The Medical Anthropology of Climate Change: Eco-Risks and the Body Environmental

ABSTRACT

Anthropological research can provide the time depth needed for a rich understanding of the health effects of atmospheric and ocean warming, shifting weather patterns, and the breakdown of biological and social systems large and small. Medical anthropologists are poised to document the human costs of floods, fires, droughts and other catastrophic events, as well as the slowly shifting supplies of fresh water, clean air, and adequate food. Our anthropological eyes on the ground are needed for contextual, local, and critical understandings of how human lifestyles of the twenty-first century are creating climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• ecobiopolitics
• eco-risk
• environmental health

The coming decades will witness unprecedented climate change; they will be marked by unpredictable environmental health challenges and social upheavals. Increasing numbers of humans engaging in a carbon-based, throw-away culture of consumption are pushing biological systems to new tipping points; global warming of the atmosphere and the oceans is changing life for millions of people. Climate refugees within and between countries already number in the millions, and those numbers will surge as coastal areas flood, wildfires destroy large tracts of land, and food and water become more scarce.¹ It is time to reset our disciplinary intentions and our research goals to clearly include a focus on the health effects of human created climate change (Baer 2008; Singer 2016). Anthropology encompasses the long view of how cultures and environments change. Our work can provide the time depth needed for a rich understanding of the health effects of atmospheric and ocean warming, shifting weather patterns, and the breakdown of biological and social systems large and small.

Medical anthropologists are poised to document the human costs of floods, fires, droughts and other catastrophic events, as well as the slowly shifting supplies of fresh water, clean air and adequate food. Our anthropological eyes on the ground are needed for contextual, local and critical understandings of how human lifestyles of the 21st century are creating climate change that is impacting the quality of life on our planet.

The call to study the health effects of global warming, increasingly toxic environments, and climate refugees has gone out to medical anthropologists before (Baer 2008; Singer 2014; Trostle 2010). As a discipline, we have moved our lens from understanding individuals in particular locales to large-scale analyses of structural inequalities and violences. We often write about the individual level and our embodied perceptions of ill health, or we focus on bigger social level inequities. We have left the links between these levels to the readers of our work. In focusing on climate change, we are tasked with keeping both the near and the far in focus, conceptually linking our work to the larger climatic changes that are happening.

A medical anthropology of climate change includes the individual, social, political and environmental levels of analysis clearly articulated to the concept of “climate change.” Medical anthropology has deep knowledge of the cultural construction of eco-risks (Cartwright 2013), idioms of distress and the social construction of embodied discourses. We attend to the hegemonic interplays between institutions and media in creating consent and subservience to powerful states, institutions and individuals. Expanding on the notion of the “three bodies” – the individual phenomenological body, the symbolically lived body social and the body politic (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987) – we now add, with urgency, the body environmental as a separate conceptual lens. In the context of denials of climate change by the current US administration (Samet and Woodward 2018), there is a growing need to highlight the links between on-the-ground health ramifications of such things as increased numbers of floods, fires and droughts, and the climatic shifts that underlie these disasters. Our words and our research matter.

What if those with whom we work do not make these connections? This is often the case. When I was engaged in research in rural Mexico in the mid-1990s, one of my goals was to understand how indigenous farmworkers understood the health effects of the pesticides with which they were working (Cartwright 2003). Many of the poorest laborers from southern Mexico worked on the large scale mono-agricultural farms in Sonora, Mexico were they were exposed to unhealthy amounts of toxic agrochemicals. This is the region of Mexico where the agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug started the Green Revolution in the 1970s; he left a mixed legacy. The toxicity of the petrochemical-based herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers was vaguely recognized by the farmworkers, but so, too, was the toxic political environment of Southern Mexico at that time. The violent Zapatista uprisings, governmental military oppression and extreme poverty made staying home in Oaxaca and Chiapas more dangerous than braving the Dieldrin, Eldrin and DDT being used on the crops that they were harvesting in Sonora.

When I brought up the subject of the dangers of agricultural work with the farmworkers, the conversations were often fraught – fear comes with understanding that the air you breathe or the water that you drink may be lethal either now or in the future. Individuals understood the general dangers of working with the chemicals, but they viewed the situation as beyond their control. They carried on as best they could. The bandana over the nose and mouth while working, and a cool rag or maybe an aspirin for the headache at night, had to suffice. The long term health effects of reproductive problems, cancers, unremitting skin diseases and chronic lung problems were left to be dealt with in the future. This problem persists globally, even in the US, as Saxton (2015) has recently described.

