Social inequalities and the environmental crisis

Need for an intergenerational alliance

Bibliographic Data

ID22079207
AuthorsPaolo Vineis (0000-0001-8935-4566, Imperial College London, corresponding author), Ajay Gambhir (0000-0002-5079-4537, Imperial College London)
Year2023
Volume11
Pages1226961-1226961
Publication date2023-08-30
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFrontiers in Public Health (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2296-2565 • E-ISSN: 2296-2565
PublisherFrontiers Media SA (PUBLISHER • CH)
DOI10.3389/fpubh.2023.1226961
PMID37719719
OpenAlexW4386329069
LanguageEN
References cited10

Social inequalities and ecological crisis have the same historical rootsThomas Piketty (1) has described the close relationship between the development of the "extractive" economy that led to the current environmental crisis, and the origins of social inequalities in the world, between countries and within countries.Both problems date back to the era of colonialism, when massive amounts of natural and human resources were literally extracted from those that became low-income countries.To this extraction process science was not extraneous.Let us consider the immense scientific efforts, particularly classificatory, carried out by the explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who sent to Kew Gardens in London and to the natural science museums in Berlin, Paris, London, Washington and New York the specimens they gradually discovered.Scientists such as von Humboldt, Wallace and Darwin were deeply involved in this work of discovery, extraction and classification.Von Humboldt, for example, explored Central and South America in the late 1700s, classified 60,000 plants and described entirely new natural phenomena.At the end of his life, in Berlin, he wrote a most ambitious work, "The Cosmos, " which denotes the universalistic aims of these great explorers and naturalists.The same spirit finds its fullest expression in English institutions of the same and the following period: the Royal Geographic Society with its celebration of David Livinsgtone; the Kew Gardens; the Natural History Museum; and even the British Museum, founded by Sir Hans Sloane, an Irish physician and botanist.The latter figure is particularly interesting: the first collections housed in the embryonic Natural History Museum in London were in fact assembled by him and donated to the British government.The collection included dried plants and skeletons of animals and humans and was first displayed in 1756.But Sloane was also the founder of the British Museum, and he is largely responsible for what is now the Enlightenment Gallery collection.The Gallery is unique in that it brings together objects from all the then known world, from Japan to Chile, mixing artifacts with objects of naturalistic interest.It is the ultimate expression of the age of colonialism, with all its connotations: universalism (with the British Empire at the center), extractive inclination, genuine aesthetic curiosity, classificatory and scientific interest.Health was not extraneous to these huge historical changes.In the era of great navigations it was harbors that were the crossroads of exchanges and intermingling of genetically and culturally diverse populations, goods, commodities, works of art, and Frontiers in Public Health frontiersin.org

Alliance · Economic growth · Economics · Environmental health · Inequality · Political science · Public health · Public relations · Social inequality · Climate Change and Health Impacts · Engineering · Global Health Care Issues · Health disparities and outcomes · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Epidemiology

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