| Good for the Planet, Good for Us |
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| Written by Joshua Liberles | |||||||
| Saturday, 19 January 2008 | |||||||
 A recent article by No Impact Man reiterates what is perhaps the environmentalist’s most persuasive argument: what’s good for the planet is good for us. This is as true in our diet decisions (natural, wholesome foods versus packaged, processed, nutrient-stripped crap) as it is in our transportation selections.
Here’s a great graphic (larger image here) from Transportation Alternatives illustrating the correlation between obesity and transportation methods:
 Although there are certainly other factors at play, and the relationship isn’t linear, I don’t think it’s much of a leap to infer that people would be healthier and happier if they took some deliberate steps away from their vehicles. As we at Carectomy have said before, Cars are More Fattening than Cake. If you've never heard of No Impact Man, it’s a project in sustainability and an associated blog by Colin Beavan. No Impact Man describes his own project best, so I’ll stop trying. From No Impact Man:
A Guilty Liberal Finally Snaps, Swears Off Plastic, Goes Organic, Becomes A Bicycle Nut, Turns Off His Power, Composts His poop and, While Living in New York City, Generally Turns Into a Tree-Hugging Lunatic Who Tries to Save the Polar Bears and The Rest of the Planet from Environmental Catastrophe While Dragging His Baby Daughter and Prada-Wearing, Four Seasons-Loving Wife Along for the Ride. If you haven’t visited the site, I highly recommend it.
Photo via flickr by billaday. Comments (3)
saxsux
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Just because there's a correlation, it doesn't necessarily mean there's a fact; I could draw a graph of pirates against global temperatures, and use it to "prove" that a decline in the pirate population is the cause of global warming. Having said that though, I agree with what you've said. Keep up the good work!  |
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The relationship is linear, you're just looking at the data wrong. Look at it as % walk, cycle, public transport vs. %obesity:  and you can linearly graph the data with a R-squared value of 77%, which is really good for real world data. |
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You could equally conclude that obesity causes people to not walk as far (which certainly seems more plausible . But I agree with the conclusion (obviously for other reasons), that the most effective diet plan is to sell your car. The way to test causation is to introduce 'interventions', whereby you change the believed cause and see whether it has an effect. So, for example, if you can find a city where people have switched from cars to PT/bikes in a short period of time and show that health has improved, you could make a stronger claim, or alternatively, a plce where health went down the tubes as a result of a large mode-shift away from PT. I do not know of any strong examples of the former, but perhaps shanghai is a good example of the latter? Even better if you have a comparable experiment in the opposite direction: a place where obesity increased for other reasons, and a mode shift occurred. Perhaps Samoans, whose weight is a sign of social standing (sitting?) have changed their mode in the last 100 years, but not had a change in average BMI. |
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Cars are the most inconvenient convenience we have. We're required to have them, but increasingly, we dislike them. At Carectomy, we're trying to figure out how to extract cars from people.
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