almost
unquestionable.
• Public health has the capacity to avoid
anthropocentrism, by focusing on networks
and interactions rather than bodies.
Anthropocentrism, health and
the environment
• With human health privileged, then the
environment becomes the context within
which health is threatened or enhanced.
• Examples:
• Improving the built environment.
• Addressing environment risks e.g. pollution, UV
radiation.
• Health and safety, health protection, HPA.
An alternative approach
• Anti-humanism: a philosophical or ontological
position that intentionally overturns the priority or
privilege accorded to humans.
• Focuses on the non-human, the inanimate, and
social formations.
• Humans are no longer sole agents (‘inorganic
life’).
• ‘Health’ is understood relationally, as a capacity of
a body to engage with its environment.
An anti-humanist method
• Focus not on bodies or subjects, but on
assemblages (networks) of relations
between bodies, things, ideas and social
institutions.
• Look at how these relations affect or are
affected, rather than at ‘agency’ and social
actors.
• This is how we ‘change the (human) subject’.
An anti-humanist approach to
health and environment 1
• Humans are not prior or privileged.
• Focus on assemblages of organic and
inorganic: bodies, things, social
formations.
• ‘Environment’ is no longer separate from
bodies: the latter are part of an
assemblage that is ‘environment’.
An anti-humanist approach to
health and environment 2
• Trace how relations in the assemblage affect
and are affected by each other.
• Look at the capacities produced in bodies
and things by these affects.
• ‘Health’ is not a body attribute, but an
evaluation of capacity: what a body can do.)
• Understand poor health outcomes by
assessing assemblages.
Example 1: city transport
housing – work places – shops – services - workers –
(capitalist) economic system - wages – transport
infrastructure – fossil fuels – renewable fuels –
pollution - public transport - private transport – etc.
• A sustainable city transport policy can optimise the
affective flows in this assemblage.
• ‘Health’ emerges as a ‘by-product’ of the capacities
produced by sustainable transport.
Example 2: water management
population – agriculture - industry – water sources –
climate – investment – water use and recycling
technologies - water and sewage infrastructure –
economic development – cultural water use beliefs
– micro-organisms – etc.
• Analysing the interactions in this assemblage can
optimise water management.
• Sustainable water management policy enhances
capacities (e.g. access to affordable clean water,
sewage management) = ‘health’.
Example 3: global warming
humans – industry - fossil fuels – sunlight –
atmosphere - weather systems – politics economics - cultural formations
• Balancing the production and capture of
atmospheric carbon can stabilise global
temperatures , and thus reduce ecosystem
variability.
• A stable ecosystem will enhance human
opportunities and hence health.
Conclusions
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•
•
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Environment is an assemblage.
Humans are an element in this assemblage.
Elements in the assemblage affect each other.
Engineering assemblages can produce
capacities that enhance health.
• Change the subject from ‘human health’ to
‘environmental assemblages and affects’.
• This suggests a distinctive, environmental
approach to public health.
Health and the Environment
Shall we change the subject?
Nick Fox
University of Sheffield