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Introduction: Summaries

Introduction and Course Overview
Paul R. Epstein, MD, MPH, Harvard Medical School

The opening session will cover the course curriculum, requirements and organization. It will include introductions of the Teaching Assistants and Center staff. The session will close with brief comments on fundamentals of science and a review of grading criteria for the course.   

Why We Are Giving This Course
Eric Chivian, MD, Harvard Medical School

It is evident that information about global environmental change and health is becoming increasingly important to the practice of medicine, to public health professionals, to environmental scientists, and to policy analysts. This lecture outlines the importance of undertaking the study of human health in relationship to global environmental change. Fundamental to this study is the understanding that our well-being is supported and dependent on the conservation and integrity of the biosphere

Methods in Environmental Health
Melissa Perry, MHS, ScD, Harvard School of Public Health

Download the outline summary of Melissa's PowerPoint presentation here.

How to Prepare for This Course
Daniel A. Goodenough, PhD, Harvard Medical School

This is a Medical School. Although you are not all medical students, you are nonetheless involved in Western science in a number of different contexts.  It is important to understand the context of Western science since this is the vantage point we observe from. 

Our scientific roots begin with Euclid, Pythagoras then to Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Pasteur.  There is a corresponding philosophy articulated by Descartes.  The sum of all these influences is that we live in a Mechanistic World, coming from billiard balls, laws of motion, dropping apples, geometry, mass, momentum, etc.  This mechanistic world can be understood by Analytical Thinking:  something can be understood by taking it apart, studying its parts.  When you understand the parts, then you understand the whole.  Western culture is obsessed with taking things apart, into smaller and smaller bits, in order to understand.  This approach is often called Reductionism.  We live in a world dominated by Western Culture, which is itself dominated by a Scientific Worldview.  How does that worldview impact on our understanding of the environment?  In general, Western science will approach the huge complexity of the Global Environment by trying to reduce the whole into parts in order to understand how it works. 

           

 

Reductionism will not permit an understanding of complex systems.  Accordingly, new ideas have emerged to tackle this problem, such as chaos theory, general systems thinking and much of modern ecology.  Key to these new paradigms is an understanding of the interactions and the probability of interactions between component parts.  Out of these interactions, new things emerge.

EMERGENT PROPERTIES. 

Emergent properties arise as a consequence of interactions – for example, those between water molecules that generate a snowflake, between proteins that generate motility, or the relationships between neurons that generate a memory.  Emergent properties can be reduced to their component parts (snowflakes à water), but they are “something more” or “something else” than their component parts and hence novel and innovative.  Emergent properties frequently produce “surprises”, outcomes that could not be predicted from analysis of the component parts.  Emergent properties also give rise to yet more emergent properties, generating the vast complexity of our present-day cosmic, biological, ecological, and cultural contexts.  Scientists offer rigorous explanations of what emergence entails (e.g., self-organization, autocatalysis) and describe the centrality of emergence both to the dynamics and evolution of the cosmos and planet Earth and to the origins of organisms and ecosystems. 

So how will we think about emergent properties in this course?  Analysis does not work.  We need a new way of thinking.  Quoting Capra:

The great shock of twentieth-century science has been that systems cannot be understood by analysis.  Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it.  However, the properties of the parts [of a complex system] are not intrinsic properties but can be understood only within the context of the larger whole.  Thus the relationship between the parts and the whole has been reversed.  In the systems approach, the properties of the parts can be understood only from the organization of the whole.  Accordingly, systems thinking concentrates not on basic building blocks, but on basic principles of organization.

Human Health and Global Environmental Change is a course that focuses our attention on the science of emergent properties.  To do this, we must become systems thinkers in addition to analytical thinkers. While it is helpful in many contexts to think of the planet as a “thing” with mass, velocity, angular momentum, chemical composition, etc., Lovelock’s idea of Gaia resists analysis and must be thought of as a network of interactions and interconnections.  These interconnections result in the creation of Gaia.

