Social Impact
By looking at the environment and health as a continuum, conservation medicine has the potential to effect rapid change in public opinion on complex societal issues, by making the distant and ill-defined, local and pressing. For instance, global warming may have vaguely defined long-term impacts, but when an immediate effect is a relatively slight rise in air temperature, which in turn raises the flight ceiling for temperature-sensitive mosquitoes, allowing them to infect higher flying migratory birds, which in turn carry a disease from one country or continent to another, the issue becomes more real. Likewise, the broad topic of suburban sprawl is made more relevant when seen in terms of the immediate imbalance it brings to rural ecosystems, which increases population densities and forces humans into closer contact with, certain animals (like rodents), increasing the risk of new cross-species diseases. When tied to actual cases (like SARS or HIV/AIDS), this holistic outlook seems likely to resonate more powerfully with the public than the more abstract explanations of environmental and health issues that are currently common.
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Famous quotes containing the words social and/or impact:
“The term preschooler signals another change in our expectations of children. While toddler refers to physical development, preschooler refers to a social and intellectual activity: going to school. That shift in emphasis is tremendously important, for it is at this age that we think of children as social creatures who can begin to solve problems.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)