Citation
(2012), "Ecological Public Health – Reshaping the Conditions for Good Health", Management of Environmental Quality, Vol. 23 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/meq.2012.08323faa.010
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2012, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Ecological Public Health – Reshaping the Conditions for Good Health
Ecological Public Health – Reshaping the Conditions for Good Health
Article Type: Books and resources From: Management of Environmental Quality: An International Journal, Volume 23, Issue 6.
Edited by Geof Rayner and Tim Lang
Routledge, London
April 2012
432 pp.
ISBN 9781844078325
£26.99
What is public health? To some, it is about drains, water, food and housing, all requiring engineering and expert management. To others, it is the State using medicine or health education and tackling unhealthy lifestyles.
This book argues that public health thinking needs an overhaul, a return to and modernization around ecological principles. Ecological public health thinking, outlined here, fits the twenty-first century's challenges. It integrates what the authors call the four dimensions of existence: the material, biological social and cultural aspects of life. Public health becomes the task of transforming the relationship between people, their circumstances and the biological world of nature and bodies. For Rayner and Lang, this is about facing a number of long-term transitions, some well recognized, others not. These transitions are demographic, epidemiological, urban, energy, economic, nutrition, biological, cultural and democracy itself.
The authors argue that identifying large scale transitions such as these refocusses public health actions onto the conditions on which human and eco-systems health interact.