Health and Deep Ecology

More deep ecology reading is on my list of things to do. Once my books are out of storage :-( BTW, one of the fathers of the movement - Arne Naesse, died last week.

But as for scientific proof of the philosophical concept, that's been harder to come by. Check out this BBC news item:

Diverse roots of human disease

* Richard Black
* 23 Jan 09, 05:17 PM GMT

Does loss of biodiversity affect human health?

The United Nations Environment Programme believes it does - the notion was one of the top lines in the last edition of its massive five-yearly Global Environmental Outlook, which came out in 2007.

The nuts and bolts of the link, though, can come across as a bit tenuous - loss of species may affect the discovery of new drugs; biodiversity can impact water quality; and so on. They're not necessarily the most convincing arguments to those who pride themselves on having hard heads.

This week, I came across something a bit more concrete - and what makes it more interesting is that it relates to one of the really poor cousins of the medical research field, schistosomiasis..........Read more here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2009/01/keep_snails_fight_disease.html

BTW, a great introductory book that I can recommend to anyone is Green Psychology, by Ralph Metzner (apparently a Harvard contemporary of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Andrew Weil, etc).