health

The Clean Body

November 24, 2019

Did you bathe today? If you live in western Europe, the U.S., Canada, or any of the world’s other post-industrial countries, there’s an excellent chance you did. And if you didn’t, you almost certainly did yesterday. You also likely washed your clothes within the past week. A century ago, none of these things would have been so easily assumed. Three centuries ago, the odds would strongly favor a negative answer to these questions (Louis XIV of France, for example, took two baths over the entire course of his life). So what changed?

The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs

April 5, 2018

It’s really only been not much more than a century since “great stinks” caused tremendous disruptions of daily life across major world cities. Lack of sufficient public sanitation, open sewers, abattoirs, and a host of other elements of those times would combine with seasonal weather patterns and other phenomena to produce a level of stench that could not only cause people to alter the activities, they could – and in some cases did – literally bring the activities of governments to a halt.

Children and Environmental Toxins

March 11, 2018

In 2014, the city of Flint, by then under the direct control of the state of Michigan since 2011, in an effort to save money while a new pipeline was under construction, had its water supply switched from that of a treated reservoir to water from the Flint River. Due to a pH difference – the river water being more acidic – the lead solder in the old pipes began to leach out into the water flowing into homes, schools, and businesses throughout the city.

On the Importance of Nature to Mental Health

July 9, 2014

“I got into bird watching because I discovered I could be on a murder scene and there’d be birds. So I got these little binoculars I’d carry in my pocket because I had to have some connection to the natural world – or the sane world – if I was going to do this.”