Environment & Health

My interest in  “environment” and “health” began when I was a student in Florence Italy 1963-64. On a month long trip we took to the Middle East during our Christmas break, I studied Arab refugee camps where I made an early observation of environment and health that greatly influenced and shaped my professional life.

For a special project course in an economics, I studied Arab refugee camps and their implications for the economy and future development of that part of the world. Throughout our trip I visited and observed refugee camps in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.  These camps were the homes for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the 1947 Arab-Israel War. The camps were administered and supported by the United Nations.  They were squalid.  There was the stench of sewage everywhere, the drinking water was polluted; trash was piled high, and eating and sleeping areas were infested with vectors of disease. 

The camps were designed to be miserable; in fact, they were weapons.   I learned from the research that environments shape human attitudes and behaviors. The thing I remember most vividly and reported extensively on in my research paper presented back in Florence, was the affect the terrible environmental conditions have on children.  The repugnant environment radiated no sense of hope for the future. The children of those camps were condition to hate.  My conclusion was then, as it remains today, that unhealthy environments shape ambivalent and sick attitudes and that at some point in time those humans in the unhealthy environment will lash out.  After all, what do they have to lose? 

The years that followed my study bore out my prediction about those particular camps.  I recall the airline hijacks of the 1970s, the 1980 Olympics and the massacre of athletes in Munich, the Italian cruise ship ‘Achille Lauro’ hijacking in 1985, and the countless suicide attacks of recent decades.  The terror attacks of the 1970s and 1980s were-all planned and carried out by the children I saw in those extraordinarily filthy, depressing, no future environments.  

Not much has changed in 60 years.  Look at evening news today and the filthy environmental conditions in Gaza, there is no hope for the future, only a chronic state of war.