In this course, we will try to understand the science of each of the levels which interact to create the biosphere and the planet.  To do this we must integrate all the sciences, from quantum mechanics through biology to ecology.  We must always be thinking of context in addition to thinking of content, we must always be thinking of probabilities of interaction. 

So:  How to take this course?

1. We must continue our training in analytical thinking.  Within each layer of the hierarchy, analysis plays a fundamental role. 

2.  We must struggle to be “generalists”.  While there is endless pressure to become “experts” and to “specialize”, we must constantly push ourselves to learn more outside our specialty.  We must be specialists and generalists.  We must be comfortable reading and thinking about broad fields of science and wide sweeps of history.

3.  We must learn to think systemically.  Our reflex questions will be: “What is the context?”  “How do the parts interact?”  “How do these interactions change over time?”

4.  We must become experts of process in addition to content.

5.  We must be part of an emergent property.  We must not be alone and isolated.  We must be interacting. 

6.  We must take care of our despair.  Joanna Macy offers five powerful guidelines, five lessons and some process suggestions:

• Acknowledge our pain for the world.  If it is present, we cannot deny its reality.  We cannot make it go away by arguing it out of existence, or burying it inside of ourselves.  We can acknowledge our pain for the world to ourselves through journal writing or prayer, and communicating to others.
• Validate our pain for the world.  Honor our pain in ourselves and in others, by listening carefully and accepting it as healthy and normal in the present situation.  To hurry in with words of cheer can trivialize its meaning and foster repression.

Experience our pain.  Let us not fear its impact on others and ourselves.  We will not get stuck in this pain, for it is dynamic, it flows through us.  Stay present to its flow–in words, movement and sounds.

Move through the pain to its source.  Pain is rooted in caring, not just for our children and ourselves but for all of humanity.  We rediscover our interconnectedness with all beings.  Allow this sense of mutual belonging to surface in whatever words and images are meaningful and share them.

Experience the power of interconnectedness.  Let us dare to translate our caring into a sense of belonging to all humanity and the web of life.  Observe the trust level rise when we expose our vulnerability to pain for the world.  Recognize how the realization of interconnectedness results in personal security and economy of effort.

Principles of Despairwork. Five lessons.

• Feelings of pain for our world are natural and healthy.
• This pain is morbid only if denied.  To speak of sorrow works upon it, moves it from its crouched place, barring the way to and from the soul’s hall…Denise Levertov.
• Information alone is not enough.
• Unblocking repressed feelings releases energy, clears the mind.  Catharsis.
• Unblocking our pain for the world reconnects us with the larger web of life.  The distress is more then concern for self.  It reflects concerns that extend beyond our individual needs and wants. It is a testimony to our interconnectedness. 

Process Suggestions:How do we talk to other people? How do we speak the unspeakable?

1.  Breaking the ice:  truths.  No one wants the world to die.  Everyone feels lonely and isolated facing the dangers that beset their world.  Therefore elicit concerns about the world and its future, rather than impose our own information.  For example: “Does hearing the news scare you as much as it scares me?  Do you worry about the environment sometimes?  What is the hardest part for you?  I find myself worrying more and more about the world situation, and it feels like there is nothing I can to about it.”  Do not try to sell your political views. 

2.  Dealing with differences of opinion.  Nine suggestions: 

a) Beware of labels and hidden assumptions.

b) Don’t play total expert.  You are more trustworthy if you come off as “not knowing”. 

c) Do your homework, so you can be responsible for what you say. 

d)  Be clear whether you are communicating facts or feelings. 

e)  Don’t try to corner the other person. 

f)  Don’t be afraid to share personal experiences.

g) Don’t be afraid to examine differences.

h) Be willing to let go of a discussion at the right time. 

i) Shift, if you can, to the level of deep common concern. 

A human being is a part of the whole called by us “Universe”, a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.  Albert Einstein.

You didn’t come into this world.  You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean.  You are no stranger here. Alan Watts.

Bibliography

Capra F. The Web of Life. New York, NY:Anchor Books; 1996.

Macy J. Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers; 1983.

Song C, Navlin S and Makse HA. Self-similarity of complex networks. Nature. 2005;433:392-395.