Environment, development and health: ideological metaphors of post-traditional societies?

Environment and health have become nearly interchangeable concepts in post-traditional societies. We are able to observe almost an obsession with them, as if individual changes in ways of life--important for the individual and significant for the culture though they may be--possessed the power to overthrow a system of economic relations that aims at growth in numerical terms rather than at development, enabling society to sustain its specific modes of private and public interaction.