Does Health Promotion Harm the Environment?

Abstract

Health promotion involves social and environmental interventions designed to benefit and protect health. It often harmfully impacts the environment through air and water pollution, medical waste, greenhouse gas emissions, and other externalities. We consider potential conflicts between health promotion and environmental protection and why and how the healthcare industry might promote health while protecting environments. After probing conflicts between promoting health and protecting the environment we highlight the essential role that environmental resources play in health and healthcare to show that environmental protection is a form of health promotion. We then explore relationships between three radical forms of health promotion and the environment: (1) lowering the human birth rate; (2) transforming the food system; and (3) genetically modifying mosquitos. We conclude that healthcare and other industries and their institutions and leaders have responsibilities to re-consider and modify their priorities, policies, and practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Health promotion
• population density
• food
• agriculture
• environment
• industry

Acknowledgment

We thank David B. Resnik for significant contributions to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Cheryl C. Macpherson is a Professor of Bioethics at St George’s University and Senior Research Fellow in the Windward Islands Research and Education Foundation (WINDREF). Her interests include environmental and public health ethics. She recently authored Energy, Emissions, and Public Health Ethics in the Oxford Handbook of Public Health Ethics (2019).

Elise Smith is an Assistant Professor and Research Ethics Consultant at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston. With a background in philosophy, law, and the social sciences, she works on projects in research ethics, research integrity and public health ethics.

Travis N. Rieder is Assistant Director for Education Initiatives, Director of the Master of Bioethics degree program, and Research Scholar at the Berman Institute of Bioethics. His interests include ethicsand policy questions about sustainability and planetary limits and responsible procreation in the era of climate change.