If it were a drug

Suppose that there was a medical intervention that would reduce the risk of getting dementia by 50%, of developing type 2 diabetes by 58%, produce a 41% reduction in hip fractures in post-menopausal women, reduce anxiety by 48%, depression by 30%, reduce your chances of premature death by 23%, would be the number one treatment for fatigue, dramatically ameliorate the health risks of being obese and have major impacts on cardio- vascular disease and bowel cancer, then you'd think that health services and governments around the world would leap at the opportunity to promote it.

What's the intervention? 

Half an hour of purposeful walking per day. The sort of walking that slightly lifts your heart rate and gets you breathing just that little bit faster.

Now it isn't hard to find this stuff out and I'm sure that most of our policy makers have encountered these facts if not really taken them in. So the question becomes why haven't they been acted upon? Why don't they seem to be informing public decision making in anything like the way they should?

For what it's worth I've got a few hypotheses. Taken together they may contain an explanation.

The first is quite simple. There isn't any money in it. If there was a pill that had these effects we'd be jumping over ourselves to give money to the big pharmaceutical companies, but there isn't.

The second is that it represents an implicit challenge to car culture. What's the point of having a car if you're going to leave it at home when you go to the shops? Where's the opportunity for the public display of wealth and status if you're on foot and indistinguishable from poor people who are doing it through necessity rather than choice?

The third is that it in electoral terms walking is seen as trivial and attempts to encourage people it would get categorised under the heading of "nanny state makes us feel guilty about our lifestyles and then tells us what to do".

In what sometimes feels like a previous lifetime I used to teach a course called Science in Society and would make use of a lot of video materials. Amongst these videos, captured from ordinary broadcast television, I remember one that included a discussion among 14 year old girls about the relative benefits of smoking and exercise. As far as they were concerned both of these activities carried a financial cost. For the price of a packet of fags you could have a session at the gym. Their conclusion was that it was better to spend the money on cigarettes rather than down at the gym because you could share the cigarettes with your friends. 

A friend, who is now a Professor of Medicine, and well aware of my frustration in attempting to push this particular issue, sent me a link to a short video lecture. If you've got ten minutes it's well worth a look.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUaInS6HIGo&app=desktop

The skinflint photographer

During Ronald Reagan's early presidency I briefly lived and worked in Connecticut on the east coast of the United States. My colleague/boss had recently moved there herself and I offered to bring her car from California. Of course, a trip like that, taking the northern route across Montana and the Dakotas, gives lots of opportunities to take photographs but, what with the American landscape being a slowly changing thing, unlike the UK which is a geological mess, and my general reluctance to waste money on film, I ended up considering many photographs but only taking 36 actual pictures (one roll of film).

In the end it turned out that the camera hadn't been working properly and none of the photos came out. But, such had been the deliberation in deciding what pictures to take I realised that all of these images were firmly lodged in my head and from then on decided to make a virtue of my tight arsedness by asserting that the looking was more important than the taking. I'd back this up with the tale of a Japanese colleague's son who was a proper photographer. he'd just spent three days standing by a waterfall in Yosemite National Park and at the end of that period used his 70mm Hasselblad to take just two photographs; one of them being a spare in case the other hadn't worked. He knew what he wanted and was prepared to wait.

As someone who spends what many would consider an inordinate amount of time wandering or cycling about the place and just looking, I began, after many years, to feel the urge to capture some of my favourite scenes if not for anyone else's consumption then my own. The big challenge being how to capture extensive landscapes on film (a squeomorph if ever there was). Hence, I finally got around to buying a decent quality digital camera.

 The first photo with the new camera

This first photo was taken sat at the kitchen table. A revealing tableau of domestic life in a scruffy household.

Heavy seas the day after the highest tide for 60 years.

We went to Malta in the summer, out of curiosity and to visit a cousin who lives there, but didn't take a camera. This astonished the cousin who, when he was about to take us to visit a coastal feature called the Azure Window (a natural stone arch that you can look through to see the sea), couldn't really see the point of going if you weren't going to take a picture. How will you share the experience with your friends? 

By sending them this link, that's how.

Common aspirations

A scheme for reducing greenhouse gases was put forward by Mayer Hillman under the name of contract and converge. The basic idea was that an international body of respected scientists would decide on what would be a sustainable per capita carbon budget. They'd then plot a path from the current level of emissions to the ultimately sustainable level and each year the total allowable emissions would be reduced. If a country exceeded its allowed amount it would be obliged to purchase surplus emissions from somewhere that hadn't. Over the years the overall carbon emissions would contract but the per capita emissions from individual countries would converge.

Now, whilst climate change may be the most pressing global environmental issue, the wider problem, to put it simply, is that we're consuming too much. At least those of us in the developed world are. For everyone to live like a typical citizen of the UK we'd need a planet at least three times larger than the only one we've got.

Meanwhile, the dissatisfaction industries are doing their best to make us feel unfulfilled with what we've got even though, were it more reasonably distributed, the developed world has already got more than enough.

It simply isn't realistic for the whole world to aspire to the consumption levels of the rich and famous. But when those of us in the developed world start talking about restraining our consumption it can feel very much as though we are consigning the rest of the world to eternal poverty. "You've all got cars and shiny things why can't we have them too?"

Even though the global cake is clearly finite the classic capitalist solution is to keep trying to make it grow. But this can't happen in a world of finite resources and the likely outcome is that a small number of people get richer at the expense of everyone else. So, to bring our consumption patterns back into line with what the planet can sustainably provide, some people can get more but only if someone else get less.

Now, if a person's sense of well being is inextricably linked to how much they consume, how much stuff they've got, then we're in real trouble. But it turns out that this isn't the case. Once basic needs, such as decent housing, food and personal relationships have been sorted out then further increases in income don't actually make people happier. Indeed, some evidence suggest that once you've got past a fairly modest income all that happens is that you start to envy those that have even more. Bankers could be genuinely upset that they only got a £2m bonus when someone else got £4m. Inequality adversely affects the lives of the rich as well as the poor.

So, we need to look at what things actually contribute to leading a fulfilling life and begin to make these the key elements of our political and social aspirations. For example, the American car based model of urban development is clearly well past its sell by date. Allegedly when Gandhi was shown a rather fine Humber motor car he couldn't help but reply "But what if everyone had one?" So, our model for development here might be that of some of the more enlightened European cities where people can walk or cycle to work, school or the shops and longer journeys can be made by high quality interurban public transport.

In the developed world, environmentalism is often portrayed as wanting to take us back to a pre-industrial past, but there's nothing hair shirted about wanting decent energy efficient housing, clean water, nutritious food, well maintained public spaces, ready access to the natural environment, universal access to high quality health and education....

In dealing with climate change, the necessary degree of agreement among nations has so far been lacking, but there is nothing to stop us, as citizens, working out for ourselves what really matters and deciding on a common target. One that is equitable, recognises that we live with finite resources and doesn't set one part of the world against a another.

For one slice of cake to shrink while another grows we need to develop common aspirations.