Feature

Allies in the green army

Alliances must be built between all sections of the environmental and public health movements if fundamental issues of the green agenda are to be tackled, says Ged Moran

Given even a nodding acquaintance with the history of public health, the current upsurge of political concern and mobilisation around issues vaguely labelled ‘Green’ or ‘environmental’ offers some interesting parallels with the past. Not only are some of the substantive issues the same (water-quality, food adulteration, air pollution), but as with the sanitation movement of Victorian times, contemporary environmental concerns have found expression in a remarkable variety of voluntary and campaigning groups at national and especially local level.

The same debates about the role of market forces, the sanctity of private property and the legitimate scope of government intervention are also being aired. In the last century, concern about public health served to highlight the inadequacy of existing political structures, in terms of their democratic legitimacy and their administrative competence. The eventual result was wholesale reform through the extension of the franchise and the creation of new structures for local government. Here again contemporary environmental movements raise parallel issues, for example in the debates about electoral reform and open government.

Such parallels suggest considerable scope for alliances between the new movements and the institutional and professional inheritors of the first public health movement. However, developing such alliances is by no means straightforward.

Existing structures have often been unable to accommodate single-issue campaigning, informal grass-roots organisation, high-profile media stunts and direct action; indeed, their unease with such approaches has often blinded them to the growing technical expertise of environmental groups.

Conversely, those who have struggled to create a shift in environmental consciousness in the face of political hostility insistently emphasise its newness — ‘neither left nor right but a new direction’ — and are understandably cynical of superficial bids to highjack the agenda and the electoral rewards.

Despite these potential barriers, one encouraging development in recent years has been the continuing re- evaluation of the nature and role of public health, agenda with the emergence of an embryonic new public health agenda which has significant elements in common with the environmentalist agenda. These common elements include not only many substantive issues but also an underlying philosophy that emphasises holistic and collaborative approaches rather than a narrow and alienating professionalism. The mushrooming interest in ‘health for all’ strategies offers an important opportunity to advance this agenda locally, nationally and internationally.

Such developments present dangers and opportunities. At worst, established public health interests will merely adopt a new language while in practice offering no real accommodation to the agendas and organisational forms pioneered outside conventional political structures. Equally, environmentalists keen to emphasise the new and unique quality of their agenda risk overlooking some important continuities with the public health tradition, thereby ignoring the very real strengths of that tradition and the potential for breathing new life into some of its institutional bases, such as local government.

There is even a danger that health and environmentalism might become competitors rather than allies in the struggle for political space and influence. Fortunately, in a growing number of localities, real attempts to find common ground are being made, with the adoption of green charters, the funding of environmental groups from statutory sources, the conducting of environmental audits and a whole range of other projects.

Some emergent alliances are extremely welcome, but a comparison with Victorian experience might also alert us to their possible limitations. Despite the enormous benefit of the nineteenth century environmental improvements, they left untouched the grotesque disparities in income which underpinned the appalling health status of the poor. To challenge such disparities would have raised questions too fundamental to be encompassed by most of the practically-minded but ultimately conservative men and women who pioneered public health reforms.

It is not too fanciful to see in the current mobilisation among some people a direct parallel to their ancestors’ fears about the spread of cholera and other infectious diseases: fears closely linked to their own fears of being threatened by the new hazards. At worst this attitude is exemplified by NIMBY (not in my back yard) ism — a desire to protect personal comfort and inflated property values regardless of any wider social priorities.

At best, while potentially helpful on specific issues, it represents only a very limited reshaping and strengthening of traditional public health concerns and structures for some of the challenges of a new era.

Crucially, it again sidesteps fundamental issues about equality, about production and distribution for need, and about the emergence of a social ethic of co-operation and participation — issues that are integral to the new public health if it is to be anything more than a catchy slogan.

Couched in those terms the limitations of current policy responses to the green agenda are glaringly obvious. On key issues such as the nature and purpose of economic growth, the tentative questioning of a decade ago seems to have all but vanished. For example, under the impact of recession and government-led free market strategies, local authorities vie with each other to embrace the developers’ schemes for yet more shopping/ leisure/ office mega-complexes.

Such developments, inaccessible without private transport, employing low paid, insecure staff and policed by private security firms, represent cathedrals to precisely the kind of privatised consumerist values that can flourish only in deeply unequal societies.

When the property developer spearheading the mammoth King’s Cross re-development in London is also chairman of the Friends of the Earth Trust, there are clearly some unresolved contradictions in the present environmental crusade.

Looking further afield these contradictions are still more striking; it is a limited internationalism indeed which mobilises to resist overseas hazards that may impact upon our own backyard, while profiting from debt mountains and terms of trade that systematically attack the health of much of the world’s population.

Challenging such values is essential if real progress is to be made on the broad agenda set by the World Health Organisation’s Health for All by the Year 2000 project. That challenge is unlikely to succeed without effective alliances between activists and professionals from the green and public health movements, together with local communities resisting the dehumanising scale of schemes such as King’s Cross or, for example, the Kirstall Valley proposal in Leeds.

All these alliances go beyond simple concern for the physical environment, to engage with the more far- reaching questions about the nature and purpose of economic activity and development, the fundamental issues that others prefer to avoid once again surface. Will the new public health be more effective than the old in helping these issues onto the political agenda?