Scarring ourselves by killing nature

NEW DELHI: When you see the images of environmental devastation, you likely feel terrible. There’s grief at the loss of something so beautiful.

Now, medical researchers say the pain is shared by those who clean up, more than we realize.

The Lancet, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, has just published a study by Dr. Richard Kwok and others, showing this to be true.

What the research team did was to study those who cleaned up after the terrible oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, after the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, which began in April 2010.

They studied 8968 workers and 2225 ‘non-workers,’ described as those who were trained but finally, not hired. These folks were screened and studied for depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-something you would expect victims who have experienced losses during a war or a disaster to exhibit-between March 2011 and March 2013.

What the team found was that workers with high hydrocarbon exposure or stressful job experiences experienced more depression and PTSD, suggesting that this work actually had a negative mental health impact. What’s more, the research team suggested the need for mental health services before and after the assignment.

The results didn’t surprise me, but they underscored the silent human burden of environmental catastrophe.

In India, enough people have such unpleasant jobs-from cleaning chemical spills in factories, to cutting down pristine forests for development. What happens to them? Does despoiling nature leave us with a permanent scar? Is protecting nature the only solution then to protecting ourselves? I leave you with these questions, for which I have no data-based answers.