When we inhale, the oxygen hits our lungs and bloodstream, where cellular respiration keeps the cells bangin’. Without that, it’s game over

Preferably clean from the start, preferably not stale, and if inside, preferably run through a filter

Clean air probably started to go downhill when we decided to start cooking inside, often with wood, which a lot of folks still do either by choice, or because they suffer from cooking-related energy poverty (about 40% of the world). Over 4% of global deaths can be attributed to inside air pollution. Feels unnecessary!

Outside air remained pretty choice for a while, except for the waste and dead bodies piled up out back, but once industrialization got under way, things went bad, fast. Factories, coal mines, cars, roads, smoking, cooking inside with wood, cooking inside with gas — all not great for lungs that evolved to live to their fullest on pristine air.

We had a pretty good idea these things weren’t good for us, but the incentives to ignore that and build economies vastly outweighed the costs. Almost 8% of global deaths can now be attributed to outside air pollution.

The economic math became even more lopsided when we realized we could park factories next to and pave roads through the communities of the historically marginalized, stripping those communities of trees, while increasing heat and reducing air quality in about seven different ways.

One great thing about air pollution is how quickly we can make it go away. Like, immediately. Overnight. Or faster! Unlike carbon or even methane emissions, removing a source of air pollution inside or outside a home, school, restaurant, or workplace instantly improves the well-being of everyone in the surrounding area.

So we should do more of that.

To remain hydrated and to regulate body temperature. Cells need it, tissues need it, we all need it. Electrolytes are great and keep our sodium and potassium up to snuff. Water also helps keep our temps in check through some pretty swell processes like sweating and evaporative cooling.

But also it turns out water helps us clean ourselves, and especially our hands, cook our food, to travel on and transport goods, to put out fires, grow food, and for Slip ‘N Slides.

Fresh water, not salty. Not brackish either, dammit, I said fresh.

Great, now we need to filter out common contaminants like lead, atrazine, arsenic, mercury, nitrates. and a variety of fun pathogens, and then usually we add a bit of chlorine to purify it and fluoride so you teeth don’t fall out (unsafe water is responsible for about 1.2 million deaths a year)

Access-wise, we’ve always instinctively built villages and towns and cities near drinking water, but obviously not everybody can do that and so that got contentious, fast.

Quality-wise, we used to just use the bathroom directly in our drinking water, so. But even after we moved on from that embarrassing stretch, we still dumped dead bodies and other waste in our precious streams and rivers, and later, a huge variety of industrial, pharmaceutical, and farm-related chemicals and poisons joined the pot.

We also built a lot — a lot — of pipes with lead, because it didn’t corrode as much as alternatives. We eventually realized lead in the bloodstream reduces IQ and have made huge progress to reduce exposure, but we’re definitely not all the way there, which is stupid.

Well, first, we could just all agree to stop dumping shit in our water, directly or indirectly, like fertilizer runoff.

Once we do, we’ve got our work cut out for us, from cleaning up major water sources like the Erie Canal and Hudson River on the east coast, to the New River on the west coast, and all of the many tributaries into the Mississippi in between.

In addition, we’ve still got a whole hell of a lot of leaky pipes, and those aforementioned lead pipes, and replacing them will take a very long time and a whole hell of a lot of money. It’s not the sexiest use of our cash, but again, these are fundamental make-or-break requirements — there’s no better way to spend it.

Because it’s delicious AND we need it to convert into energy.

We digest food, absorb what we need, and then process it through glycolysis etc into mitochondria and, combined with a little hit of that sweet sweet oxygen in a process called cellular respiration, we make ATP, and then like magic, it’s Thursday all over again and you can get out of bed to face the sum of your lifetime decisions.

Nutrient-dense, affordable, accessible.

Over time we’re finding out how our microbiomes define what diet is best for each of us — though we’ve just gotten started on understanding the gut — but broadly, most science agrees that less meat, less dairy, less sugar, basically no processed food, and way more legumes and vegetables is the way to go.

Chasing our food was always a bit dangerous. Agriculture has a lot of pros and A LOT of cons, including serfdom and slavery, and specific crops requiring a specific set of recurring weather conditions, which was even more complicated when we thought heavy rains and drought were the gods punishing us.

Industrial farming has made more food accessible to more people, but reduced the quality of what’s available and prioritized the wrong foods, making people, animals, and soil drastically less healthy overall.

There are way more people than before in geographies that are more likely to live in poverty (9% of the world’s population is “severely food insecure”, which is a huge improvement, but we’ve got a long way to go)

Oh, and a disturbing percentage of what we grow — say, corn or soy — isn’t even fed to humans. It’s either fed to enormous cows or chickens after an antibiotics appetizer, or turned into syrups or ethanol, both of which are no bueno, all of which requires massive amounts of — you guessed it — not-salty water.

