Introduction

When the financial crisis hit Europe, one wry response from those affected early on in Ireland was to retort: ‘That which does not kill you makes you stronger’. There remains a great misunderstanding concerning suffering. In most cases that which harms you, even if it does not kill you in the short term, will tend to shorten your life in the long term and will certainly make it more uncomfortable in the medium term. If it does not harm you it might well harm others, if not now then in the future. This is what is meant by environmental harm – damage being done more widely than to the individual, where the actions of one person curtail the options of others. When the environmental harm which is being committed spirals out of control it is fair to say that people are heading for environmental bankruptcy.

Environmental harms range from the immediate to those repercussions which appear only to threaten us from the far horizon. The most immediate form of harm is that which is (or might be) damaging right now. Drinking water of poor quality or breathing in air that is damaging to our lungs are significant forms of environmental harm, but we contribute to such harms when we add alcohol to our drinks, or cigarette smoke to the air we breathe. The greatest immediate killers of humans are the ways in which we have managed to make our own personal environments much more dangerous than would naturally occur.

This chapter begins with a series of statistics concerning the greatest threats to young people in Britain today. These are introduced by contrasting the different approaches to fatal environmental risk which can be found around the world. For children it is not smoking or drinking which are most harmful, but cars. In Sweden there is now a road accident policy that all deaths of children on the roads should be prevented at whatever cost. In Britain we are now so protective of very young children – those aged 5 to 9 – that more die due to disease today than as pedestrians, which had been the greatest threat for most of the past two decades. However, by age 10, cars are the greatest danger to children when all risk categories are compared.