Some key themes of Variants:
The image shows an old people’s home in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The message, ‘andrà tutto bene’ roughly translates as ‘it’s going to be OK’. This was the slogan used by the then Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, to encourage his people through those testing times (similar to most other state leaders).
His slogan belies another reality: it’s going to be/go better if you are:
- not poor,
- not obese,
- not diabetic,
- not breathing in polluted air and
- do not suffer from existing health conditions.
This is the aim of Variants: to have a world where these conditions are true for an increasing amount of people.
This is what underpins my work as a ‘health hesitancy campaigner’: we rarely ‘hesitate’ when voting or vaccinating, so why is there so much hesitancy linked to caring for one’s health?
We can create more beneficial health trajectories for everybody!
Millions of tonnes of cargo pass through the port of Hamburg every year – a glimpse of this can be seen in the accompanying image. This means that growers, pickers, packers, processors, transporters, sellers and buyers across the globe intersect in getting something from somewhere to someone else, somewhere else; macros trends linked to micro actions.
Since the pandemic, most of us are familiar with the term ' R rate' - the reproduction rate of a virus within a given population. What other R rates do we enable through the port of Hamburg? The delivery of fizzy, sugary drinks or confectionary or cheap goods produced by workers on very low wages or single use plastic. It is not so much a question of 'levelling up' (as promoted by the UK government in recent years) but linking up that needs to be our main concern regarding the R rates that emerge as much in a virus as in society and the economy at large.
How do the norms and dreams of society and its citizens influence the world we live in? The image on the left is of a mountain around Lake Garda and a ‘real butterfly’ photographed on top of that mountain. This is Nature; this is astonishing, radical, beautiful Nature.
Nature as the guiding norm and aspirational dream.
Nature as the basis to our existence and our dreams building from that.
Variants aims to promote the following ideas:
- Linking up nature with human nature
- Fostering mental mobility
- Putting in place social health structures
- Striving for bodily sovereignty
- Having fun whilst caring for our bodies and planet