Worldwide demand for meat has dominated land-use, driven deforestation at home and abroad, and created a massive amount of carbon emissions (see chart above)

Instead of prioritizing access to affordably nutrient-dense food, we…don’t do that…and let a dangerously unregulated supplements industry thrive

The incentives for what we grow and what we eat have to change, and that’s going to require a kitchen-sink approach, including:

One, because sleep’s fucking amazing, and two, it’s amazing because it:

Everybody’s a little different but seven to nine hours a night seems like the Goldilocks Zone, with a little more for teenagers. A dark, cold room, no screens, as few interruptions as possible.

We work too much

We’re too stressed out

We stay up too late

We eat too much and too close to bedtime

We drink a shit ton of caffeine late in the day

And Black and Brown people often live in homes they can’t cool down and/or are overcrowded.

Do the opposite of all of those things? There’s a lot we can do system-wide to improve sleep via reducing stress, including:

Pretty straight-forward! Shelter helps us protect ourselves from harsh conditions - sun, wind, rain, cold, heat. But shelter doesn’t just protect us, it also protects our food and other essentials.

Water-tight, insulated — and not with toxic materials, please — affordable, with plumbing, so the air doesn’t get poisoned, and near a fresh-water source.

Well, once we moved on from branches and leaves to rock overhangs and caves — which, when you’ve got nothing else are pretty great — upgraded shelters required not only more sophisticated understanding and tools to build, but more resources from which to build them, like woven fibers, animal hides, wood, steel, and more.

And those required more extensive bartering or, eventually, some form of money. If you couldn’t build something new or buy your own, you had to rent or be a serf or a slave.

To build shelter requires land, and after colonizers stole the land from indigenous people everywhere, the best land became more scarce, unaffordable, or just unattainable in some way, mostly because of greedy, asshole warlords, slave-owners, slumlords, or landlords.

Terrible single-family zoning practices in the US made the suburbs off-limits to more dense housing, public transportation, and marginalized families

I’m not kidding when I say we need to build four million new affordable homes across the U.S. and then power them all with clean electrify, SPEAKING OF—

I mean we really started to use power when we started to rope carts to animals to plow fields and take us and our goods around the neighborhood, which must have been super fun.

For today’s purposes though, I’m talking water, wind, steam, whale oil for a while — which fucking sucks — and eventually electrical power.

These tools helped us to see in the dark, which, again, revelatory, and to enhance shelter — to warm and cool our shelter and bodies, to to heat and chill (and preserve) food, and to charge our kids’ iPads to play Minecraft.

Affordable, clean, renewable power transmitted over a gazillion new long-distance power lines and backed up with community and residential batteries

Fossil fuels powered the 20th century. The companies that mined or drilled, refined, and distributed them realized with ALARMING SPECIFICITY that they’d cause global warming and then lied about it for 60 years

Fossil fuels are a finite resource trapped under certain states or countries or parts of the ocean so we’ve fought over them a lot or bribed horrific dictatorships to please drill more

13% of the world doesn’t have access to electricity

By transitioning to affordable, clean, renewable power transmitted over a gazillion new long-distance power lines and backed up with community and residential batteries

Mining the minerals and metals we need is already complicated all over again, but hopefully we’ve learned something from last time?

Even if you’ve got all of the essentials covered, you’re going to get sick, or hurt. That’s life.

Something comprehensive and affordable that includes trusted community health workers who know you and who can provide you with guidance, checkups, vaccines, and more so you’re less frequently surprised when something comes up, and who can connect you with specialists as needed.

Well, we got way more access to everything above, but then it was access to less-good versions of those, which made people sick, and then because of profits we focused way more on medicine and specialty medicine than public health and wellness

Our food makes us sick

And now it costs a small fortune to have your wisdom teeth removed, if you can find a bus that’ll take you to the dentist, who is probably booked six months out and is short many nurses, oh and dental isn’t usually a part of your health insurance

And that’s before COVID, which has become much more survivable over time, but which continues to kill 130,000+ Americans a year, and potentially contributes to tens of thousands of extra deaths we really can’t figure out

Emphasize prevention and value-based care (38% of US people polled said they delayed care due to costs last year)

Build and staff a million community health clinics

Mandate paid sick leave

Add a single-payer health insurance option

Increase the percentage of Black doctors and nurses

Pay nursing teachers much more

Expand telehealth

Reduce the cost of drugs

Expand Medicaid everywher

I don’t know, stop sacrificing children at every turn?