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Andrea Merkel, German Chancellor, called it too late to stop global climate chaos because of the rate at which the industrialized nations are increasing their heat trapping gas emissions. As Bill Mckibben commented nearly two decades ago that humans have developed the capacity to alter the atmosphere thereby affecting all natural weathering and reproductive processes on earth. More significantly the past climate variations are no longer reliable predictive patterns for our future because our human pollution has been so prolonged, so pervasive and so decisive in altering the oceans.

In the sense of Hippocrates, the ancient Greek writer, we have significantly altered the airs, waters and places that were once the province of forces beyond human influence and technical control, Any physician, according to Hippocrates had to know about these natural conditions to better understand situations in which diseases due to climate, pests, or water sources spread among people whose health they seek to restore.

Today the conceptual triad from the Hippocratic Corpus provides an opportunity for us to understand the threat from natural carbon in airs and waters to places on earth. The triad may reveal how --by treating this waste gas as a commodity-- the inherent natural assets of wildlife, forests, even water bodies take on an economic importance that are not apparent. Airs and waters are inherently tied into a functional bundle that manifests widespread influence on human health in the corpus.

For example DDT sprayed in the air, persists chemically resisting degradation as it accumulates in water bodies, the tissues of fish and birds, while it also has been shown to increase the risk of testicular cancer. By using the coherent view exhibited in the corpus the connections among water, air, energy and human livelihoods may become more obvious to a wider audience. In the case of seeing water bodies with this ancient perspective consider the Severn estuary in Britain which has an estimated capacity to generate five percent of the U. K. electricity demands from the river mouth's tidal power. Similarly a forest under the European Union's cap and trade system has value --not as timber or as wildlife sanctuaries-- but a new valuation based on its storage capacity for removing carbon dioxide from the air when it is not cut down. No one invests in tidal power because of the costs with respect to oil and gas and the the fragmentation of nature into disconnected pieces.

ike he old story of Osiris, modern automated and energy intensive industry has dismembered the body of nature and severed the air from the water that regulates the atmosphere and sliced the nourishing soil microbes from the air they replenish. The Hippocratic corpus linking the parts as one body serves a rhetorical service in placing the current need for pollution control and sensible energy use into a less complicated context from which new insights may arise.

This old ethic when tied to a new financial instrument has tremendous importance for water supplies, wildlife habitat and recreational values, not to mention tillage practices, building design and human health. This importance lies in a new valuation --an opportunity under carbon cap and trade system that does not exist otherwise. The peril in making a commodity of our natural resources is a real and present danger to our ethos. Commodities bring with them responsibilities that can easily be overlooked in a materialistic and narrowed product based frame of reference. There is an equal problem in the ancient Hippocratic corpus and its dictum to "do no harm." for one might easily suggest that had the writings of Hippocrates been influential there would be no need to revive them, indeed their superstitions may have hampered not engendered a more profound understanding of natural places.

In this respect it is important to understand the limits and opportunities in the Hippocratic corpus, the way we have changed the air, waters, and places and why we need, in the words of the German MP ____ a new means of dealing with people, their environment and wildlife in an age consumption driven energy scarcity and rising incomes among greater numbers of people.

Solutions to urgent problems, in Freeman Dyson's analysis .

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Last Updated on July 14, 2008