Everyone knows that health is important. According to surveys, 89% of people say that health is their most important thing. But only 64% of them do anything about it, and that includes just taking supplements. The most common answer to the question, "Why don't you do what you know is important?" is "no time." In other words, others seem more important.
The same thing happens with environmental sustainability. People are worried. They know that climate change is real. But when it's time to choose between convenience and sustainability, convenience wins. This is not due to a lack of concern for the environment. The psychological barriers hindering environmental action are identical to those that obstruct individuals from sustaining healthy habits; comprehending this parallel elucidates the challenges of achieving sustainable living.
The comparison is not shallow. There are six specific structural similarities between the environment and health that make it difficult to choose which one is more important, even though everyone agrees that both are important. These aren't failures of willpower on an individual level. These issues behave in ways that make them easy to predict.
Six ways the environment mirrors health.
the boundaries keep expanding
Please ensure clarity when defining what "environment" means. You probably think of forests, oceans, and animals when you think of nature. But environmental problems can also be things like the air quality in your home, noise from traffic, the social conditions in your neighborhood, and even cultural heritage sites. The word applies to almost every area of life, so it's important everywhere but not very focused.
Health works the same way. It's not just about being healthy physically. The idea of health grows to include almost everything about being human, including mental health, social health, and relationship health. This wide range causes paralysis. It's challenging to set priorities when everything is about health or the environment.
This means that you can't look at "the environment" as a whole if you want to live in a way that is beneficial for it. You pick certain areas, like energy, waste, consumption, and transportation, and you know that you can't be completely virtuous when it comes to the environment. Similar to health, it involves identifying what matters most to you and then focusing on those priorities rather than attempting to address everything simultaneously.
Causes and effects hide in complexity.
Direct sources like diesel cars and power plants are responsible for 29% of fine particulate pollution. What about the other 71%? Chemical reactions in the air lead to the formation of secondary substances. Climate change is 95% caused by people, but it is caused by many different things, like fossil fuels, farming, cutting down trees, and many other things we do every day. Diet, exercise, stress, genetics, and age also influence high blood pressure. Each of these things affects the others in ways that make it impossible to separate them.
This complicated situation leads to three problems. First, it's not always clear what actions really help. Second, what works for one area doesn't work for another. Diesel cars and trucks put out less CO₂, but they do put out more particles. People with kidney disease should not eat foods that are beneficial for blood pressure. Third, effects build up over time, making it difficult to see how actions lead to consequences.
This means that when making choices every day, you have to accept that "sustainable" options aren't always the best. They might be better in some ways and worse in others. The goal isn't to arrive at perfect solutions; it's to make trade-offs that improve things overall, even though they are complicated.
solutions require expertise you don't have
The Johns Hopkins Medical School said that 11.1% of the time, doctors got the diagnosis wrong. These doctors are some of the best in the world and have a lot of training and testing experience. There isn't an equivalent error statistic for environmental policy, but the results point to similar problems. We have tracked 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals since 2015, and the environmental ones have made the least progress. People are less and less responsible when it comes to buying and making things. Climate action is making very little progress. Aquatic ecosystem protection is the lowest priority. Ecosystems on land are actually getting smaller.
Both fields have the same problems: complexity makes it easier to commit fraud and spread false information. Climate denial and greenwashing take advantage of how difficult it is to verify environmental claims. Unproven health remedies and false treatments proliferate for identical reasons—when genuine solutions require expertise most people lack, fraudulent simple answers attract audiences.
In practice, this means that you should be wary of both doomist and easy-fix stories. Real improvements to the environment, like real improvements to health, need long-term work based on evidence, not quick fixes or significant changes.
Money beats value almost every time.
Economic pressure is the most significant threat to both personal health and the environment. Economic downturns often lead to the relaxation of environmental regulations. People work even when they're sick because they think missing out on pay is worse than hurting their health.
The parallel also applies to solutions. If nothing is done, environmental costs are expected to reach 18% of global GDP by 2050, which is about $28 trillion a year. But environmental budgets are often cut as a way to save money. People often forgo necessary medical care due to high costs, while companies reduce their environmental spending, labeling it as efficiency.
The Environmental Kuznets Curve says that pollution goes up as economies grow, but then it goes down when people can afford to invest in the environment. The data partially corroborates this for local pollution but is wholly inadequate for climate emissions, which consistently increase with income. Money and environmental protection are not synonymous. You have to choose to put your money into mitigation instead of just assuming that wealth will automatically lead to sustainability.
This means that people need to understand that making sustainable choices often costs more at first, but they should consider that cost as an investment instead of a loss. Like preventive healthcare, spending on the environment today lowers costs in the future while improving life.
omnipresent yet invisible until crisis
You don't consider the quality of the air until pollution reports turn red. It seems like waste management is working well until collection services stop. Health works the same way: people know it's important in general, but they only do something when test results show something is wrong or symptoms become too obvious to ignore.
This leads to a big misunderstanding: environmental sustainability isn't something to repair; it's something to keep. It's not about getting to a perfect state and then stopping, like health. It's about doing things all the time that stop things from getting worse while still allowing for changes that are bound to happen.
The change in mindset is crucial. Failing to correct the environment when it's a problem leads to despair. If the environment is something you do every day, like brushing your teeth or working out, then imperfect care becomes success. Brushing your teeth doesn't "fix" your dental health; it keeps it that way. Cutting down on waste doesn't "fix" pollution; it just keeps it from getting worse.
Awareness often arises when it is nearly too late.
