O clima, a paz e a saúde

Abstract

About sixty years ago, a very short period in historical terms, the climate was blamed for a considerable range of adverse effects on human health and that of domestic or wild animals that live around homes in rural or urban areas, making up our life ecosystems. The temperature, rainfall patterns, mountains, forests, rivers, lakes and oceans -the whole physical geography -played a preponderant role in the distribution of diseases. It is worth citing the pioneering work of Hippocrates (On Waters, Rivers and Places), written around 400 BCE, which established the environmental foundations of the process of health and disease as basic medical principles. 1 Such views continued for generations and reached their height in the last century. Typical of this paradigm was the consolidation of the concept of tropical diseases, a field of study in its own right and a branch of health services, focusing on disorders that prevail in countries and continents lying between the Tropic of Capricorn, in the southern hemisphere, and the Tropic of Cancer in the north. This was the so-called "Torrid Zone", a term which is, in itself loaded with prejudice. 2 In fact, rather than physical characteristics, the geography of disease was better explained by the geography of poverty, the underdevelopment of populations living in the tropics, who had been subjugated for centuries by non-tropical peoples who created the political empires of colonial powers -Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Japan. In other words the epidemiological hegemony of tropical diseases resulted directly from the economic, political and military hegemony of non-tropical peoples that imposed their interests, their culture and their modus operandi over a vast swathe of equatorial parts of the globe. 2,3 As ill health was seen to be geographical, the solution was to imposed on the colonized peoples, under the supervision of metropolitan militias, the advances in science and technology that could address the challenges posed by the physical and biological environment and the problems of indigenous cultures characterized by apathy, primitivism, a belief in divinities and the values of underdevelopment.Within one century (the 20 th ), political colonialism practically ceased to exist and was replaced by economic colonialism in the new world of global markets. A triumphant capitalism, based on strategies that preyed on whole populations and their habitats, spread its interests and methods for exploiting nature and altering geography across the globe. In this new world molded by human action, Western science and technology would overcome the climatic challenge of underdevelopment and the shortcomings of tribal cultures. Economic growth, untrammeled by the geographical environment and the obstructive regionalisms and localism of native subcultures, would produce a civilization of markets, as the new model for human development. 4 The fallacy of this total victory over a hostile nature, represented by the tropical climate and its agents -the heat, rivers, forests, aqua...