Environmental health (4th ed.), by Dade W. Moeller

Environmental health as a reading for planners

Environmental Health has remained over decades one of the fundamental value system frameworks for planning and environmental assessment, along with the concepts of sustainability and limits to growth. The infancy of both urban planning and environmental engineering is tightly intertwined with concerns for environmental health, or conditions of the living environment that are favorable to human health.

Sustainability-based assessment requires use and consumption of resources not to impair an indefinite possibility to benefit from those resources in the future, and an assessment based on the limits to growth stipulates that the impacts should not exceed certain thresholds or boundaries in order to prevent harmful modifications to the environment.

The foundations of the sustainability paradigm can be found in the ‘Bruntland Report’ prepared for the United Nations (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987), and sustainability is now such popular a framework, that it requires no further mention. Those of the limits to growth can be found both on the concern for the depletion of non-renewable resources seminally highlighted by the Club of Rome (Meadows et al. 1972), and on the understanding of the massive scope of human modifications to the biosphere in terms of biodiversity, climate change, or alteration of biogeochemical cycles, as in the unifying perspective of the planetary boundaries (Rockström et al. 2009) proposed in the last years.

Environmental health-based assessment focuses instead on the impacts that a certain action might have on the living conditions of humans. While sustainability issues and limits to growth have emerged relatively recently in response to evidence of environmental impacts, environmental health has always been considered as a goal by land planners, civil engineers and physicians. The roots of environmental legislation may be tracked since the antiquity in provisions on the maintenance of healthy conditions for the society, including the codex of Hammurabi, the Bible or King Edward I's edicts on the burning of coal. In most European countries, environmental legislation before the 1980s has always been adopted uniquely with a view to protecting human health. Most classical textbooks and essays on land planning, including the classic Lynch's Site planning (1984) and Ian McHarg's Design with Nature (1995), always include environmental health criteria among those relevant in site selection. The original hygienist perspective has been enriched in the last 30 years, by increasing attention paid to the link between ecological and human health, particularly through the concept of ecosystem services. In the broader perspective, human health depends not just on hygiene but also on ecological health, as healthy ecosystems are capable of delivering effective services to the mankind.

Despite this long consideration in planning and engineering, and the renewed momentum gained with these developments, general handbooks on environmental health are not very common and the student or practitioner is often forced to navigate through several specialized manuals in order to find comprehensive treatment of these topics. This may be dispersive and, more important, may distract from a unifying perspective on environmental health problems. A system-level understanding of the relationship between human health and environmental conditions remains of broad interest, and the classic textbook by D.W. Moeller, now at its fourth and revised edition, helps in this direction. The book deals with the classic topics of postgraduate environmental health courses, including indoor and outdoor air quality, noise, waste and chemical releases, drinking water and food quality, radioprotection and electromagnetic protection, industrial and labor hygiene, but also industrial accidents, environmental health problems from natural hazards, unusual topics such as deliberate violence and terrorism and the more recent issues of the impacts of climate change and other environmental changes on environmental health. The little more than 500 pages of this textbook present concepts, facts, examples and references in an accurate but always accessible style, adequate for students and professionals without specific prerequisites beyond some general scientific background, despite some parts being a little overambitious in scope (e.g. the connection of a chapter on energy resources with the rest of the book is not apparent) and not completely up-to-date (for instance, no mention is made of ecosystem services or of the International Panel on Climate Change reports on climate change and adaptation; persistent and emerging organic pollutants are not dealt with per se; etc.). For its characteristics, this book may be of interest particularly for professionals in the field of land planning and environmental impact assessment, and revives attention to environmental health in the planner's toolbox.

A. Pistocchi
European Commission, DG Joint Research Centre, Unit
H 01 – Water Resources Unit, Via Enrico Fermi 2749,
I-21027 Ispra, Italy
[email protected]