Showing papers on "Environmental health ethics published in 2005"

Sustainability and health : supporting global ecological integrity in public health

Abstract: Radical changes in the biosphere and human interaction with the environment are increasingly impacting on the health of populations across the world. Diseases are crossing the species barrier, and spreading rapidly through globalized transport systems. From new patterns of cancer to the threat of global pandemics, it is imperative that public health practitioners acknowledge the interdependence between the sustainability of the environment and the sustainability of the human species.* Why are issues of global and local sustainability of increasing importance to the public's health?* Why do issues of sustainability require new practices within the professions of public health?* How can future and current public health practitioners develop those new practices?Drawing on scientific evidence of global and local environmental changes, Sustainability and Health offers a thorough background and practical solutions to the overlapping issues in environment and health. It examines potential and existing responses to global and local environment and health issues, involving individuals, community, industry and government. The authors introduce a range of emerging conceptual frameworks and theoretical perspectives, link IT and epidemiology and explain how scoping can link program design, delivery, data collection and evaluation in projects from their very beginning. Public health practitioners need to be able to manage health issues that cut across environmental, economic and social systems and to develop the capacity for leadership in facilitating change. Incorporating learning activities, readings, international case studies and an open learning approach, this is a valuable resource for students of public and environmental health, as well as medical, environmental and health science professionals.

Detecting the Health Effects of Environmental Change: Scientific and Political Challenge

Abstract: Scientists fluent in ecology and the earth sciences understand that the current scale of human-induced changes to the biosphere entails risks of systemic dysfunction. Ecosystem processes, being complex and often nonlinear, are somewhat unpredictable in their responses to major external stressors (Egler, 1986; Levin, 1999; Gunderson and Holling, 2002). These issues are not yet prominent or well understood within population health research circles. Yet it is a reasonable expectation that this ongoing impairment of Earth’s life-support functions poses substantial risks to human health. It is axiomatic that humans rely on functioning ecosystems (potable water, breathable air, arable land, and food-producing ecosystems) for survival. Substantial evidence, including that from high-resolution paleoclimatic data, shows the link between abrupt climate changes (typically aridity) and the collapse of ancient societies (Weiss and Bradley, 2001). Severe and prolonged droughts forced the abandonment of agricultural settlements and the collapse of the Akkadian empire in Syria just before 2200 BC (Lemcke and Sturm, 1997; Cullen et al., 2000) and the collapse of the classic Mayan civilization in Mesoamerica in the ninth century AD (Brenner et al., 2001). Beyond these extreme examples, however, we have very little detailed knowledge about how changes to ecosystem functioning affect human health and well-being. The work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has not yet identified certain evidence of effects on human health attributable to climate change (McMichael and Githeko, 2001). Similarly, the nearly completed Millennium (Ecosystem) Assessment project has documented very few clear examples of adverse effects on human health due to human-induced ecosystem changes. This situation is both scientifically tantalizing and politically important. For example, consider the political aspect. We are dealing with complex, and not yet widely understood, changes in large biogeophysical systems. Models can be used to estimate future human biological and social impacts on the assumption, for example, that current trends in global climate change will continue. However, for many policy makers (confined within more immediate electorally defined time horizons), such futuredisplaced forecasts of adverse consequences may lack relevance. To make the topic tangible and substantial, we should strive to link currently observable adverse health effects of environmental changes with the likely future effects of large-scale biogeophysical environmental changes impinging on whole populations. Then, if we can communicate how the well-being and health of human populations is jeopardized by these global environmental changes, we will illuminate society’s understanding of the essentials of sustainability. As researchers, various scientific issues tantalize us. First, effects on human health emerge only gradually (in human experiential terms), because changes to system functioning and to the pattern of environmental events occur over decadal time. The early evidence of health effects, in general, is therefore rather marginal. Second, most human health outcomes are multifactorial in their causation. A movement of highland malaria to higher altitudes could result from land-use change, population movement (including from the more malarious lowlands), changes in pesticide programs, and regional climatic changes (Hales and Woodward, 2003; Reiter et al., 2004). Apportioning causal influence among such coexistent—and often interacting—factors is difficult. EcoHealth 2, 1–3, 2005 DOI: 10.1007/s10393-004-0152-0

