Health and Sustainability; An Introduction

Health and sustainability have become ubiquitous topics in all realms of popular discourse. What these discussions often overlook is the fact that the two concepts are interrelated, and that their surrounding policies and practices can often inform and reinforce each other. As sustainability measures are already in place across many levels of government, there is now an opportunity to extend these principles to improve health care and health care policy.

Health and Sustainability: An Introduction details how the values of sustainability can be applied to the design of health systems and the delivery of primary care. By providing a practical framework for understanding complicated sustainability problems related to health, the book offers an authoritative resource for understanding:

- health and environmental rights
- parallels between human toxicology and ecotoxicology
- how health promotion strategy can be a template for sustainability
- health science and how it can be used to support decisions in health and sustainability
- how scientific knowledge is achieved, understood, accepted, and used in health and environmental advocacy, and how this relates to sustainability

Students and practitioners in health will benefit from this introduction to sustainability, and those in sustainability and environmental studies will benefit from this application to human health. Health and Sustainability offers a roadmap for successfully integrating these approaches for healthier people and environment.

Dr. Tee L. Guidotti is a physician specializing in pulmonary medicine and in occupational and environmental medicine, trained at Johns Hopkins. He had a long academic career devoted to public health, environmental and occupational health, and the relationship between ecosystem integrity and human health, mostly at the University of Alberta (Canada) and George Washington University (USA). He is currently an international consultant working through Medical Advisory Services, a small firm with offices in Rockville, Maryland, where his work convinced him that the unifying framework for what he was doing was sustainability. In 2015, he is on leave of absence as a Fulbright Visiting Chair at the University of Ottawa, in the Institute for Science, Society, and Policy. He is President-Elect of Sigma Xi, the international honor society for scientific research.