Applying Systems Thinking to Environmental Policy

Well, we're in interesting times, aren't we? That's an understatement. And one of those areas that's very important for us to keep our eyes on is the whole nature of the interface of humans to their environment and the present trends towards altering our commitment to understanding the role that the environment plays in health and the role that human activities play environmental health. And as you probably know, there was a recent act published and passed, the honest and open new EPA Science Treatment Act, Honest act, which is an interesting acronym. And in fact there is an editorial that just appeared in what is arguably considered one of the top science journals in the United States, Science Magazine, June 9, 2017, in which the title of this editorial is the Dishonest Honest Act. And why is it considered dishonest? Because David Michels, a professor of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at George Washington University, and Harold Burke, who is the Jacob and Irene Fabricant professor and Chair in Health, Risk and Society at John Hopkins, have both been describing the fact that this so called honest act is deregulating environmental protection in such a way as we are putting ourselves in jeopardy as it pertains to air, water, environment and the nature of how that interfaces on human health. And therefore what we might be doing is gaining an economic short term advantage by the deregulation, only to have a much longer term disadvantage as it pertains to the release of kind of the progress that we've made and the relinquishing of this progress as it pertains to environmental quality and reduction of exposure of humans to environmental toxicants and how that interrelates with exposure to all other living organisms as well. And so they go on to say if the Onus act becomes law, it will embolden attempts to dictate science and delay decisions at the federal, state and local agencies. The community must make it clear that this act, which is a threat to the health and the environment, is an unnecessary and burdensome political intrusion into the scientific enterprises and takes away the science of the environment away from decision making, a really serious and, you know, troublesome concern. That then leads to another interesting editorial that I think follows the same theme. We've heard that there is a trend towards wanting to move us back into into the coal economy, the coal economy, which may also be the coal economy too, in that we have felt that maybe coal is a way of re energizing the economy and putting people back to work. And one of the arguments that's been made for this is what happened to the so called rust belt of The United States of say, western Pennsylvania Pittsburgh area when we lost the steel producing industries and we lost a lot of the coal supported production of steel and that that led to the downturn in the economy and putting people out of work in western Pennsylvania. And this has been used as an example of what happens when we roll back certain things in industry and we impose certain environmental regulations. Now that story is much more complicated than that. As you probably know, much of the high grade iron ore had already been mined out of Mesabi range in the northeastern United States. We were not able to have the same grade of ore. The expense of producing a steel then became competitively disadvantageous relative to other places in the world where higher grade ore was available and cheaper ways of producing it. And yes, there were environmental protections that were imposed as well. But the bottom line is that the so called Rust belt lost a lot of their jobs as a consequence of really the changing economy and the changing nature of this resource and this production of steel. And so what did Western Pennsylvania do? Case Western Reserve Institute, University of Pittsburgh, many other organizations and institutions reformed the economy. It took 20 years, but now if you go to Pittsburgh, it's not the place that it was 25 years ago, which was suffering from a bust economy, but it's revitalized, it's re energized, it's full of entrepreneurs, it has new high tech industry, it's involved in the production with all sorts of small businesses of new technologies. It is revitalized, re energized and it is putting people not into just work, but into high quality work, clean work, higher paying jobs, and really reforming a renaissance of the economy. The same thing then could hold true for much of what we are trying to preserve of an old model. And the question is, how do we marry together these economic models in terms of the 21st century economy, global economy, how do we tie that together with the of the environment which then interfaces with the health, both emotional, physical and physiological health of the individual to create a Systems approach towards 21st century society. And I think that one can use this systems biology, systems thinking approach at many levels, from the individual right up through society, to look at the bigger pictures of what we're trying to do and recreation of culture in light of new opportunities to become cleaner, safety, safer, more efficient, and also to produce higher paying, more highly educated job opportunities. So this is all described in this interesting editorial. Patrick Gallagher, the Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, wrote entitled Pittsburgh Myth, Paris Reality. And he's talking about the Paris Accords. And we're now moving away from the joining into the climate global warming accord and and that now we're going back into carbon dioxide emissions over all us and that how do we feel that this is in support of long term population biology and population health? And is it really realistic to think that these abandoning our commitment to the accord, the Paris accord, is really going to be in the best interest of our country? And this is described again in Science magazine, the June 16 issue in 2017. So again, I believe that when we start thinking in a systems way, be it either systems biology, system economics, system as it relates to regulating and understanding the progress and evolution of human culture, that we come to much more intelligent decisions about how to manage the future than looking at individual piece parts, individual and trying to treat individual things one at a time in isolation. And that I think is a model that is really our 21st century lesson plan.