Wanted: A New Ethics Field for Health Policy Analysis

Abstract: Ethics guidance and ethical frameworks are becoming more explicit and prevalent in health policy proposals. However, little attention has been given to evaluating their roles and impacts in the policy arena. Before this can be investigated, fundamental questions must be asked about the nature of ethics in relation to policy, and about the nexus of the fields of applied ethical analysis and health policy analysis. This paper examines the interdisciplinary stretch between bioethics and health policy analysis. In particular, it highlights areas of scholarship where a health policy ethics specialization--as distinctive from bioethics--might develop to address health policy concerns. If policy and ethics both ask the same question, that question is: "What is the good, and how do we achieve (create, protect, cultivate) it?" To answer this question, the new field of "health policy ethics" requires development. First, we should develop a full set of ethical principles and complementary ethical theories germane to public policy per se. Second, we must understand better how explicit attention to ethical concerns affects policy dynamics. Third, we require new policy and ethical analytic approaches that contribute to constructive (not obstructive) policy making. Finally, we need indicators of robust, high quality ethical analysis for the purpose public policy making.

Environmental health implications of global climate change

Abstract: This paper reviews the background that has led to the now almost-universally held opinion in the scientific community that global climate change is occurring and is inescapably linked with anthropogenic activity. The potential implications to human health are considerable and very diverse. These include, for example, the increased direct impacts of heat and of rises in sea level, exacerbated air and water-borne harmful agents, and—associated with all the preceding—the emergence of environmental refugees. Vector-borne diseases, in particular those associated with blood-sucking arthropods such as mosquitoes, may be significantly impacted, including redistribution of some of those diseases to areas not previously affected. Responses to possible impending environmental and public health crises must involve political and socio-economic considerations, adding even greater complexity to what is already a difficult challenge. In some areas, adjustments to national and international public health practices and policies may be effective, at least in the short and medium terms. But in others, more drastic measures will be required. Environmental monitoring, in its widest sense, will play a significant role in the future management of the problem.

The Earthscan reader in environmental values

Abstract: Environmental Values: An Introduction * Part I: Economic Themes in Environmental Values * Contingent Valuation: A User's Guide * Economic and Ecological Concepts for Valuing Ecosystem Services * The Development of Environmental Thinking in Economics * Part II: Philosophical and Ethical Themes in Environmental Values * Non-Anthropocentric Value Theory and Environmental Ethics * Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthropocentrism * A Defence of the Deep Ecology Movement * Radical American Environmentalism and 'Wilderness' Preservation: A Third World Critique * Class, Race and Gender Discourse in the Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate * The Biological Basis for Human Values of Nature * Part III: Anthropological and Sociological Themes in Environmental Values * Christianity, Environmentalism and the Theoretical Problem of Fundamentalism * Measuring Endorsement of the New Ecological Paradigm: A Revised NEP Scale * Value Orientations, Gender and Environmental Concern * Environmental Values: A Place-Based Theory * Part IV: Judgement and Decision Making Themes in Environmental Values * Valuing Public Goods: The Purchase of Moral Satisfaction * Protected Values * Aggregation and Deliberation in Valuing Public Goods: A Look Beyond Contingent Pricing * Valuing Environmental Resources: A Constructive Approach * What Should We Do? Human Ecology and Collective Decision Making *

