HEALTH
Everything about Planet Action Street Arts is about is health. The health of the planet, city, countryside, rivers, sea, sky and all the life forms that share and keep our world inhabitable.
Most health care offers cures for illness, repairs to damage or is palliative, and we all hugely appreciate this and the NHS and other therapies that can help us when we are in trouble or suffering. Unfortunately, this does mean that prevention tends to be pushed to the back of the queue.
In this scenario there is no suffering patient. The value of prevention is only provable by retrospective social statistics which and have less emotional impact and are often hard to obtain through funded research.
When the genetic and carcinogenic problems of manufactured chemicals are revealed it is often outside of the product testing period. There was even a time when cigarettes were advertised as good for you.
Insecticides are a biproduct of biological warfare. When they were researching chemicals deadly for humans The weapon scientists discovered that insects were dying and losing their wings. Thee factories that manufactured bombs could also turn a profit with nitrates used as fertilizers These have been overused and deplete the soil and created desserts.
Research into long term harm including genetic based disorders and cancers from agricultural sprays is hard to fund because it is not profitable and also undermines profits. The purveyors spend heavily to obfuscate findings as they have done on fossil fuels power plant caused acid rain, aerosol caused ozone destructive sprays, and of course fossil fuel greenhouse gas based environmental disaster.
See Merchants of Doubt Oreskes and Conway for the fascinating details of these crimes against the planet and humanity, which include the formation of pseudo charities and the biasing of conferences to undermine peer reviewed science. Take note that ‘democratic’ governments can be `owned` by these companies donations’ and lobbyists and for example our current UK PM is married to a fossil fuel billionaire. Please see radio transcript pdf http://tinyurl.com/3kcxmmay for more about these chemicals
Despite living longer, at this strange point of human history much of our bad health (in all the senses mentioned above) is avoidable because it is caused by human products and activities . The bad health of our planet in the Anthropocene era is a vast subject covered in many of the books in this site’s bibliography.
The health benefits of our festival communal city plantings are in general terms already proven. The vegan diet is an easy health choice for the planet and individual health see the `vegan heaven` page. It is important when you learn about a very frightening problem to be able to do something about it. Gaining a sense of agency and purpose is our recommended cure for environmental anxiety and solastalgia.
Solastalgia is a neologism, formed by the combination of the Latin words sōlācium and the Greek root -algia, that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. It is best described as the lived experience of negatively perceived environmental change. Wikipedia
So on this page you will find both information and petitions you can join which are mainly about the problems of chemical s and the environment. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Dave Goulson’s Silent Earth are excellent very readable classics on this topic
Take a stand against fossil fuels
Petition the EU against exporting banned chemicals
Asbestos in Soil and Water | Exposure Risks (mesothelioma.net)