How Are You Using Your Privilege?

Fernando Xavier, Planetary Health Campus Ambassador
University of Sao Paulo

The isolation needed to reduce the spread of COVID-19 has been difficult for me. In fact, for whom has it not been difficult? But, in relation to many Brazilians, I consider myself privileged, because I can stay at home without it affecting my doctoral research activities at all. Nor do I have financial limitations that could cause food shortages at home.

However, this is not the reality for a large part of the Brazilian population. Many people need to leave isolation to work, because if they do not work, they will receive no income, and will be unable to buy food. When they leave home, they put themselves at risk of being infected with the coronavirus. The data show that COVID-19 is much more lethal in poorer populations.

What is our role?

We can exercise our privilege to work for a better, healthier, and more sustainable world. My vision of a healthy planet involves ending inequalities, which are even more evident during a global pandemic.

Research in planetary health shows that everything is related. There is no health of people dissociated from the health of the planet. We are part of the same whole. And whenever the parties cause imbalance, we are all affected, especially those most vulnerable.

How can we change that?

We produce a lot of research results from our academic activities. However, we need to transform research into action, not just write scientific articles for our peers to read.

In this sense, I have taken advantage of my privileged condition in this quarantine to get involved in actions that can contribute to reduce the distance between the results of the research and the actions of the transformation.

Actions reach their maximum potential for transformation by including population empowerment activities. This means, among other activities, also bringing the correct information and promoting dialogue between researchers, managers, and citizens. We don’t have to do this alone. In fact, we can have better results if we can collaborate with others from similar initiatives.

The Planetary Health Alliance ambassador program is a great opportunity to contribute, on and off your university campus, to promote this dialogue. I applied to this program because it is an opportunity, through a network of ambassadors, to learn from experiences, exchange information, and develop joint initiatives.

We are encouraged to promote initiatives to disseminate the concepts of planetary health and, for this, we have the support of the Planetary Health Alliance. We learn from experts around the world, and we can share our learnings, which for me is the main reward of participating in this program. The main challenge I have faced is dealing with my desire to develop several projects and not forgetting my obligations as a doctoral student.

When I signed up for the program, I intended to hold events to spread planetary health concepts. However, due to the isolation necessary due to COVID-19, I started developing other projects that could spread the concepts of planetary health, from which I learned a lot. Following, I describe some of these initiatives developed during quarantine.

Initiative 1: Vegetable Gardening

It is wrong to think that only large projects can achieve the objectives of disseminating information. We can bring useful information to people with small actions. I will give you an example:

Since the quarantine began, I started planting food at home. I started these experiments with some goals:

• Promote healthy eating
• Decrease the generation of waste
• Maintain a vegetable garden at home with minimal additional expenses

When I started my experiments, I adopted the premise that I would make the garden only with materials that I have at home, reusing as much as possible. In this way, I use packaging as pots for plants, leftover food to produce fertilizer, and seeds from the vegetables I consume. The images below show some results:

I used milk boxes and packaging of cleaning supplies as plant plots, and I shared photos of my results on my social networks. That way, with our own example, we can encourage people to adopt more sustainable behaviors in their homes. Recently, I wrote about these experiences for the website of a project that promotes sustainable food, the Sustentarea.

These experiences have also taught me a lot about our relationship with the environment. I just had to start planting at home and some visitors started to appear:

This experience has taught how things are connected. By promoting the sustainable use of materials and developing a vegetable garden at home, some species can find favorable environments to thrive. A vegetable garden can be an environment for pollinators, necessary for maintaining life on the planet.

Initiative 2: Dissemination of information

In addition to my home garden experience, I have worked on promoting events related to planetary health. I had scheduled three face-to-face events in the first semester, but due to the quarantine, I was only able to hold one, in early March at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of São Paulo. The event was about systemic thinking for modeling the relationship between health and climate change and you can watch the recording here.

During the quarantine, we moved scheduled in person events to online ones on our YouTube channel. We held some live sessions with significant public presence, and were able to introduce the planetary health theme to many people who had never heard of it, along with presentations of specific themes.

Thanks to these events, our study group on planetary health has had greater visibility, which will be important to spread the theme of planetary health.

Initiative 3: Social data mining

One of my research activities is related to data mining of social networks with a primary focus on health. Handling data collected on Twitter related to COVID-19, we published an article on the use of this data as a strategy to support health surveillance.

I am looking to apply these techniques in other subjects. I developed a simple application that collects posts about “planetary health” on Twitter and generates a visualization in the form of a tag cloud to demonstrate the subjects most related to the theme for a week. This application generates an image with the most related subjects during the week and posts the result on my Twitter account.

An example of a result can be seen in the image below:

This type of analysis can be employed to understand the themes most related to planetary health in a given period.

What have these initiatives taught?

Although quite different from each other in relation to the techniques used, all these initiatives have a common goal: to deliver information to people. This is significant because science can be transformed into action as people outside universities have access to the information we produce in our research.

As shown by the three projects previously reported, there is no need to develop large projects to bring quality information to everyone. Small individual actions can make a difference in our location or group. While it is great to be part of an initiative like the Planetary Health Alliance ambassador program, you can develop initiatives in your space and share your learnings with everyone, as I have done with my small home garden.

So, my advice is: start now!

Through my activities as ambassador, I’m working to disseminate the knowledge acquired from my research, and am promoting events for other researchers sharing their knowledge with the population. Thus, my privileged condition can be used to contribute for the development of a healthier and less unequal planet.

And so, I ask this question for your reflection: how are you exercising your privilege?