Environmental Health and Sustainable Living: Chapter 15 Review

Finding the Right Balance

In Chapter 15 of her text Health: The Basics, Donatelle offers a discussion on the implications of the natural environment for our health as individuals and as a species. Her evaluation reveals that we share a directly reciprocal relationship with our environment, and that the balance we strike in treating it with respect will have a direct consequence for our own longevity. As readers, we are asked to examine the aspects of our lives that contribute positively to the environment and those that can negatively impact it. Consequently, we can make changes in our lifestyle choices to improve the tilt of this balance toward activities that are environmentally neutral or beneficial.

For instance, we may be inclined to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of shopping for certain vegetables versus maintaining a personal vegetable garden. While it may not be feasible to reduce our dependency on grocery store supply chains and large farming operations altogether, we can find the right balance between this dependency and some level of healthful autonomy. Environmental health as a discipline is grounded in exactly this kind of analysis — understanding how our daily decisions interact with the larger ecological systems we depend upon.

Creating Healthy and Caring Relationships

A recurring theme of the Donatelle text is the clear connection between achieving environmental sustainability and fostering a strong sense of community. Indeed, much of the achievement in the area of conservation rests on the ability of local groups to improve habits and conditions in their immediate surroundings. Therefore, creating healthy and caring relationships within these communities can be essential to stimulating the involvement of neighborhood leaders, localized public agencies, area businesses, schools, and families.

Cooperation, collaboration, and a shared set of practices and objectives can help transform individual lifestyle changes into community-wide transformations. Efforts to stimulate carpooling, bicycle riding, and the integration of walking or biking paths can require the assembled efforts of numerous parties, and can ultimately result in genuinely progressive changes in the way community members consume energy and contribute to air quality. Moreover, these micro-level relationships can help pave the way for macro-level relationships in which different communities support one another in meeting shared conservation and sustainability goals. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency similarly recognizes community engagement as a cornerstone of effective environmental health practice.

Avoiding Risks from Harmful Habits

In many ways, Chapter 15 of the Donatelle text illustrates how we can become addicted to certain habits that are negative for the environment and negative for our own individual health outcomes. For instance, cigarette smoking represents one of the leading causes of health maladies and mortality in the United States and is simultaneously a top cause of air pollution at the individual level. This means that in addition to the hazards of emphysema and lung cancer to which the smoker puts himself and others at risk, additional hazards exist in the smoker's contribution to the presence of harmful carcinogens in our air and environment.

For the individual smoker, cessation from this addiction represents one way — albeit a challenging one — to begin making a direct impact on both personal and environmental health. The CDC documents extensively how tobacco smoke degrades both human health and air quality. The attitude that integrates personal and environmental health priorities can also significantly alter one's way of thinking, such that decisions are made with the intent to lessen risk in both areas. This can lead to individual lifestyle changes in food consumption, energy use, transportation, and purchasing habits — all to the benefit of personal longevity and environmental conservation.