Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 33
Environment and Health
Hilda E. Kurtz and Karen E. Smoyer-Tomic
Introduction
Environmental health can be viewed in terms of human impacts affecting the health
of the environment, as well as the impacts of the environment on human health.
Geographers theorise and examine both issues from a variety of sub-areas, including
environmental justice, political ecology, hazards geography and health geography.
Geography has long been concerned with understanding the complex interplay of
human-environment relations both as a central theme as well as through subtexts
arising in its systematic branches. In the face of rapid and adverse environmental
changes, human and ecological health have become key focal points for evaluating
relationships between human use of the environment, the ecosystemic disruptions
that ensue, and their implications for human well-being. The discourse on sustain-
ability has been infl uential in understanding the interplay of human-environment
relations, as has a growing acceptance that we live in a 'risk society' (Beck, 1986).
We refer to these complex relations as the
human-environment-health nexus
. While
geographers and those in other disciplines have long recognised the environmental
consequences of human activity, studies of disparities in health and disparities in
environmental quality have been conducted in largely separate realms both within
and outside of geography (Brulle and Pellow, 2006).
This chapter considers how geographers and those in related disciplines under-
stand the human-environment-health nexus at a range of geographic scales. We
review developments in four areas of geography: environmental justice (EJ), political
ecology of disease, vulnerability analyses and health geography. In each, we note
the increasing importance ascribed to environmental and health disparities, a
growing emphasis on ecological analyses, and the ways in which particular opera-
tional defi nitions of health and environment shape research trajectories. Geographic
scholarship on EJ problematises the human-environment-health nexus, politicising
and interrogating the uneven impact of (primarily) industrial activity on both human
health and the health of the environment, as well as the complex factors which
produce such uneven effects. Geographic scholarship on the political ecology of
