The Ecology of Environmental Health

The applied discipline of environmental health sciences seeks to clearly establish, secure and promote its role within many diverse science-based disciplines with similar names and yet very different approaches. These diverse disciplines include environmental science, ecology, environmental ethics, and many others. Traditionally, environmental health has been distinguished from these other disciplines in its emphasis on protecting human health (e.g. public and occupational health). Environmental protection is also an important part of environmental health, but has typically focused more on the affect that our environment has on human health rather than the effect that humans have on our environment. Environmental health also emphasizes practical, applied solutions to problems. One approach to this process integrates hazard anticipation, recognition and evaluation followed by intervention identifi ca-tion, implementation and evaluation. The intervention evaluation cycle is repeated until a problem is ultimately solved, or perhaps more realistically, until a higher priority problem takes precedent. As an environmental health microbiologist completing my doctoral research in waste management in an ecological institute, and previously serving as faculty and adjunct faculty in biology departments, my personal environmental health experience is somewhat unusual. While I don't identify myself as an ecologist, I believe that environmental health is beginning to recognize the value of an ecological systems approach to problem solving. Humans are just beginning to recognize, acknowledge and attempt to limit our contributions to a variety of environmental problems, with varying success. More people than ever before now seem to understand that the changes that we make in our environment yield results that affect our own health and well-being. To borrow a concept from the emminent biologist David Suzuki, we are all inextricably linked with our environment. Whatever we do within our environment ultimately affects us, either directly or indirectly, for better or worse. These affects have consequences on every scale, from our home environment and personal workstation ergonomics to global climate change and all of the intervening local, regional and national evironmental levels. Many humans no longer see ourselves in extreme terms, as either simply passive observers of our environment or as a plague upon it. We are recognizing and accepting that whenever we take a breath, drink, eat, touch, create waste or otherwise interact with our environment, we literally become a part of our environment. In fact, we have always been a part of our environment, but closer examination of these interactions serves to more clearly demonstrate …