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Hans Baer earned a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Utah in 1976. He taught at ANU in 2004 and is presently at the University of Melbourne. Hans has published 16 books and some 160 book chapters and articles on a wide diversity of topics, including Mormonism, African American religion, complementary medicine in the US, UK, and Australia, and climate politics in Australia. Below is a question and answer session with this world leader in global warming research.

Hans Baer

Eco: What drew you into the field of anthropology back in your student days? Were you inspired by anyone. Please outline?

Hans: I worked as an engineer during the 1960s, a period of social ferment around much of the world. I wanted to understand what was going on and thus studied anthropology. My politicisation started in the corporate world and ever since I have moved ever leftward.

Eco: How urgent is your call to action regarding the affects of climate change on the health of the human species? Please expand.

Hans: I believe that a systematic program of climate change mitigation is extremely crucial, not only in terms of the fate of humanity and the planet up until 2100 but beyond. We humans have been on the face of this planet for some five to six million years. Climate change is the most profound problem that humanity faces and one that is related to many other issues, including the global economy with its treadmill of production and consumption, which is heavily reliant upon fossil fuels; the distribution of resources in the world; what we eat; how we house ourselves; how we get around; and our relationship between with other species and the environment.  In terms of health per se, I along with Merrill Singer in our book Global Warming and the Political Ecology of Health (2009) apply critical medical anthropology in addressing the role of anthropogenic or human-created climate change on health.

Eco: How do you respond to the challenges on your findings by the sceptics?

Hans: As far as I know, no climate sceptics have responded to our work. I do not purport to be a climate scientist. This would entail years of academic study, just as becoming an anthropologist takes years of study. While I have read several excellent overviews of climate science, I accept the general conclusions of the vast majority of climate scientists that climate change is in large part due to human-related activities. Indeed, many climate scientists, including Barrie Pittock and David Karoly in Australia and James Hansen in the US, argue that the observations in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report are on the conservative side and that dangerous climatic changes are occurring faster than predicted in the report’s worst-case scenarios.

Eco: What’s your prognosis for the planet if politicians and decision makers put the environmental concerns of most of the scientific community on the back burner?

Hans: While I do not want to be a doomsday prophet, if politicians and decisions makers put the environmental concerns of most of the scientific community on the back burner, the world is going to become a much nastier place than it already is. Unfortunately, the people who will be the most adversely affected by climate change will be the poor who have contributed the least to it. In addition to the loss of millions, perhaps even billions of lives, many who will seek to migrate to more developed societies. There is the strong possibility that the developed countries will develop an even more profound fortress mentality than they already have. The Pentagon and other security entities have issued reports that express concern about the impact of climate change on geopolitics.

Eco: What kind of negative health implications, in general and even specific in Australia’s case, are you discovering as the planet warms?

Hans: More frequent heat waves, particularly in urban areas, threaten the health and lives of vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and the sick. The estimated mortality of some 35,000 people during the heat wave of summer 2003 were associated not only from the high temperatures but also the fact that night-time temperatures have been rising nearly twice as fast as day-time temperatures. The lingering night-time warmth deprived people of normal relief from blistering day-time temperatures and the opportunity to recuperate from heat stress. Air pollution linked to longer, warmer summers particularly affects those suffering from respiratory problems, such as asthma. Heat waves in recent years in Australia have been implicated in 100s of deaths.

Climate change has also been implicated in the resurgence of numerous epidemics, including malaria, cholera, dengue (which has started to appear in Queensland) , and West Nile yellow fever. While climate change is not the only factor involved, it is estimated that there are 300-500 million cases of malaria in Africa alone, resulting in between 1.5 and 2.7 million deaths, more than 90 percent among children under five years of age. We can speak of the diseases of climate change. These include any ‘tropical disease’ that spreads to new places and peoples, but also includes failing nutrition and fresh water supplies because of desertification of pastoral areas or flooding of agricultural areas.

Eco: What kind of socio-political and other system changes do countries need to make to counter these health threats? Please give an outline of the remaining window of opportunity to address these real and potential health crises

Hans: Anthropologists have long recognised that social systems, whether local, regional, or global do not last forever. Global capitalism has been around for some 500 years but I believe that it must be transcended if humanity and other forms of life are going to survive in some reasonable fashion. These contradictions include the growing gap between the rich and poor within nation-states and between nation-states thanks for corporate globalisation and ongoing conflicts in many parts of the world. The latter can be related in part of various governments, led by the United States but including the United Kingdom and Australia, which are willing to do the bidding of global corporate interests. The treadmill of production and consumption associated with the drive for profits contributes not only to the depletion of natural resources but also to environmental degradation, the most profound of which is climate change. While energy renewable sources are crucial in climate change mitigation, ultimately humanity needs to start thinking about creating an alternative world system committed to social equity, democratic processes in all walks of life, and environmental sustainability. We cannot expect the system that created the problem to solve the problem with simple market mechanisms, such as carbon trading.

Eco: Please briefly outline the scientific processes you use to reveal these threats to humankind

Hans: Thus far, the physical sciences and mainstream economics, in contrast to political economy, have been privileged in terms of addressing climate change, but it is imperative that other disciplines be considered climate change. Thus the social sciences and   humanities should play a crucial role in elucidating the role of political-economic systems in creating climate change and how social systems need to be restructured not only in adapting to climate change but far more crucial mitigating it.

Eco: Describe briefly the early days of your anthropological studies and how it gradually developed into a mission to alert our society leaders to the present looming planetary crisis.

Hans: My initial work in anthropology focused on various U.S. religious groups  that sought in various ways to challenge social inequality, either class or racial or both, in US society. I also became quickly involved in medical anthropology and coined, with Merrill Singer, coined the term ‘critical medical anthropology’ which entailed bringing bring political economy of health into medical anthropology. I have for long been interested in alternatives to global capitalism and read a great deal about post-revolutionary societies, such as the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Based upon my reading and experiences in what was the German Democratic Republic, I came to the conclusion that these various post-revolutionary societies were at best transitions between capitalism and socialism that generally aborted in their efforts to create socialism for complex historical and social structural reasons, both internal and external. For me, socialism remains a vision that has not yet been achieved. While much of my initial research focused on issues of social justice and inequality, since the early 1990s I have sought to couple these concerns with environmental ones, both in terms of health issues and climate change ones.

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