Environmental crisis isn’t looming just around the corner. It’s already happening. So why aren’t people alarmed? It’s not due to lack of evidence. Evidence abounds, and you would struggle to find an environmental scientist anywhere who wouldn’t agree that global warming, water and air pollution, the destruction of the rainforests, the massive rate of species extinction, and a variety of other issues each represents crisis respectively and, when taken as a whole, foreshadow actual disaster. Yet very little is being done to address any of these issues. How can this be?

No doubt it’s partly legacy of our economic history. We never had to be concerned about the environment in the past because we lacked the technology to do the damage that we do today. In addition, it takes years for the effects of pollution, deforestation, and similar environmental insults to accumulate, so for years no one worried about the vague threat of future environmental consequences in the face of the promise of fast profit. Our present culture of prioritizing industry and ignoring the environment is a legacy of this past.

A lot of people today want to change this culture, but major cultural change doesn’t just happen – it requires a strong impetus. The visible threat of global environmental disaster has begun to provide such an impetus. The work of numerous non-profit organizations, and other efforts like the films March of the Penguins and An Inconvenient Truth have raised awareness of this threat and generated a flurry of media attention on environmental issues, and all of this will hopefully contribute to cultural change.

ReEvolution is all about creating cultural change, but our area of focus is human health. So why are we devoting so much attention to environmentalism? Because we know that in the long run, our health as a species is inseparable from the health of this planet. The idea that our economic history has conditioned our current lack of regard for the environment is a common interpretation. We’d like to offer an additional perspective that hasn’t received as much consideration: That our current lack of regard for the environment is also a legacy of our scientific history and the way that we think about health.

From the dawn of man, science and technology have been about mastering nature. Building shelters protected us from the vagaries of the weather. The advent of agriculture liberated us from the need to hunt, gather, and live off what the land naturally provided. Boats let us conquer the sea, and eventually, planes let us conquer the sky. Heating and air conditioning helped minimize the impact of seasonal changes in temperature. As science and technology progressed, they allowed us to deviate further and further from the boundaries that nature (the whether, geography, the seasons) once placed on us.

The last century has seen the advent of a new field of science; medical science. With the advent of medical technology, our quest to master nature found a new focus – our bodies. It’s a fact of life that things go wrong with our bodies. We get infections, we develop plaque in our arteries that can lead to heart disease, and we experience DNA mutations that can lead to cancer. Our bodies are constantly faced with these and other challenges, and, for the most part, our bodies handle these challenges easily, usually without our ever being aware that there’s a problem. But sometimes an infection or another problem gets ahead of us. This is generally where medical science steps in. Our bodies have a natural response to bacterial infection. When that natural response isn’t enough to beat back the infection, we get sick. At this point, we are prescribed antibiotics. It’s a good thing that we have antibiotics, or a lot more people would die from bacterial infections.

Antibiotics were the first great medical advance. Within a few years of the beginning of their wide-spread use, antibiotics saved literally millions of lives. It was another victory for man over nature. The current medical paradigm, in which we look for drugs to treat virtually every illness, is a legacy of the success of antibiotics in treating pneumonia and other infectious diseases. The basic idea behind this paradigm is simple: 

Certain problems naturally crop up in the body. When these problems create disease, 
we have to look to technology to supply a solution. These problems  (cancer heart disease, diabetes, etc) are a natural part of life, and medical technology in the form of drugs will allow us to overcome them.

Our core message at ReEvolution is that most of the things that go wrong with our bodies (with the partial exception of infectious diseases) are not natural. They are the result of living unnaturally, and the way to keep them from happening, and even reverse many of them, is to live the way we are meant to live. But it’s not our purpose here to argue about whether drugs or exercise, nutrition, and other “natural cures” are the right solution to various health issues. Our point is that the entire history of our health care system has led us to the point where we no longer recognize the ways in which our health is tied to nature.

We see the maintenance of our health, and even our happiness, as tied to the progression of medical technology. Witness the fact that anti depressant and anti anxiety drugs are prescribed to millions. The idea that technology can and should provide a solution to every problem blinds us to the reality that our health is absolutely, inescapably dependent on the way that we live our lives.  Every doctor who stays current with the medical literature knows this. No drug can have anywhere near the effect on heart disease or obesity or the likelihood of your developing cancer that a healthy diet, regular exercise, and proper rest can have.