Decades into the Green Revolution, this region of Mexico is currently in a state of ecological distress – large scale agriculture farms have pumped the water out of the subterranean aquifers, sea water has come in increasing groundwater levels of salinization and the load of agricultural chemicals has poisoned the aquifers. Climate models show increased desertification, prolonged drought and acute water shortages for the millions of inhabitants of northern Mexico (Magaña, Zermeño and Neri 2012). The US-Mexico border is a prime area for understanding the politics of water, climate change, immigration pressures, poisoned bodies and the biogovernance of contested terrains.

The special issue articles

Each of the articles in the special virtual issue of Medical Anthropology on Climate Change, Environment and Health highlights a particular topic, method or intellectual approach that serves to more fully understand the health effects of climate change. Taken separately, they are exemplary medical anthropological research; taken together they form a strong basis for the much needed future work on the medical anthropology of climate change.

One of the most important issues that need attention by medical anthropologists is the long-term effects of climatic disasters. Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005; the effects on the residents of the area were varied. Poorer neighborhoods suffered appreciably more and the suffering was not the same across either ethnicities or age groups. As the interview-based work by Vincanne Adams and colleagues (2011) shows, people in the middle years of life experienced the crushing medical and financial stresses even more so than the very elderly. Healthwise, teasing out how different ages, genders and ethnicities are affected by natural disasters such as hurricanes, fires and floods is a critical step in medical anthropology’s work. The political will to address these issues is similarly uneven with respect to those who have been harmed.

Eichelberger’s (2014) work on Inupiat access to clean water firmly shows how the political will to protect citizens is contextualized in histories of colonial domination and racism. By taking an historical approach, Eichelberger demonstrates that the indigenous residents of remote Alaskan villages are engaged in trying to obtain clean water as well as their own, non-state spaces for existence. Discourses about water are a polyvocal expression of what it means to be Inupiat and continually engaged in the struggle for self-determination.

Water and the chemicals that travel through it inform Nading’s (2017) work on mosquito control in Nicaragua. Self-determination for these Nicaraguans comes in their rejection of public health measures that use strong chemicals in their home water supplies to fight mosquito infestations. Through close attention to local perceptions of the smell and health effects of the pesticides and chlorine based materials used to rid the water of the larvae that cause dengue and other illnesses, Nading shows how these chemical substances infiltrate bodies and the environment and how they highlight shifting bureaucratic manipulations of whole populations of people.

As climatic warming increases, so too will the presences of vectors such as the Aedes egyptii mosquito that transmits dengue, chikungunya and zika (Alley and Sommerfeld 2014). As Alley and Sommerfield argue, a plethora of infectious diseases are manifesting in more lethal ways across our changing environment. Our increasingly contaminated air must also be understood, as it creates problems such as COPD and asthma at alarming rates (Wainwright 2017). Air and water are cornerstones of life; climatic warming and environmental pollution are profoundly altering the quality of both.

Singer, Hasemann and Raynor (2016) demonstrate that sometimes people are clearly aware of linkages between their predicaments and the changing climate. Singer and his colleagues take the important step of directly asking people about their understandings of the ramifications of changing weather patterns. Medical anthropology, they argue, has a role in facilitating the co-production of knowledge about climate change and its daily impact on our health.

People’s perceptions of what is happening in the environment are key, and researching it is one of the real contributions of medical anthropologist’s work on this topic. For instance, the months or years that it takes for cancers to develop post pesticide exposure weaken the perceptual linkages between cause and effect. We remember things differently as life unfolds. Changing weather patterns similarly waver in our memory. We adjust our thinking; we shift our behaviors to accommodate the present as the “new normal.” Wildfires, severe droughts and catastrophic floods are increasingly attributed to environmental changes resulting from burning fossil fuels. Anthropological data can clearly contribute to understanding the impact on social organization of and institutional responses to these changes over time. We offer this special, virtual issue of Medical Anthropology as a way to reinvigorate the discussion over medical anthropology’s potential for contributing to this pressing topic.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Cartwright

Elizabeth Cartwright, PhD, is professor in the Department of Anthropology at Idaho State University and author/editor with Manderson and Hardon of The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology (Routledge 2016). She has published widely on structural vulnerability and health among immigrant and ethnic populations. She has extensive experience in obstetrical nursing and publishes in the fields of anthropology, nursing, and women’s health. Additionally, she has written on the health effects of pesticides, the mining industry and fracking.

Notes

1. https://www.iom.int/news/iom-conducts-first-climate-data-tracking-lake-chad-basin.