Public Health and Ecology

All Center program areas share the aim of working to strengthen the intellectual and civic capacities of citizens and organizations in their efforts to understand and effectively promote the interconnected well-being of both humans and nature. The Public Health, Planning, and Ecology program explores the goals and concepts of public health from an ethical and ecological perspective. It examines the implications of the concept and metaphor of “health” as it may be applied to both human and natural communities (populations and ecosystems). It examines the connection between the natural environment (e.g. environmental pollution, toxins), the built environment (e.g. sprawl and other patterns of land use and development), and human health. It analyses the limits of the reductionistic “medical model” of disease and the mechanistic understanding of human biology in favor of an ecosystemic perspective, which has been a growing trend in the field of public health in recent years. Above all, it seeks to define a newly emerging perspective within public health that shows the relationship between the health of individuals and groups and the webs of social support, activity, and meaning (“social capital”) within which they live.