Public health policy and ethics

Abstract: Public Health Policy and Ethics brings together philosophers and practitioners to address the foundations and principles upon which public health policy may be advanced. What is the basis that justifies public health in the first place? Why should individuals be disadvantaged for the sake of the group? How do policy concerns and clinical practice work together and work against each other? Can the boundaries of public health be extended to include social ills that are amenable to group-dynamic solutions? These are some of the crucial questions that form the core of this volume of original essays sure to cause practitioners to engage in a critical re-evaluation of the role of ethics in public health policy. This volume is unique because of its philosophical approach. It develops a theoretical basis for public health and then examines cutting-edge issues of practice that include social and political issues of public health. In this way the book extends the usual purview of public health. Public Health Policy and Ethics is of interest to those working in public health policy, ethics and social philosophy. It may be used as a textbook for courses on public health policy and ethics, medical ethics, social philosophy and applied or public philosophy.

Book Review: Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice

Abstract: Jason Corburn’s Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice is an important addition to the literature on the science and politics of environmental health decision making. In clear prose, Corburn provides a “descriptive, analytic, and prescriptive understanding of local environmental-health knowledge” through what he calls “street science” (p. 217). Street science is a framework that joins local insights with professional scientific techniques, with concurrent goals: to improve scientific inquiry and environmental health policy and decision making. At the heart of Street Science are four case studies from Greenpoint/ Williamsburg, in New York City, where diverse racial and ethnic, low-income populations practice what Corburn calls “science on the streets of Brooklyn.” These studies were centered on complex environmental health issues: subsistence fishing risks, asthma, childhood lead poisoning, and small sources of air pollution. Some of the larger issues addressed through these particular studies include the limits of traditional risk assessment and the politics of mapping health and environment risk. Through these studies, Corburn provides a theoretical model for understanding key characteristics of what he calls “local knowledge,” its paradoxes, and contributions to environmental health policy. Street science, at its best, identifies hazards and highlights research questions that professionals may ignore, provides hard-to-gather exposure data, involves difficult-to-reach populations, and expands possibilities for interventions, resulting in “improved science and democracy.” One of the strengths of this book is that it succeeds where most studies of local knowledge fail, “scaling up” and providing generalizations about the nature of local knowledge, how it is acquired, the typical problems that occur when local and scientific knowledge conflict and why. Drawing from social science, particularly science and technology studies, Corburn explicitly calls for environmental and public health researchers, policy makers, and urban planners to become “reflective practitioners.” At the same time, he is careful to reject the idea that street science is a panacea. It does not devalue, but rather revalues science. He is not calling for a populism where the “community” replaces “experts,” but for a better understanding of how knowledge “co-produced” among local and professional constituencies can lead to better health, science, and politics. The greatest strength of the book is in the details about the particular interventions that street science made in these four examples. One of the stronger cases was in the story about subsistence fishing. Local residents added to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Air Toxics Modeling and Cumulative Exposure project by contributing local knowledge to the dietary exposure assessment. The U.S. EPA had no idea that local residents consumed contaminated fish from the East River, but as a result of community challenges to the U.S. EPA’s risk assessment models, the agency was able to conduct angler surveys and to more accurately represent the real-life exposures that local residents faced. Local knowledge was culturally sensitive, linked with the environmental justice movement, successfully used intermediaries, and was low-cost enough to be incorporated successfully into the U.S. EPA’s practices. Corburn does not claim that each example of street science is successful or equivalent with one another. But even these failures and limits are instructive. For policy makers and health researchers who face hostile communities, his accounts of conflictive public meetings in Greenpoint/ Williamsburg offer a good guide to “what goes wrong and why.” Agencies such as the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences are increasingly recognizing community-based research and environmental justice concerns [exemplified, for example, by “Advancing Environmental Justice through Community-Based Participatory Research,” Environ Health Perspect 110(suppl 2)]. At the same time, more focus and funding is being channeled into investigating and eliminating health disparities. Corburn’s Street Science is an essential and critical investigation into the science and politics of local knowledge and environmental health justice at this crucial juncture.

