Read our Q & A with Congress keynote Aaron Bernstein, MD, MPH. He is on faculty at Harvard Medical School and the Center for Health and the Global Environment. Along with Nobel Peace Prize recipient Eric Chivian, he co-authored 'Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity'.
He discusses how to change human behaviour relative to climate change, a recent example of biodiversity's importance ot human health and a source of his bond with nature.
We understand you work as a pediatrician; what prompted you to write a book on biodiversity?
As a pediatrician, I see each and every day how medical practice and health depend on harnessing elements of biodiversity, or the variety of life. Knowing, as we do, that we are living at a time of rapid depletion of biodiversity, one of the most extreme in Earth's history and by far the most severe since humans first appeared, compelled us to write Sustaining Life and document, in language accessible to a lay audience, the many ways in which our health is inseparable from that of the living world.
Can you give one recent example of a piece of biodiversity that has been particularly important to human health that many may not know about?
Most people will know that oseltamivir or Tamiflu, is our best drug for treating influenza, including the H1N1 influenza virus. What fewer people may know is that we would have a very hard time making the drug without the production of a substance known as shikimic acid which is harvested from the Chinese star anise tree.
You are the course director for Human Health and Global Environmental Change at Harvard, what does this course teach/focus on?
This course, the only one of its kind that I am aware of taught at a medical school, examines the human health consequences of global environmental change, with an emphasis on climate change and biodiversity loss. After presentation of the relevant science, the class delves into how human well-being may be affected in a warmer and less biodiverse world. At the end of the class, proposed solutions to these problems are put forward and scrutinized with a public health lens. Some past lectures are available on our Center's website at http://chge.med.harvard.edu/programs/education/course_2007/index.html
Getting people to change their behaviour is difficult - what do you think is key in getting individuals to change their actions relative to trying to limit climate change?
When a kid gets sick, parents routinely ask me what it is that they could have done to prevent it, often in the belief that their child's illness is, at least to some extent, their fault. Conjuring such a claim of responsibility and resolve to prevent harm are exactly what's needed if we are to realize real progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Putting on the table what is at stake with climate change for our well-being and especially for that of our children may help do this. However, the steps to reforming our economies must tread over a powerful status quo. We may prefer to blame those that produce fossil fuels or other large companies with large carbon footprints. Yet, they respond to our demand for their goods. If those of us in the democratized world believe that continued fossil fuel consumption is a bad idea then perhaps we would be wise to more actively demand different energy sources for our needs, and at the same time demand of our representatives more assistance in forging a path to sustainable energy production.
What is your favourite outdoor place, and why?
For more than a decade of my childhood I summered in the Northern tip of Wisconsin. Those summer days were passed outdoors in a magnificent conifer forest wilderness. Although nature was not why I went there (playing sports was), its presence was inescapable. Those summers solidified my bond with nature that lives with me today. When I pass through woods, hike up a mountain, or even sit under a tree in a park, part of me returns to those fond moments in the Northwoods of Wisconsin and rekindles the happiness I knew there.
Dr Aaron Bernstein’s speaking tour has been made possible thanks to the Thomas Foundation Conservation Oration presented in partnership with The Nature Conservancy.
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