Module 2: How to understand ecological health
Dr Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne
Centric Lab
Featuring:
Dr Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne is a doctor, organiser and researcher focused on environmental justice, abolition, anti colonialism and reimagining health systems.
She speaks with us about the context of the Medical Industrial Complex and shares with us her insights and analysis on the construction of health within the current system and potential healing pathways.
Key Learnings: Definitions
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In economics, capital is defined as the physical or financial resources used to produce value.
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The extractive economy is the economic model under which we live that involves the extraction and exploitation of natural resources and human labour for profit and wealth accumulation.
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A tactical form of abuse or manipulation in which doubt, confusion and blame are assigned to people and communities for experiences that are caused by factors outside of themselves. This is done to gain power and control over said person or community by distorting their reality. See Gaslighting Communities report by Centric Lab in the AIK Academy Library.
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Individualised health looks at the patient in a vacuum without context or history, it overlooks the broader determinants of health and treats sickness as originating in the individual body.
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The network of private corporations and conglomerates that provide healthcare for profit.
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Coined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (a geographer and abolitionist), this term refers to death at any age that could have been prevented. In this context primarily under racial capitalism and state sanctioned exploitation.
Key Learnings: Our Thoughts
Understanding some of the history and roots of this type of work is very significant because the more education and awareness that we have, the harder it is for our experiences to be denied by the polluters.
Air pollution, trauma, emotional stress will all impact the functioning and regulation of the endocrine system, which in term impacts diseases such as diabetes, or bodily processes such as menstruation. Centering disease on a person’s ethnicity or race is inaccurate, unscientific and rooted in eugenics.
WEB Du Bois created a set of maps where he looked at the environment, living conditions, work and see how they created a very specific experience of being racialised. These maps showed how segregation by race and social class corresponded to very high incidences of poor health outcomes, giving a geospatial viewpoint of what racism does.
Charles Booth organised and funded one of the most comprehensive and scientific social studies of London to inform a social epidemiological understanding of the unprecedented urban growth, scale of poverty and ill health in London. The Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People of London 1886-1903.
Poverty is not an accident or inevitable, it is a deliberate outcome of capital gains and wealth accumulation.
South Wales Miners Federation (1922) proved the relationality between employment, place and poor health, the reason the people in this community were getting sick and dying at a young age was because of their exposure in the mines, as well as poor working conditions and living in overcrowded, inadequate housing.
Professor Robert Bullard began using the vocabulary of environmental racism showing in 1979 that in the US landfill sites were located in neighbourhoods where majority Black people lived.
Communicable diseases, diseases that are contagious such as COVID-19, also fit into this lens of ecological health and place and health, because despite it being an infectious disease, some people are still more susceptible than others. Trauma, stress, pollution can all impact various bodily systems and inflammation, lowering immunity and increasing susceptibility. Susceptibility can also be impacted by inadequate housing or fuel and water poverty.
The polluters tend to follow a ‘playbook’, they offer an already precarious community that has high economic deprivation jobs in their industrial or agricultural site. However, these jobs are precarious, with low pay, working conditions and rights, and are highly exposed to pollution and hazards. For example, Boca Chica where SpaceX’s Starship production and test facility is based.
What in this lesson stood out for you?
Debate Questions
These questions are framed to help you apply your own experience and perspectives to points raised in this lesson.
What are your thoughts on how your community understands their health and the relationship to the economic conditions under which you live?
When moving beyond the notion of individualised health, what patterns of ill health and potential healing can you identify in your community?
What sort of economic model do you think is most conducive to ecological health?
How To…
Critically engage with dominant narratives of health
Solo or in your community, explore your understandings of good health and wellness and what they stem from. Key questions to ask are:
Is your sense of health linked to your productivity?
How much are your material conditions contributing to your state of health, and how much are you defining your health by measuring your material conditions?
As a group explore ways in which you can expand any existing understanding of health to incorporate community, connectivity, joy and participation in the world around you.
What does this expanded understanding of health allow for? Does this impact your advocacy?
Create a common understanding of the determinants of health in your area to safeguard against individuals being gaslit by medical professionals or institutions that tell them that their health is an individual pursuit based on lifestyle, behaviour or happenstance.
You may require creating informative material that makes these determinants clear and easy to understand for your community.
You are done with Module 2!
Next Lesson:
Module 3 Lesson 1