November 2023 Feature Interview,
Dr. Marcelo Korc

This interview, conducted by by Nat Thomson, Simmons MSW Candidate, runs abridged in the November 2023 issue of the MPH Monthly.  

Dr Korc is the Representative in Paraguay at Pan American Health Organization & a Simmons MPH Professor

What initially drew you to the chemical engineering realm of study, where you started your career?

That’s a good question. Immaturity? [laughs] I was living in Uruguay, where I was born. I lived there until I finished high school, and at that time in Uruguay, in your last year of high school you had to guide yourself towards a specific career, so I did engineering, but, at the time my love was moreso environmental issues. At the time, environmentalism was just not a career in its own right. So, I started in the chemical engineering field. Eventually, I did my undergrad in Israel and my Ph.D. in The States. So then after I finished my Ph.D., my first job was to work in the field of air quality research, in northern California. What you would call today a “startup” but at the time we just called it a little place, made up of researchers of air quality. So, then, that was how I was able to eventually connect my background in chemical engineering with my passion for environmental issues.

I suppose that was when the idea and issue of “smog” was emerging in California and the nation?

Yes, this was the early 90s. At that time many studies were being conducted in the states to understand, three-dimensionally, the air pollution episodes that were happening in different parts of the country. We started in southern California, the typical Los Angeles area, but also the Lake Michigan and the Northeast corridor, from North Carolina to Canada. However, instead of just doing surface measurements, we did measurements with aircraft, so we were able to get a more three-dimensional measure of the cloud as it moved and developed, not just the impact on the terrestrial surface level. This data helped us understand the episodes better as well as how to attempt to control them. 

In the media of that era, "extreme" pollution was largely covered as something that tended to be confined to Los Angeles or Hong Kong; I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how it’s shifted to a fully mainstream topic over the past 30 years or so.

At the time we were focusing on what were called “episodes” of air pollution at very high levels. However, with the knowledge we were able to collect, the health aspect of air pollution became more clear, and we saw how important it was not just to understand the episodes, but the same phenomena at comparatively lower levels, because even then there is an impact on health. With time, the science and public health community realized this, and so air quality standards changed over time, alongside the research findings, to be more stringent and to focus on a day-to-day monitoring and reporting approach, as opposed to only looking at the extreme high-level episodes we had researched initially. Looking at the peaks, it becomes clear how emission levels and natural meteorology combine to create these episodes, but looking at air pollution in a day-in-day-out fashion, it’s just a different approach to controlling and lowering. A much more massive effort overall.

So as you were working on this, the philosophy changed- from looking at these “code red” types of days to looking at the daily levels in a permanent monitoring approach? 

That’s right. And so today, that’s how or why you see the air quality index alongside the other things that a meteorologist would typically cover. The measure of the index has also changed. What we now call “red” is something that, when I started in the research, we would have not called red, because the orientation was around just extreme episodes of pollution. Over time, the research showed that even at that level we would have been considered as “low” back then, there were still health impacts that we just weren’t considering. We also started to think more about susceptible populations, not just the whole average population. For example, we started to look at, let’s say, children with asthma, and the negative impact was stronger, but there wasn’t much attention to those populations and their increased susceptibility, at the start. Policies began to become more informed about vulnerable populations, not just the general average whole and the broad issue of polluted air.

What factors do you feel propelled things forward in this direction?

In the past 10 years we have also had this explosion of data gathering, through various means, be it sensors or other technology. In the '90s, some of this was impossible to imagine. When I started, we were much more focused on simply understanding how the episodes formed and moved and how the chemistry and the physics of it all tended to operate. Once we understood the mathematical models and had access to increased computing power, we were then able to work much faster on those models and make better use of them. Back then to understand just one day of pollution data, we would have had to run the computer for one week. There was no usefulness in terms of projecting because of how long it took to process. So then, the growth in computing power helped us a lot.


How were you able to move from this space of air pollution research, which is let’s say, public health adjacent, into a more direct public health type of work and research?

