I first wrote my manifesto while preparing a vendor’s table for my clinic at the first Sunfest–a fair in New Hampshire that celebrates sustainable living and alternative healthcare.
I was thinking about the correlation between the two, and was inspired to write down some ideas that had been in my head for some time. I came up with a simple document I called the “Ecological Medicine Manifesto” with twenty defining points. Right after I wrote it, I did a search online to find out whether the term “ecological medicine” was in use already, since as far as I knew, I had invented it that evening. To my surprise and delight, I saw that there was actually an ecological medicine movement, spearheaded by the Bioneers and the Science and Environmental Health Network, and a truly wonderful book by the same name—a collection of lectures at the Bioneers conference.
Spurred on by knowing there was a movement behind me, I handed out hundreds of copies of my manifesto at the fair, and spoke to many people about the idea of “Ecological Medicine.” Most were slightly baffled at the term, but liked what I had written.
I spent the winter rewriting parts of it, and thinking about why, after many years of being directly involved in alternative medicine and sustainable living, I had never heard of ecological medicine. Why had the term not caught on in the general public? The time seemed so ripe. I came to the conclusion that the term itself was not self-explanatory enough, and that people assumed “Ecological Medicine” was a type of medicine, such as “Naturopathic Medicine” or a general term such as “natural medicine” and didn’t bother to ask more.
Yet ecological medicine, or sustainable medicine, as I have come to call it, is not a type of medicine, rather, it is a concept against which one can (more…)