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.
Read more about this topic: Conservation Medicine
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or impact:
“When women can support themselves, have entry to all the trades and professions, with a house of their own over their heads and a bank account, they will own their bodies and be dictators in the social realm.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
—Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922)