Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The vulnerability approach 'requires a new way of viewing the world, one that
integrates perspectives from the sciences, social sciences and humanities' Cutter
(2003, p. 6). Turner et al., (2003) situate vulnerability fi rmly within what is known
as sustainability science. They attempt to redress the conceptual separation of
environment from population, with the implementation of a coupled human-
environmental systems framework that incorporates feedbacks between human
actions (and reactions) in the environment, environmental change and subsequent
shifting of multiple equilibria between human and environmental systems in a con-
tinuing cycle.
Health is embedded in the subtext of vulnerability scholarship in two quite dis-
tinct ways. First, the concept of
environmental
health emerges in terms of environ-
mental hazard likelihood based on an area's biophysical properties, which can be
traced back to conditions resulting both from natural features (e.g., landforms,
climate, location) and from how humans have modifi ed the environment to create
a new steady state. Second,
human
health arises in the treatment of the exposure,
sensitivity, and resilience of an area's population. Researchers recognise that people
in certain demographic categories (i.e., low-income or socially marginalised groups)
may be more exposed to some hazards by living in higher-risk areas, close to, for
example, polluting factories. Likewise, some groups (i.e., children or those in ill-
health) may be more susceptible to a given level of hazard exposure, and less resil-
ient, and thus, slower to recover from hazard impacts (Blaikie et al., 1994). Recent
work has made health more central by discussing commonalities between the social,
physical and economic factors underlying population health (referred to as the
'determinants of health') and population vulnerability to disasters (Lindsay, 2003).
Continued contact between hazards and health geographers will no doubt build on
commonalities in the fi elds, and serve to strengthen conceptual as well as practical
understanding of the human-environment-health nexus.
Health and Place
As medical geography 'reinvente[d] itself as health geography' Dyck (1999, p. 243),
it incorporated more holistic defi nitions of health and increasing attention to socio-
environmental factors, moving beyond a focus on biomedical outcomes and health
care provision. As Elliott (1999) notes (citing Wilkinson, 1996), with this shift
health [geography] emerged as a social science. Newly engaged with social theory,
health geography has become positioned to draw from and contribute to the com-
mitments of EJ scholarship, thus linking environmental and health disparities to
political economy.
Within health geography, and extending into public health and health promotion,
is a growing body of scholarship on 'health and place'. Health and place research
incorporates a broad, integrated view of the environment and explores the diverse
impacts of environment on health (Macintyre et al, 1993, Smoyer, 1998, Frumkin
2003). Attention is given to uneven access to resources and exposure to harmful
substances arising from economic, political and social structures, and to disparate
health outcomes to which those inequalities give rise. Environment is conceptualised
and articulated as the
places
where people spend their time, which in urbanised
societies are more likely than not built (and often indoor) environments of cities.
The lived environment is important in health and place research as it is the source
of acute and chronic exposures, both harmful and benefi cial, that are experienced
