Our Synthetic Environment Chapter 1
Tuesday, November 18 2003 @ 01:22 AM PST
Contributed by: murray
By: Murray Bookchin
CHAPTER ONE: THE PROBLEM Our Changed Environment
Life in the United States has changed so radically over the past one hundred years that the most wearisome historians tend to become rhapsodic when they describe the new advances that have been made in technology, science, and medicine. We are usually told that early in the last century most Americans lived heroic but narrow lives, eking out a material existence that was insecure and controlled by seasonal …

CHAPTER EIGHT: HEALTH AND SOCIETY
Individual and Social Aspects of Health
A new approach is likely to gain easier acceptance if it involves individual rather than social action. The majority of people tend to look for immediate, practical solutions that they can adopt without having to face major social and environmental problems. They search for personal recipes and formulas for physical well-being. This attitude is understandable. Health and illness are intimate problems, involving the ability to survive and enjoy full lives. Health is enjoyed by the individual, not by such abstractions as …

APPENDIX A: CHANGING CONCEPTS OF ILLNESS
-An Excerpt from “The Healthy Environment”
by John D. Porterfield, Deputy Surgeon General of the United States*
Our dazzling technological progress since World War II has yielded a random harvest of mixed blessings, and a bumper crop of new health challenges. These challenges differ from our traditional health concerns in a number of significant ways. For one thing, the nature of the assault on the human organism is very different. The public health professions are familiar with the infectious disease pattern-exposure, followed at a predictable interval by …