Health and Sustainability. an Introduction

About this Book

• Systematically explores the relationship between health and sustainability
• Provides a primer on health science and how it can be used to support decisions in health and sustainability
• Offers an expanded discussion of "ways of knowing" in the context of how scientific knowledge is achieved, understood, accepted, and used in health and environmental advocacy, and how they relate to sustainability
• Practical knowledge and essential context for different types of sustainability problems related to health

Health and sustainability have become ubiquitous topics in all realms of popular discourse. What these discussions often overlook is the fact that the two concepts are interrelated, and that their surrounding policies and practices can often inform and reinforce each other. As sustainability measures are already in place across many levels of government, there is now an opportunity to extend these principles to improve health care and health care policy.

Health and Sustainability: An Introduction details how the values of sustainability can be applied to the design of health systems and the delivery of primary care. By providing a practical framework for understanding complicated sustainability problems related to health, the book offers an authoritative resource for understanding:

- health and environmental rights
- parallels between human toxicology and ecotoxicology
- how health promotion strategy can be a template for sustainability
- health science and how it can be used to support decisions in health and sustainability
- how scientific knowledge is achieved, understood, accepted, and used in health and environmental advocacy, and how this relates to sustainability

Students and practitioners in health will benefit from this introduction to sustainability, and those in sustainability and environmental studies will benefit from this application to human health. Health and Sustainability offers a roadmap for successfully integrating these approaches for healthier people and environment.

Readership: Students, practitioners in public health, environmental health, and health promotion; Physicians and scholars in community medicine, occupational medicine, and preventive medicine; sustainability managers in the private sector

Table of Contents

Foreword on Health
Foreword on Sustainability
Preface
Chapter 1 Health and Sustainability
Chapter 2 Ways of Knowing
Chapter 3 Catastrophic Failure
Chapter 4 Pollution and Contamination
Chapter 5 Chemical Pollution and Health
Chapter 6 Ecosystem Change and Infectious Disease
Chapter 7 Socially-Mediated Issues
Chapter 8 Ecosystem Services and Health
Chapter 9 Artificial Ecosystems
Chapter 10 Energy
Chapter 11 Culture and Rights
Chapter 12 Spirituality and Sustainability
Chapter 13 The Professionalization of Sustainability
Selected Sources
Index

Author

Tee L. Guidotti, Fulbright Visiting Chair, University of Ottawa, Institute for Science, Society, and Policy

Dr. Tee L. Guidotti is a physician specializing in pulmonary medicine and in occupational and environmental medicine, trained at Johns Hopkins. He had a long academic career devoted to public health, environmental and occupational health, and the relationship between ecosystem integrity and human health, mostly at the University of Alberta (Canada) and George Washington University (USA). He is currently an international consultant working through Medical Advisory Services, a small firm with offices in Rockville, Maryland, where his work convinced him that the unifying framework for what he was doing was sustainability. In 2015, he is on leave of absence as a Fulbright Visiting Chair at the University of Ottawa, in the Institute for Science, Society, and Policy.