Values and ethics

Abstract: Volume 1: Environmental Philosophy: Values and Ethics The first volume explores the major concern of environmental philosophy: the intrinsic value of nature, and the proper foundations for non-anthropocentric environmental ethics. Volume 2: Environmental Philosophy: Society and Politics This volume includes papers which examine politically charged strains of environmental philosophy such as eco-feminism, social ecology, and deep ecology. Volume 3: Environmental Philosophy: Economics and Policy A perennial theme in environmental philosophy is a critique of economism and, often from environmental pragmatists, a call for more environmental policy orientation in environmental philosophy. This volume collects the essential papers on these themes. Volume 4: Environmental Philosophy: History and Culture Volume four explores environmental philosophy's engagement with the legacy of deep cognitive structures, such as human/nature and mind/body dualisms in the Western worldview, and alternatives to these cognitive structures found in various non-Western worldviews.

Reconciling Realism and Constructivism in Environmental Ethics

Abstract: This paper outlines a constructivist approach to environmental ethics which attempts to reconcile realism in the ontological sense, i.e., the view that there is an objective material world existing outside of human consciousness, with the view that how nature is understood and acted in are epistemologically and morally constructed. It is argued that while knowledge and ethics are indeed culturally variable, social constructions of nature are nonetheless constrained by how things actually stand in the world. The 'realist' version of constructivism proposed here can be linked to dialectical forms of reasoning which see knowledge and ethics as arising out of human interactions with an objectively real environment, and contrasted with strong constructivist views which see nature as 'nothing more than' a social construct. While both the physical environment and human attitudes towards it are in part socially constructed, nature also retains a measure of autonomy, or 'wildness', apart from human constructions.

Putting ethics on the organisational agenda: The social work ethics audit on trial

Abstract: Findings are presented from an Australian study on the implementation and evaluation of a Social Work Ethics Audit Risk Management Tool. The aim of the research is to determine the extent to which ethics audits are useful and applicable to Australian human service organisations. Over the period of the study, social workers and other human services staff and volunteers used the ethics audit to achieve outcomes that included provision of legitimate space for discussion of ethics in the workplace, and identification of gaps in knowledge and skills about ethical practice, and the policies and procedures that support and enhance such practice. The paper provides an analysis of how practitioners and managers grapple with the concept of ethical risk management, and outlines strategies that were developed in an effort to move towards greater accountability and ethical reflection in practice.

Health and the Good Society: Setting Healthcare Ethics in Social Context

Abstract: PART I. THE EVOLVING VALUE FIELD OF HEALTHCARE 1. The Diffusion of the Public Health Agenda 2. Producing the Goods: Health, Welfare, and Well-being 3. Participation in Health Decisions: Patient and Community Empowerment PART II. HEALTH POLICY ETHICS 4. Health Promotion and the Good Society 5. The Distribution of Health and Healthcare 6. Responsibility for Health PART III. INSTITUTIONS AND VOCATIONS 7. Professional Ethics in Context 8. Managing Healthcare: Making or breaking healthcare goods? 9. The Boundaries of Professional Legitimacy PART IV. EDUCATION, ETHICS, AND AGENDA SETTING 10. Rethinking Health Education 11. Towards a Socially Reflexive Healthcare Ethics 12. Making the Health Agenda

The Promise and Threat of Nanotechnology: Can Environmental Ethics Guide Us?

Abstract: The growing presence of the products of nanotechnology in the public domain raises a number of ethical questions. This paper considers whether existing environmental ethics can provide some guidance on these questions. After a brief discussion of the appropriateness of an environmental ethics framework for the task at hand, the paper identifies a representative en- vironmental ethic and uses it to evaluate four salient issues that emerge from nanotechnology. The discussion is intended both to give an initial theoretical take on nanotechnology from the perspective of environmental ethics and to provide a clear indication of the direction from which environmental resis- tance might come.

