Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Most of today's references to 'sustainable practices' underrepresent the true depth of the global problems we face. Tee Guidotti's new book gets serious about sustainability, defining it as simply 'balancing what is taken and what is given.' What comes into focus is how sustainability and health are forever linked, and that substantive change is needed before global health is irrevocably affected." -- William Leiss, PhD, McLaughlin Centre for Population Health Risk Assessment, University of Ottawa
"A timely book. The task of recharting a course to a sustainable future is great, urgent, and formidable. A clear understanding of the 'health and sustainability' relationship - and in particular that attaining environmental and social sustainability has enormous consequences for human wellbeing, happiness, health and survival - is essential." -- Anthony J. McMichael, from the foreword
About the Author
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. He is President-Elect of Sigma Xi, the international honor society for scientific research.
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