Environmentalism is a broken machine. As the twin evils of climate change and unchecked industrialism rage across the world, burning forests, salting land, raising tides, spreading disease and choking our skies, the environmental movement keeps turning away from the dangers of the present. Instead, it prioritizes the familiar fight of conservation, saving this forest or protecting that rare parakeet. While these are important for biodiversity, prioritizing this single cog of environmentalism has come at the expense of the movement’s broader mission: protecting both the planet and the people who live on it. Many nonprofit organizations and government policies emphasize biodiversity, species protection and the preservation of national landscapes, but too often ignore a crucial crux: the intersection of people and climate. This imbalance not only weakens environmental policy but also blinds us to the human costs of our changing world.
Since President Grant’s creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, environmental organizations have channeled their funding into the tangible and photogenic: national parks, wildlife sanctuaries and endangered species. These projects attract supporters for their high visibility and moral cleanliness — just look at Smokey Bear. But the threats that don’t make for glossy posters remain largely ignored: polluted air, heat islands, vector-borne diseases and industrial waste. The slow, uneven damage to human health from these issues is easily ignored, largely because they disproportionately impact marginalized people. This selective blindness in favor of conservation-based issues has warped our sense of what “saving the planet” really means. We tend to measure progress in carbon offsets and conserved acres, not how many people are spared from asthma, heart disease or cancer. While the former metrics matter, the failure to account for the latter has sidelined human needs in the environmental movement. But when a shift away from fossil fuels could save tens of thousands of lives annually — long before any meteorological climate benefits would arrive — it is clear that this battle is both an ecological fight and a public health emergency.
This blindness is most apparent in the fight against air pollution. Every year, air pollution from oil and gas leads to 90,000 premature deaths in the U.S. The same pollutants cause 216,000 annual childhood-onset asthma cases, and more than 1,600 annual lifetime cancer cases. These are not the metrics of environmental harm one hears about on the news, yet are still vital statistics to understand the fight for a greener earth. This burden isn’t shared equally, either. Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and Asian populations are disproportionately exposed to pollution from extraction, processing, refining and manufacturing. These instances are often clustered in communities such as Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, where the cancer risk is nearly double the national average. These inequalities stretch back to racist redlining and industrial zoning policies that targeted communities of color by situating them besides pipelines, refineries and highways. The environmental movement has historically been limited by its white-centric structure, often overlooking environmental racism altogether. This issue has persisted — current environmental policy has a tendency to treat these cases as side effects, rather than real, separate issues.
The effects of environmentalism’s social inaction extend beyond urban smog and factory zones. As global temperatures rise and weather grows more erratic, diseases once confined to the tropics, such as dengue and yellow fever, are creeping northwards. Already, another tropical virus, Zika, has become a yearly issue in Connecticut. On top of this, floods, fires, droughts and increased storm severity have stripped entire communities of their homes and livelihoods. More often than not, those most affected come from disadvantaged backgrounds, as with Puerto Rico’s 2017 Hurricane Maria. As long as public health and environmentalism remain mutually exclusive, millions will continue to suffer.
Evidence already exists that proves that bridging the gap between these two fights will lead to a more effective environmental movement. China’s “Two Control Zones” policy, for instance, was designed to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions and acid rain from factory pollution. Though created as a long-term pollution control measure, the policy led to improved environmental health from the reductions in acid rain, but also an increase in public health by way of a reduction in respiratory diseases. If a similar policy was implemented in the U.S., an additional 53,200 premature deaths could be prevented each year and would yield over $600 billion in benefits from avoiding yearly deaths.
Environmentalism can’t keep running in its broken state. The forests, reefs, ice sheets and ecological diversity that the movement strives to protect mean nothing if humans are unable to live to see it. If the environmental machine is to be repaired, the movement must realize that it can’t choose between planet and people but instead work to protect them both. Only then will environmentalism be able to reap its full benefits and achieve its mission of protecting the planet and all its inhabitants.