Review

Global warning

Prescription for Change: Health and the Environment
Friends of the Earth, 1995

Concern for the global environment has had little success in progressing up the political agenda. Environmental groups have been saying for a long time that the man-made environmental degradation that has had such appalling effects on the rest of the natural world will eventually come to haunt the human race which is the root cause of the degradation. It is only now emerging clearly that such predictions are not alarmist, but are becoming reality. Those concerned about the environment have not been slow to capitalise on the impact of linking human health to degradation of the global environment. Prescription for change is one of a series of books from various sources on this topic.

All such books are faced with the problem of a lack of unequivocal evidence about the effects of environmental degradation. One solution is to fill the book with ‘it has been shown that so-and-so possibly or maybe causes this or that’. This Friends of the Earth book rather falls in to that trap, which gives it the impression of sensationalising the risks and makes many of its propositions rather easy to demolish. It is presented as a research report, but it is too uncritical of the research results it presents and is inevitably more of a campaigning document.

Having said all of this, I wholeheartedly agree with the general purpose of the document. On several occasions it mentions ‘the precautionary principle’ which dictates that steps must be taken when the stakes are very high, even if the evidence is equivocal. Given that the stake is the integrity of the global ecosystem on which all life depends, the precautionary principle is the environmentalists’ trump card.

Also of great importance is the increased discussion among environmentalists of the environmental effects of social inequalities. Such discussion usefully brings the environmental agenda closer to the daily concerns of many people. But the people who should be most concerned about social inequalities will probably find the book difficult to get into. It is essentially a mouthpiece for the middle class convert. In his introduction, Charles Secrett nearly widens the audience dramatically by reassuring us, in relation to oestrogens in water, that ‘blokes in Britain aren’t suffering from shrinking willies’. If the whole book were written along those lines the environmental cause might take a huge step forward.