People on the verge of death suddenly know what matters most. In a similar way, Easter Island's civilization fell apart after hundreds of years of prosperity because it ran out of resources. They cut down trees to move stone statues until there were no trees left. The soil eroded, food production stopped, and society fell apart.
The Environmental Crisis Clock shows that the planet is currently at 9:27 globally and 9:11 for certain countries. Midnight means the end of a species. Nine o'clock means "very dangerous." The clock doesn't tell you what will happen, but it shows you the path.
This stage of terminal awareness is where the comparison between health and the environment is most useful. Healthcare professionals acknowledge that lifestyle influences health more significantly than medical intervention. A 1974 Canadian health report found that individual behavior was responsible for 52% of health outcomes. Genetics accounted for 20%, the environment for 20%, and healthcare quality for only 8%.
Using this framework for environmental problems shows:
Earth and natural systems: 20% (things we can't control)
Industry/production: 20% (economic structures)
8% of environmental technology is for new ideas and solutions.
Culture and behavior: 52% (daily decisions and social norms)
The numbers aren't exact, but the trend is important: cultural change—changes in how people act and what they value—has a bigger impact on results than just new technology or policies.
The reasons why environmental action is more challenging than adopting health habits are complex.
The parallel breaks down in two important ways that make it especially challenging to live sustainably.
Each person experiences lessened consequences. When you don't take care of your health, you hurt yourself. You are overweight because you eat poorly. Smoking causes you cancer. This instant feedback loop pushes people to make changes. Damage to the environment spreads over time, across people, and places. Your trash made of plastic doesn't make your water dirty. Your emissions don't make your home flood. The person who was hurt lives somewhere else or hasn't been born yet. This disconnect between action and consequence fundamentally undermines motivation.
The effect on each person seems small. Making choices about exercise, diet, and sleep is the first step to better health. These actions have clear results. To have an effect on the environment, we all need to work together. It doesn't do much to have one person recycle perfectly while others don't. You are at the end of a value chain that starts with extraction, goes through manufacturing and distribution, and ends with disposal. Even if consumers act perfectly, it won't make up for systems that aren't sustainable upstream.
Because of these differences, taking action for the environment requires something different than changing your health habits: accepting that your individual effort matters more by changing the way people perceive things as a group rather than by having a direct effect on the environment. You recycle to normalize recycling. You recycle to normalize recycling, which in turn enables political solutions to be effective.
What actually works?
If the structure of the environment is similar to health but the effects on each person are different, what strategies work?
Don't think of it as resolving problems; consider it to be ongoing maintenance. You don't "fix" your health by stopping exercise after you reach your goal weight. You stay healthy by sticking to healthy habits. In the same way, living sustainably doesn't mean getting rid of all your trash and then relaxing. It means making habits that keep your impact low for as long as possible within reasonable limits.
Put more emphasis on systems than willpower. Good health management makes it easy to choose healthy options. It works better to keep junk food out of the house than to keep saying no to it. In the environment, this means completely changing routines instead of trying to remember other ways to do things. To use reusable bags, don't let people use disposable ones. Instead, make sure you remember to bring reusable ones every time you go out.
Accept that progress isn't perfect. No one is ever completely healthy. You are vigilantly monitoring potential risks and making every effort to maintain your health within reasonable limits. The same goes for environmental action. With the current infrastructure, it is not possible to achieve perfect sustainability. It is possible and useful to make real progress.
Please prioritize the most important changes at the top of your list. The effectiveness of health interventions can vary significantly. Giving up smoking is more important than taking vitamin supplements. In terms of the environment, focus on energy, transportation, and diet—areas where small changes can have a big effect. Worrying about using straws while driving every day is a waste of effort.
Consider making the cultural shift the primary goal. You are the main person who benefits from your health improvements. Your choices that are beneficial for the environment and people in the future are the most important. The drive has to come from making a difference in culture that leads to changes in policy and systems. Such behavior isn't less important; it's just different. You're not just optimizing on your own; you're part of norm evolution.
the liberation in seeing clearly
It's surprising how much better it feels to understand why living sustainably is harder than getting healthy and how the two are similar. You're not failing at something that everyone else can do. You're dealing with real structural problems that make both taking care of the environment and your health very hard for predictable psychological reasons.
This clarity makes it possible to come up with better plans. Stop treating environmental sustainability like a crisis that needs an immediate response. Start treating it like health care that needs to be done regularly. Stop thinking that willpower can get you around systemic problems. Start making routines where eco-friendly choices are the norm. Stop trying to be perfect in every way. Prioritize the changes that will have the most significant impact and that you can realistically maintain.
Sustainable living should feel natural, like a butterfly moving through gardens. However, this ease stems from understanding the terrain, understanding why certain paths are challenging, and designing routes that align with the natural movement patterns of people.
This comparison is not merely a metaphor for health. It's a recognition that the environment and health have some things in common that make both areas difficult to address with quick fixes or big changes. Progress necessitates the same patient, imperfect, and sustained effort required by any intricate maintenance task.
And just like health, the stakes couldn't be higher. We know this is important. We know that putting things off makes them harder. We know that the best time to do something is now, not later. The question isn't whether we should care; it's whether we'll use what health teaches us about turning concern into action, even when the action isn't perfect and the effects aren't clear.
The clock for the environment says 9:27. It's not midnight yet. There is still time if we approach the problem in the same realistic, long-term, and organized way that sometimes works for health, even though it is difficult to prioritize both in the middle of everyday life.
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