Ensuring Environmental Health in Postindustrial Cities Workshop Summary (2003) / Chapter Skim
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8. Where Do We Go From Here?
8. Where Do We Go From Here?
Pages 61-67
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From page 61... ...
· Who is missing from policy making on environmental health MORE AND BETTER FEEDBACK LOOPS issues? Several panelists observed that the workshop's sessions had been eye-opening with regard to linkages between environmental and health issues.
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From page 62... ...
Richard Jackson showed how it was the Olympics that raised public awareness to the impacts of vehicular travel and air pollution in Atlanta, as revealed by increases in insurance healthclaim rates and frequency of visits to hospital emergency rooms. Gould cited Senator Robert F
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From page 63... ...
"By training community residents for careers in environmental health," Bush suggested, "this could provide both jobs as well as access to valid and reliable data." Baruch Fischhoff, professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, said that a program at Xavier University of Louisiana, which "educates African-Americans to do exactly those sorts of jobs, is a sterling example." One participant, noting a need to gather data on long-term cumulative effects of pollutants involving dispersed and labor-intensive data on life histories, residences, and workplaces, among other things, suggested that secondary-school students might serve as information gatherers. This could "actually contribute in significant ways to the real science of these effects," he said, "while also providing job training and educational experiences for high-school kids." MAKING CLEAR THE CONNECTIONS While generally in agreement with the need to create jobs that are meaningful both for individuals' careers and the betterment of community environmental health, Wright also sounded a note of caution.
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From page 64... ...
To be offered to the community as a free resource, it would avoid the situation of "isolated bits and pieces of information that we can't pull together one little health study there, one little environmental study here, which don't match up" and instead provide "the beginning of a system that should allow us to look much more comprehensively, layering as much data as we can put into it over time, so that we look across the community." Critical to effective action, panelists agreed, is the presentation of information to the community in a convenient, readily comprehensible way, and the securing of such information in the first place through collaborative efforts among the numerous and often diverse sources. Communication of environmental health issues requires creativity, said Jerry Thompson, a partner and director at Ketchum Pittsburgh.
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From page 65... ...
I cochaired Governor Ridge's Twenty-First Century Environment Commission several years ago, and for the very first time in this state we were able to have a set of government agencies openly sponsor conversations all over the state that actually used the terms 'land use' and 'planning'." Such agency involvement is not only desirable but essential, one participant remarked. "Environmental issues, health issues, and public health issues are technical issues and organizational issues, but at base they are political issues, and all of us as citizens need to address them that way." For one thing, as Dixon pointed out, agencies play a central role in "constantly having to balance the needs of what is environmentally safe versus the needs of economic development and growth." For another, agencies' regulations and oversight define reality for stakeholders, which ultimately yields positive results.
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From page 66... ...
We need to move away from reliance on gross domestic product and move toward, for example, what Canada has adopted the genuine progress indicator, or GPI, which uses a new system of national accounts to prioritize human capital, social capital, and environmental capital as well as economic capital. · Tax reform.
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From page 67... ...
Collaboration is extremely important, and collaboration across geopolitical lines a regional approach is especially important. Integration of services is important too, and so is integration of people: we need to have a broad consensus and continued dialogue on what we are doing, where we are headed, and how we get there; and we need to educate people so that they become participants in the whole effort."
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