While I was working in pollution research in the ‘90s I started to explore a bit of what else could be out there. I had an opportunity to be an AAAS Honorary Fellow in 1996 and I wrote a paper, one of the first papers using the concept of environmental justice around air pollution. This was all very new at the time. We used census tract-level data with interpolations of other data to try to understand exposure and effects for different populations. So that was my first encounter with public health. Eventually, when I moved on from that company, being from Uruguay, I applied for and subsequently received an offer to work with a WHO Technical Center, which at the time was in Lima Peru. So, I became the Air Quality Advisor for the WHO/Pan-American Health Organization for several years. The truth is, I wanted to go down there, get that knowledge, and then come back to the United States, but... life takes its path sometimes. That role introduced me to public health, and I fell in love with public health and started to feel like it was my purpose. I have been with the organization for over 25 years now.

You’ve worked in different places in different roles and capacities; are there different ways that public health tends to play out in different cultures or nations, from your observations?

Totally. Public health can be considered a combination of science and art, right? It’s not only science, but it’s not only art. You need to use scientific tools to develop good theories and interventions for health issues. At the same time, it’s an art because it’s very social and depends on the culture and the political environment that you’re in. It’s a politically oriented practice; once you put the word public in there, it’s political. When the public has the place to decide and there are opinions involved, then it’s political. Being in the field, in specific countries, you get a better feel for how each country ends up working things out. Some systems may be local, some countries might skew towards federal systems more, some systems might defer to local institutions more, while others might put more in the hands of centralized systems with, say, a Minister of Health. All these factors add up to differences in what you can do.

So there’s a segment of the population here in America that are climate change denialists, let’s say. Does that tend to happen outside of this country or could you consider this a distinctly American phenomenon?

It’s interesting. I did not find ever in these [other] countries that climate change was an issue of opinion. Perhaps because The US is a wealthier country, people can afford the luxury of having an opinion on something that is science. The US seems to have allowed itself to have the luxury to look at this issue in this fashion. We saw this similarly with the COVID-19 vaccination opinions. And I call it opinions because science tends to have no place there in the views. So be it climate change or vaccination, we can see the similarities there where it’s opinion-driven.

It kind of tends to remind me of how people from opposing teams in a sporting match might react to a particular call; each team is going to react to a referee's decision differently, not based on the reality of the situation but based on more primal, gut affiliation with a franchise.

Right, and some people have dedicated their lives to the objective science of the matter, they understand it, and they put it out there for what it is. The first climate change literature was published in the '60s. We are in 2023 and still arguing over these things, it’s a little ridiculous. But back to the Latin American countries, they do not have this luxury, they are living with climate change day in and day out, so there is not much motivation or appetite for contrarian thinking in this regard. Everyone sees the droughts with their own eyes, they experience them firsthand. The farming communities are impacted plainly, and while there are of course big corporations, there are a lot of small farmers, lower-income people, and families who live off the land. If those people cannot do this anymore, then they have to migrate, which is very different from how many people here in the US tend to live.

Right- if you’re only here in The US and spend most of your day inside in air conditioning and writing emails and then you go to the mall, you experience the exact same set of climate circumstances in a very different and minimal fashion. Without a globally informed worldview, another luxury perhaps, I guess I can understand how some of these anti-factual views get developed.

Right. So for those where the climate is closely tied to what they live off of and where their food is coming from, then the climate has a direct impact on your security, your food security, or your food insecurity, it’s just a different story altogether. Here in Paraguay, we are starting to experience The El Nino Effect, it’s getting settled in the southern hemisphere. We are going to have major issues here in Paraguay and the alarm is already being sounded. One issue will be the heat waves and the other will be Dengue fever outbreaks. The flag has already been raised, like it or hate it, but we are already working on how to handle these effects of the environment changing.

We’re coming into an election year here in The US, do you have any thoughts on or insights into how our domestic agencies or departments are tackling the issue of climate change?

It is certainly complex here in the states, in that you have to talk about the federal and the state levels of policy and operations. At the federal level, they have done some things that indicate to me that they have seen it for what it is. They created The Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, which helps. Each government and country has to take its measures, but the way The US tends to take its measures, it’s more about a "market forces approach" than an overall "command and control approach"; give the market the right motivations and the market will come to the right solution, more or less. That’s fine. You can either have command and control, where the governing body tells you what it is and what it needs to be, or the other is that market-driven forces will change the economy into moving towards the right things, be it in hybrid cars, electric cars or whatever comes next on the market. 

Either way, there is a move away from gasoline-powered vehicles. The US in the ‘70s and ‘80s went full command and control; let’s cut the bad stuff as fast as we can, and then they started to move more towards market-driven measures. This may work better in The US because it’s a consumer and market-driven society. Here in Asuncion, the main cars come from Japan, through Chile, from 2004. So that’s what is considered the main cars in the market here. So between here and The US, you can see how wildly different things tend to operate. The context is different. In the US things became politicized and got stuck there in politics. Not a good situation. It gets stuck in the opinion aspect like we discussed- "Who is stronger?"