Perspectives of business ethics

Abstract: Ethics is a set of rules and principles which define right or wrong of doing The business ethics is the application and extension of ethical rules to the business behaviour The performance of the individual organizations and societies can be studied to determine the ethical significance of the society The human rights constitute another criterion for judging the ethics The major source of ethical confusion in business is the conflict that occurs when the company pursues its own goals The organisation is finding itself in difficulties with social values when the society is undergoing radical social changes The traditional business value system leads the firm to take actions which are considered to be unethical by different groups in the society The business firm can improve its ethical performance by encouraging managers to set a good ethical behaviour for employees Ethics Committees can be created to consider the ethical dimension of the firm's policies and practices, conducting ethics audits and emphasizing in-training programmes in ethics

All about eve : A report on environmental virtue ethics today

Abstract: In this paper I examine and assess an important developing trend in environmental ethics, environmental virtue ethics. I begin by providing a thorough survey of influential and representative contributions to environmental virtue ethics. Along with explaining these contributions to environmental virtue ethics I discuss their various strengths and weaknesses. In the second section I explain what I believe an environmental virtue ethic needs to do to complement other perspectives in environmental ethics. Then, using the best aspects of previously published work along with some additional argument and analysis, I provide a concise portrait of an environmental virtue ethic that combines the advantages of Aristotelian virtue theory with the insights of contemporary environmental ethics. The environmental virtue ethic that emerges from this analysis and discussion is primarily a philosophical praxis. It provides a model of living well in which an understanding of and a concern for the environment human is constitutive of human flourishing. As a praxis this environmental virtue ethic articulates an account of human flourishing with a view to suggesting how a person can improve her own life by working to preserve wild nature.

Children's Environmental Health Indicators

Abstract: Environmental health indicators can provide clear and concise information on the state of the environment and its potential effects on human health. They represent a useful tool to support policy, particularly environmental policies whose effects may only be detectable many years after their implementation due to their long time horizon. Environmental health indicators can be of particular relevance to highlight the greater vulnerability of certain populations, such as children or the elderly, and to account for it in public policies related to health and the environment. In particular for children, an intervention in the early stages of life can have lifelong benefits for society as a whole. As such, the development of children’s environmental health indicators appears to be essential.

A cultural understanding of research ethics governance.

Abstract: Introduction Analyses of research ethics tend to characterize ethical review and its components as a linear process of submission, review, revision, research conduct and reporting. Recommendations to improve research ethics usually seek to provide a way to better support this linear process through improved guidance, training, regulation, institutional power or legal authority. We refer to this as a linear model of research ethics governance. Recommendations on this model implicitly recognize that research is influenced by a complex web of relations. Recent discussion about conflicts of interest and research ethics also recognizes that research review and standards are subject to a web of influences. We suggest a cultural model of research ethics governance or stewardship that explicitly acknowledges that research and research ethics are subject to complex social influences that are simultaneously antagonistic and supportive of the goals of research ethics. These influences inevitably shape even the standards, practices and structures of research ethics. Recognizing this embeddedness is more than a clever social analysis--it locates research ethics as one of many activities in an arena of social action and makes it possible to identify and evaluate the presumptions that have shaped the goals of research ethics as well as a wider range of means for achieving them. The Linear Model of Research Ethics Discussions of research ethics are rooted in the linear characterization of a process that begins with a research proposal and passes step-wise through stages of review and revision to be approved, implemented and reported. Research ethics scholarship has generally utilized the linear model in an attempt to directly influence research activities to promote high quality and ethical research. Recommendations to improve research ethics usually seek to provide a way to better support this linear process through improved guidance, training, regulation, institutional power or legal authority. As a result, the field of research ethics has been dominated by discussions of ethics review, ethical regulations and guidelines, and forms such as informed consent. In The Governance of Health Research Involving Human Subjects, (1) Michael McDonald characterizes the practice of human subject ethics review in Canada as the funnel-like reduction of complexity into an inappropriately narrow review process: In short, ethics is funnelled into a bureaucratic process, and the process itself is reduced to a bare minimum. That bare minimum consists of the tangible parts--consent forms and other items, like adverse incident reports.... An important general result of this funnelling and narrowing down of ethical concerns is that important issues are missed at all levels and at all stages.... More generally in terms of governance processes and structures designed to promote ethical RIHS, the REB is seen as the focal institutional tool and in turn its role is defined in terms of front-end research protocol approval. This ignores other possible tools or structures for promoting ethical research. It also ties too much of ethics in research to a particular stage--a very preliminary one at that-- taken in isolation from the rest of the research process. The big picture is missed--concerning the larger cultural environment of research. The funnel example demonstrates the bureaucratization of research ethics--how a broad range of research ethics issues, when channelled through the administrative mechanisms of review and consent, end up neglecting the original complexity. Discussions of conflicts of interest in relation to research ethics also make explicit concerns about how diverse influences on research shape the research agenda. (2) Some of the most oft-cited influences on research and the ethics of research in practice include: industry influence;; directed calls for research proposals by funding agencies; private funding of research; matched funding requirements; influence of disease-based and community-based groups; and patterns of health care funding. …

