Last week, I wrote about three major shifts in perspective that took me from being a family physician to a broader concern with the health of communities, of societies and indeed of the global population and the planet itself.
In my concluding major paper for my master’s degree at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s, I identified two major principles that have guided my career ever since.
The first is ecological sanity. If you understand that there really is only one Earth, that we are 100 per cent dependent on the Earth’s natural systems for our very existence, and that there are indeed limits to growth — key points to emerge from the First UN Conference on the Environment in 1972 — then it would be insane to damage or destroy those natural systems.
And yet, we do.
So protecting and improving the health of the population — which is the raison d’être of public health — means protecting and restoring the Earth’s natural systems
The second principle is social justice, which has long been a guiding principle in public health. After all, public health’s goal is “health for all,” where “all” implies equity, fairness and inclusion.
It means that while working to improve the health of the population or the community as a whole, public health particularly seeks to improve the health of the least healthy. And that means protecting the most vulnerable from health hazards, be they environmental, social or commercial.
Incidentally, looking back a few short years later, I realized I should also have included peace and non-violence as a third principle. There is no health in the midst of conflict, violence and war, as we so readily see today all over the world.
But I also became very aware of the role of public policy and governance — and ultimately, of political thought and action — in the creation of the conditions for health (or for illness).
That led me to help develop what became internationally important ideas about “healthy public policy” — public policy in all sectors, including in particular economic policy, that is good for health — and Healthy Cities, how to organize the governance of cities in ways that improve the health of the population.
That awareness also led to me becoming politically active in the 1980s. In its 1972 report Blueprint for Survival, The Ecologist noted: “Governments … are … refusing to face the relevant facts,” and called for “a national movement to act at a national level, and if need be to assume political status and contest the next general election.”
That made sense to me, and so when this call was answered in 1973, seven years before the German Green Party was founded, by the creation of the world’s first two ecological political parties — the Values Party in New Zealand and the Ecology Party (initially called the People Party) in the U.K. — I was there.
I became an area organizer for the People Party and attended the founding convention in Coventry in 1974, before coming to Canada in 1975.
Here, I began to look around for the equivalent and became part of a network of people working to establish an ecological political party in Canada.
Eventually, we succeeded and I became the first leader, helping to run the 50 candidates we needed in 1984 — I was one of them — to become a registered party (although I did not remain involved in the Green Party after about 1986).
There is one final important shift in perspective that I underwent in the mid-1970s, when I was introduced to “futurism” by a fellow activist in the People Party.
I quickly came to appreciate that good futures thinking is not about predicting the future, but in helping people think about the future they want (and the future they want to avoid) and then helping them to try to realize that future.
In one way or another, then, I have been involved in thinking about and working on the health of the population and the environmental, social, economic, political and other determinants of health for over 50 years, and I remain committed to helping to create a healthy future for all.
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy
