Sustainability supports health and health supports sustainability. However, the academic and professional communities in each do not talk much to the other. The sustainability community and environmental studies and sciences, as fields of both investigation, and practice have usually treated health issues as a deterministic outcome in the narrative of environmental harms. The health sciences (including and embracing medicine and public health) have not engaged sustainability issues broadly and focus primarily on environmental health risks rather than opportunities. A population’s health is much more complicated that the sum of all the individuals’ health status in the population and there is a bewildering array of academic disciplines, practice specializations, schools of thought, and philosophies to contend with in health fields. To release the potential for health gains as part of sustainable development requires bringing the two communities together in dialogue. This workshop will focus on concrete, tangible steps forward toward that objective.

The workshop will address these issues in open discussion:

1. How can we develop an overall sustainability framework emphasizing proactive health enhancement over reactive health protection?
2. How do we move from a focus on issue-by-issue environmental protection to broad sustainability?
3. How do we change our orientation in health from prevention of disease to enhancement and promotion of health?
4. What specific actionable proposals, ideas and objectives make sense for integrating health and sustainability?
5. How can these be translated into in goals for public policy?
6. How do we build a robust sustainable society that addresses health and wellness?
7. "Health and sustainability/environment" bridges the academic and practice communities
8. Do we need a permanent forum to bring together thought leaders in health, environmental protection (including academic environmental studies and sciences), and sustainability?

This half-day workshop will build on outcomes of a preliminary workshop at the January 2017 National Council of Science and the Environment meeting on “Health and Environment”. That earlier workshop sought a cross-cutting, over-arching, robust agenda for health and sustainability and practical means for achieving it. This workshop is intended to operationalize the outcomes of that workshop with concrete proposals and recommendations.

Discussion will be moderated and facilitated by Dr. Guidotti, Dr. Gary Silverman, and two colleagues to be named representing environmental studies and environmental sciences. 

Technical and historical background to the workshop can be found in the book Health and Sustainability (Oxford, 2015).

h_s_presentation_-_fulbright_version_-_pdf.pdf