An Historical Overview of Basic Approaches and Issues in Ethical and Moral Philosophy and Principles: A Foundation for Understanding Ethics in Psychology

Abstract: Summary This article provides a condensed history of ethics development for the purpose of exposing psychologists and other mental health professionals to ethical and moral bases upon which modern psychological ethics are founded. In addition, it focuses on contemporary theories, with an emphasis on professional ethics.

The question of success and environmental ethics: Revisiting the DDT controversy from a transnational perspective, 1967–72

Abstract: Drawing from the testimony of two landmark hearings on the controversial pesticide DDT held between 1967 and 1972, this article explores how environmentalists and US chemical interests understood and articulated the risks and benefits of DDT use within the United States and beyond its borders. It examines the critical role the international use of DDT played in shaping the domestic regulation of the pesticide and sheds light on the ethical arguments made against and in defense of DDT. By exploring the role of the international use of DDT as it relates of US environmental regulation, this article draws attention to the historical roots of a conflict that situates environmental ethics squarely at odds with the ethics of saving lives with a known environmental pollutant.

Reconciling self, society, and nature in environmental ethics

Abstract: This paper proposes an environmental ethic that adopts human flourishing, social justice, and environmental integrity as its guiding objectives. It suggests that each of these concerns should be gi...

Ethics in International Environmental Law

Abstract: The actual influence of didactic ethics on public policy is controversial, and perhaps particularly so in regard to multilateral fora. But efforts to mend the global environment invite ethical analysis in three ways. First, there are issues of human obligations to the non-human environment ("environmental ethics" proper). Second there are issues of ethics among nations in respect of the environment ("international ethics"). Third, there are issues of ethics among generations in respect of the environment ("inter-generational ethics"). The first - environmental ethics proper - can be illustrated by the question, has humankind an obligation not to kill whales? (Have whales rights?) The second is illustrated by the question, if the harvesting of a certain number of whales is moral, have indigenous peoples a higher priority on them than commercial fishermen from industrialized countries? (Are there principles of fair distribution among nations?) The third can be illustrated by the question, have present generations an obligation to remote future generations to preserve whales? (Are there obligations of sustainable development?) The author reviews and critically assesses these and related issues that have been recurring in international environmental governance bodies and literature.

Fostering an Environmental Ethic through Service Learning

Abstract: Objective: To explore connections between environmental education, public concern for environmental health, and service learning. Methods: A 20-item survey was administered to same students at the beginning and end of a 15-week Environmental Health course. Qualitative data were collected from reflective papers based on students involved in community based learning. Results: The findings of the study revealed that students grew in their sense of environmental responsibility; significantly increased their “level of concern” for 18 of the 20 environmental variables measured; and viewed community action as empowering. Conclusion: Students’ participation in an Environmental Health course and engagement in service learning increased their overall support for a variety of environmental issues.