Sustainability Medicine
At our January 7th Be Well session, Dr. Dave Donohue discussed Sustainability Medicine: Your Health, Your Planet, Your Food
The world is being devastated by climate change. Fires in Australia are the worst in its history, 4 times as extensive as the Amazon fires of 2019. Flooding in the US damaged crop production significantly in 2019. The list goes on.
Ominously, climate change is happening even more quickly than the worst case models, in some dimensions. For example, melting is occurring far more quickly than the models have predicted. Melting is 1 example of a positive feedback loop, or vicious cycle. More polar melting leads to less sunlight reflected and more heat absorbed, which leads to more melting.
This is just 1 of numerous climate vicious cycles we face. Melting Siberian permafrost is another particularly terrifying positive feedback loop. These feedback loops equate to a tipping point. The end result is runaway warming.
1.5 degrees C of warming is terrible, with reduced crop yields, water shortages, even more natural disasters and global conflict than we face today.
2 degrees C is far worse. It means the end of all coral reefs and devastation to marine life. More crop failures, fires, flooding, hunger, poverty, and economic hardship.
3 degrees C is where we arrive before 2100 if countries keep to their commitments with the Paris accord. The consequences of such warming are almost unthinkable.
4 degrees C means the end of civilization as we know it. Vast stretches of the planet will be uninhabitable. This is where we will arrive if we continue on our current course.
What is our current course? We have not yet reached “peak carbon”, where our annual emissions have begun to decline.
A major (possibly the #1) contributor to climate change is animal agriculture. Different authorities come to different conclusions on what percentage of climate change results from livestock, but it is in the 14-51% range. If you include long term effects of rainforest destruction to make land for grazing or feed production, and if you include the Earth’s 70 billion animals slaughtered annually as carbon burning factories, you arrive at the higher figure.
Regardless, numerous bodies (such as the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change) have looked at the global statistics and come to the conclusion that to survive climate change, human civilization must consume less meat and less animal products.
Project Drawdown is a comprehensive scientific analysis on what things we can do to reduce emissions and combat climate change. Drawdown’s analysis shows that a whole foods, plant based nutrition (which incorporates both eating exclusively plant foods and also removing all incentives to deforest rainforests) solves the #4 and #5 most impactful changes we need to save the planet, making plant based nutrition the #1 thing society can do, and certainly we as individuals can do.
Interestingly, behaviors that we usually consider most important to combat climate change, like nuclear power, offshore wind, electric cars are only a small fraction of the impact compared with switching to plant based nutrition.
As more people switch to predominantly plant based nutrition, we have the wonderful side effect of preventing and reversing our most deadly and most costly diseases.
Dr. Michael Greger summarizes the connection between diet and climate change is this video
Lifestyle Medicine is a newer medical specialization, devoted to reversing the underlying cause of most of our diseases, through a healthy lifestyle. With its strong emphasis on whole foods plant based nutrition, Lifestyle Medicine already does a great job advocating for a sustainable planet. However there are key areas where lifestyle medicine can be upgraded to more effectively advocate for sustainability. The 3 main areas are: (1) recommending sustainability practices, (2) helping others achieve these healthy and low impact behaviors, and (3) advocating for sustainability with our institutions like businesses and government.
So I propose a new, expanded version of Lifestyle Medicine, called Sustainability Medicine, that adds these 3 emphases in its teachings. Imagine when you go to see the doctor, in addition to talking about your diseases and lifestyle behaviors that are contributing to them (diet, exercise, …) your provider also asks about food waste (#3 on the list of biggest climate issues!) and other sustainability practices. As I see it, these sustainability practices are of public health concern. In allopathic medicine, we already focus a lot on public health measures. For example, the main reason we give the flu vaccine is for herd immunity.
The other thing we need to solve is education. We have lost generation after lost generation coming out of our education system, with few if any sustainability skills or knowledge. I have proposed this World Nutrition Curriculum, which should be taught kindergarten through 12th grade.
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