More and more I feel a lack of equilibrium between the collective and the individual. During the previous administration, I perhaps thought that was true on account of the politics of the time and that many of us were living in a state of protest, but it seems like maybe this lack of equilibrium has persisted. We seem very much to be living in the “I” and not in the “we,” or that everyone has something to say and wants to be listened to, but no one is listening to one another. That perhaps is what scares me the most. 

It used to be that only, say, politicians had the opportunity, or reason, to be up on a soapbox and in the media, but now many feel a strong need to soapbox their views and can do so pretty easily.

Everybody wants to have it, but at the same time they feel lonely, and it starts to get into the space of mental health very quickly. Even when I watch the news here, I feel like the news stations or programs get very redundant; they want to operate very fast and they also want to be entertaining, which to me, can have the opposite effect of making people, or at least me, feel very bored. There’s no nuance and it tends to make me feel very sad. The truth is that it’s exhausting, but it’s also a reflection of the way that society is operating.

Interestingly, you brought up the market forces approach to fossil fuels and emissions. There are all sorts of people who are putting their foot down or protesting this transition politically, but ultimately the car makers or the market more broadly tend to have the market research in hand saying "this is what people are starting to want," and so then, the car makers or any other market participant isn’t just going to stop making what people will tend to buy. It’s sort of a done deal.

I agree, it’s a done deal. You’re much better served to spend your time seeing how you are going to adapt and then move with the same curves, versus trying and change the curve only somewhat to your advantage, monetarily, politically, culturally, or what have you.

Agreed. It’s kind of bizarre for politicians in certain states to say that we’re gonna keep coal alive or keep cars running on diesel, while at the same time, these are traditionally people who are proponents of a free market economy, so at that point, it just becomes cultural performance art of some kind.

The market talks about the way they purchase things. What they consume. That’s how the market works. So, in that regard, it’s a done deal. But then there is performance on the left and theatrics on the right. If you are married to the market as a choice, which is fine, however, you have to live with it. And then within the limits that you have with that, make the best of it that you can.

What professorial duties are you involved in lately for the MPH program? 

Currently, I am working on redesigning the course on environmental health and justice. I just finished teaching this course this most recent term. One of the things that I would like to work on more with students, is that even though I understand that students treasure activism, how does activism fit into things for them; how can students debate better? How can they bring the arguments better, versus just bringing the arguments louder, if you will? Sometimes I feel like the students tend to bring issues that are delicate to discuss to the table very quickly . For example, issues of systemic racism or being very quick to label things as systemically racist, without illustrating exactly how and why that label is valid. If one is going to go with that approach for analyzing a scenario, it’s a loaded statement. I’m not saying in every instance that it is not what it is being labeled as, or that it is, I’m just saying that the evidence to back up that assertion is important. Show me the foundation of the argument, not just the conclusion. So, I think this is something that in the next wave of the course, I will add some elements of how to build the foundations of the arguments for the environmental injustices discussed in the course. If you want to say that something is an environmental injustice, this isn’t a problem, just show us how you got there; let’s be more analytical than just loud about the big labels like systemic racism and white privilege. I’m never going to be against any of this, as long as it can be shown. If one is in a real debate over an issue, and the other side has the data and analysis while you don’t, you lose.

What do you do to enrich or express yourself in your time?

The most important thing for me is to stay in touch with my wife and three children. Two of my children are in college and the third is in 11th grade, so that’s very enriching for me. As a Jewish person, I try to go back to my roots and go back to philosophical writings and scripture. There is a specific Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks whose writing I cherish very much, but unfortunately, he passed away during COVID in 2020. He wrote a lot about morality and ethics. His role was that of the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom. I have spent a lot of time reading his literature. I love it because I always have something new to learn from his writing. I don’t know that I would say that it lowers my anxiety, but it is a way of centering myself.

So then would you say there’s a connection between your faith and your path in public health?

Yes totally, there is a connection between myself as a Jewish person and as a practitioner of public health, because my purpose in life is about helping people and helping people through the vehicle that I am pursuing, and that goes hand in hand with who I am as a person, my identity as a Jewish man.