Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
terms of absence, or effective management, of illness and disability (US NIEHS,
n.d.
). Health can also be defi ned holistically in terms of well-being beyond absence
of disease or infi rmity. Embraced by the World Health Organization, this is a defi ni-
tion that acknowledges social as well as biophysical factors (WHO, 1957; 1986).
Environment can be understood in terms of its raw physical, atmospheric, terres-
trial, and biotic components along with 'chemicals, radiation, and some biological
agents' (WHO, Regional Offi ce for Europe,
n.d.
), or broadly as 'where we live,
work and play' within the EJ and health geography literature. In each of the four
research areas addressed here, the concept of environment has been broadened from
a focus on the 'natural' environment, to encompass the built environment as well
as certain social, cultural, political and economic characteristics of human spheres
of activity. Different approaches to environment and health pay varying amounts
of attention to the ecological complexity of the environment. In some cases, environ-
ment is viewed as the location for and partial cause of the health outcomes under
study. Other approaches view environment as the 'patient' whose disease comes
from human activity. Still other research places humans centrally into the ecological
web of life.
Given the multidisciplinary traditions of research on the human-environment-
health nexus, both within and beyond geography, different deployments of the
individual terms 'health' and 'environment' have implications for how the relation-
ship between the two can be conceptualised and investigated. Differing frameworks
for considering that relationship (in all its complexity) tend to be used in diverse
research settings; for instance, vulnerability analyses have evolved from studies of
food insecurity in rural developing world locales (e.g., Sen, 1981; Blaikie et al.,
1994), while health and place research emerged from studies of health disparities
among urban neighbourhoods in developed countries (Greenberg and Schneider,
1993; Macintyre et al., 1993). Such divergent settings bring to the fore quite differ-
ent components of both health and environment. Vulnerability analyses focus on
issues such as malnutrition as an effect of desertifi cation and various political eco-
nomic constraints, while health and place research has investigated issues such as
high rates of respiratory illness in congested urban environments. Despite an under-
lying geographical approach, research with such diverse empirical foci can be
expected to develop different models of how interactions between health and envi-
ronment play out at multiple spatial and temporal scales.
Research on the human-environment-health nexus is converging on a common
set of problems from diverse disciplinary directions and understandings of environ-
ment and health, and several key commonalities emerge from our brief overview.
First, each of the areas of research noted above ascribes increasing signifi cance to
geographically uneven health and environmental conditions and outcomes, as both
pressing socio-political problems and as rather knotty analytical problems as well.
In both vulnerability analyses and political ecology approaches, uneven environ-
mental quality serves as a sensitising device for research, rather than as a central
analytical problem. Geographers undertaking EJ and health and place research
address this problem most directly. In EJ research, not only do patterns of environ-
mental inequality serve as a persistent backdrop for case studies of EJ issues and
activism (Harwood, 2005; Saha and Mohai, 2005); but environmental inequality is
an object of analysis in its own right (Pellow, 2000). The focus in health and place
research on factors producing uneven environments and health outcomes at a micro-
scale may eventually inform EJ activism and scholarship more productively.
