Policy Brief.

Background As Michael McCally notes in Life Support: The Environment and Human Health, “it is at least since the time of Hippocrates’s essay Air, Water, and Places that humans have been aware of the many connections between health and the environment.” Despite this awareness, seldom do we create an environment optimal for achieving health and wellbeing. A vital part of an environment which is supportive of public health is land conservation that contributes to green infrastructure. Green infrastructure is the interconnected system of natural areas and open spaces that are not only important for sustaining wildlife but also people. From an ecological perspective, connecting landscape components creates contiguous habitat. On the other hand, this structure also affects human and environmental functions that influence health outcomes. A system of local parks connected by greenways which are in turn connected to a regional system of conserved lands supports not only the delivery of environmental goods important for health but also the opportunity to perform healthful behaviors. As Donna Erickson notes in Metro Green: Connecting Open Space in North American Cities, considering the pattern of conserved lands as infrastructure “...has profound implications for how the landscape is studied, planned, and developed.” The study outlined in this brief addresses the question: Is the Florida Communities Trust land acquisition program supporting public health by creating a more connected landscape structure? I do not account for the myriad confounding variables necessary to infer a causal relationship between the environment and health outcomes. Rather, I examine this program to determine if it is contributing to the green infrastructure which an increasing amount of evidence has shown is necessary to support health and health behaviors.