Overview and Summary: Environmental Health: Important Choices for a Greener World

Citation: Wilburn, S., (May 31, 2007). "Overview and Summary: Environmental Health: Important Choices for a Greener World" OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing. Vol. 12 No. 2, Overview and Summary. Available: www.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/TableofContents/Volume122007/No2May07/EnvironmentalHealthImportantChoicesforaGreenerWorld.aspx How many "Green' magazine covers have you seen lately? Likely you've seen a number of these Green covers since there has indeed been an increase in the number of such covers recently. This increase is not just because of the annual Earth Day events celebrated in April, or the visibility of Al Gore and his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." This increase is also a result of the growing recognition of the connection between health and the environment, a recognition which has changed the nature, the visibility, and the critical importance of this topic for public health. This OJIN topic takes a look at environmental hazards, particularly chemical hazards, and considers the health effects of these hazards and the role of nurses in protecting and promoting health through healthier environments. Since Florence Nightingale recognized and statistically analyzed the impact of clean air and water on the survival rates of wounded soldiers, nurses have incorporated principles of environmental health into their practice (Butterfield, 2002; McDonald, 1987). Indeed the holistic approach to health embodied in the nursing process recognizes and acts on all determinants of health and disease, including those related to environmental conditions. In 1995 the Institute of Medicine report, "Nursing, Health and the Environment," called upon nurses to be prepared to integrate environmental health into nursing practice, research, education, and advocacy (Pope, Snyder, & Mood, 1995). This report is credited with revitalizing and reemphasizing environmental health in nursing. In the decade following the report, an explosion of activity occurred among nurses in the United States (US) as nurses and organized nursing worked to become more knowledgeable about, and engaged in, environmental health promotion (Wakefield, 2002). This new era of environmental health activity in nursing moved beyond recognizing environmental factors that contribute to disease to more upstream thinking about prevention and precaution related to these diseases (Butterfield, 2002). Prevention now includes not only preventing of exposure to environmental contaminants, through the application of the hierarchy of controls in the workplace, but also to practicing source reduction, which involves replacing products and processes that create pollution with more environmentally healthy ones. Thus nurses and nursing have emerged at the forefront of the Green revolution in health care and are active in creating environmentally sustainable, health care practices. Terms, such as Green and 'sustainable development,' are becoming more common in the nursing literature. According to Wikipedia, "Green is the color symbolizing earth, nature, and in a broader sense, life. The term Green is used to mean environmentally friendly. For example, green cars are vehicles that have extremely low emissions that are harmful to the environment" (Green, 2007). The term 'sustainable development' was defined in a United Nations (UN) report titled "Our Common Future," by what became known as the Brundtland Commission, which concluded that a global goal should be to make social and economic development sustainable, meaning that it "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (Report of The World Commission, 1987, p.54). Over a decade ago, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS) wrote, "The most difficult challenges for environmental health today come not from what is known about the harmful effects of microbial agents; rather they come from what is not known about the toxic and ecologic effects of the use of fossil fuels and synthetic chemicals in modern society" (USDHHS, 1990, p. …