Our health is the price of industrial capitalism

The dramatic rise in young adult cancer rates are the latest warning

Audio version

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The mass media has been so firmly captured by the progress narrative it can be difficult to find out the true state of our civilisation. We’re all living longer and getting healthier, right? National Geographic’s January cover story would certainly have you believe this, crowing about how modern medicine and technology means we’re all going to be skydiving into our 90s. On the ecological front, a breakthrough in nuclear fusion technology, reported breathlessly by what seemed like every media outlet on the planet, means we can stop worrying about climate breakdown, right? Wrong. There is no breakthrough.

So often we’re led to believe we live in a time that doesn’t exist. Yet this propaganda serves a very useful purpose—if we’re placated by believing these fairy-tales, we’re hardly likely to agitate for change. We just have to let our rulers get on with it and we’ll be living in full health until we’re 120 in no time.

In the real world however, a bit of research confirms things aren’t so rosy. Global life expectancy has declined year-on-year for the first time since 1959 because our rulers allowed a virus which has more in common with HIV than a cold to establish itself in global circulation. (The lies told by our rulers about just-a-cold-covid are very long and can be seen here). Excess deaths in 2022 and early 2023 continue to be way above pre-pandemic baselines, sometimes even the highest they’ve ever been - despite the fact the pandemic is supposedly over. Yet judging by the silence in the media you’d think we successfully beat covid.

This avoidance of reality in favour of the progress narrative means many stories that should be at the front of our consciousness just aren’t. For example, the astonishing, frightening rise in cancer among young people. In recent years study after study after study has confirmed the same thing: we are in the early stages of a youth cancer epidemic.

The big headline stat is this: every generation since the mid-80s has a higher cancer incidence than the generation before.

Skyrocketing youth cancer

This was the conclusion of one of the largest studies of its kind published in October last year which found that the incidence of early-onset cancer (cancers diagnosed in adults under 50 years of age) of the breast, colorectum, endometrium, oesophagus, extrahepatic bile duct, gallbladder, head and neck, kidney, liver, bone marrow, pancreas, prostate, stomach, blood plasma and thyroid has increased in multiple countries around the world on the same time frame. The researchers say that early screening cannot be the only cause, and that “a genuine increase in the incidence of early-onset forms of several cancer types also seems to have emerged.” Rates among young people in many countries studied, from Ecuador, to Indonesia to Italy, are increasing 2-5% per year.

The trend in the US is stark: a study of adolescents and young adults found a shocking thirty percent increase in cancer diagnoses among individuals aged between fifteen to thirty-nine years old between 1973 and 2015.

The signs have been here for a while. A study from 2020 found that rates of late-stage colorectal cancer in young people grew more than 60% between 1988 and 2015, with the biggest increase among people aged 20-39. In the UK, cancer in people aged 20-24 has increased nearly 25% since the early 90s. Last year the NHS treated more people for cancer than ever before.

More broadly, cancer is on the march. In the 90s one in three people would develop cancer. Now it is one in two. In the year 2000, cancer was the number one cause of death in only two US states: Alaska and Minnesota. Cancer is now the leading cause of death in twenty-two states.

With young adult cancer rates unable to be explained by increased testing, we have to face reality: modern society and industrial capitalism is making us sicker and sicker.

A stew of toxicity

Supermarkets shelves are saturated with corporate food high in processed fats and sugar; industrial agriculture doses enormous quantities of cancer-causing pesticides on our fruits and vegetables; plastics (a fossil fuel-based product) are our now in the placentas of the unborn; they are in breast milk and circulating in our bloodstream; increased societal stresses have left people with less and less time to be healthy. On the roads (which means all around us) there are 1.2 billion mainly fossil fuelled cars globally, forecast to increase to 2 billion by 2035. In general, we all have to wade daily through a stew of forever chemicals and pollution. Just look at this massive list of known and probable carcinogens in our environment.

When this research is covered by the media however, you’ll almost never see an article suggest that we should change the system to get to the root of the problem. The advice is usually of the discrete, individualistic, consumer variety: buy organic, do more exercise, get more sleep, get tested earlier.

How about changing the system to ensure that the only vegetables we can eat are organic. Or change it to give people more free time to exercise or sleep; or how about we stop plastic production or halt new fossil fuel production to move us out of a carcinogenic world? These stories never tell us that the causes of cancer are baked into industrial life and cannot be solved by individual behaviour change. I suppose “end fossil fuelled industrial capitalism” doesn’t fill people with agency. But it’s exactly what we need to do.

Cancer in young people (indeed cancer in general) is another of the structural crises of our time, playing out almost unseen in the background, but guaranteed to warp the future. This crisis will further strain our world as we have known it, working alongside covid to create sicker societies (covid itself may raise your risk of cancer and at the least raises your risk of death if you have cancer by supressing the cancer-fighting activity of certain proteins). This should be an all-hands-on-deck period of modern human history. Governments should be mobilising to rapidly reconfigure society to prioritise human health, wellbeing and planetary flourishing. They won’t do it. But the good news is that what is unsustainable cannot be sustained. Change will come.

(Artwork by @ronniefurbear on IG)