Environmental Health and Ecosystem Health
as Backdrop
to the Green Curriculum Model

Environmental health and ecosystem health serve as the backdrop of the green curriculum model, because everything we do
as educators should contribute to the health of our students
and the health of the natural world.

Environmental health strives to link environmental quality of both the natural and built environments with public health and individual well being. It has been described as the art and science of

• understanding the links between human health and environmental factors, and


• protecting against environmental factors and hazards that might have a detrimental effect on individual physical, mental and social health, well being and development.

Think...

• greenhouse gases
• ozone depletion
• air, food, and water pollution and contaminants
• asbestos
• radiation
• toxic chemicals
• wastes
• disease vectors
• safety hazards
• destruction of green space.

Environmental health also implies educating people to prevent them from affecting the environment in such a way that it, in turn, will adversely affect their well being and development and the health of future generations.

"Environmental health addresses all the physical, chemical, and biological factors external to a person, and all the related factors impacting behaviours. It encompasses the assessment and control of those environmental factors that can potentially affect health." –World Health Organization

An immediate example that comes to mind is the amount of idling that still happens outside many schools. Parents love their children and would never knowingly poison them. But every school day, millions of parents pull up in front of schools and leave their engines running while they wait for their kids to be dismissed.

Click on the idle-free sign below for information
on idle-free campaigns.

Car exhaust also spews out a noxious combination of toxic chemicals and particulate pollution that can seriously impact our health, and especially the health of our younger students (who are particularly vulnerable to air pollution — a "susceptible sub-population" — because they breathe faster than adults and inhale more air per pound of body weight) and those with asthma.

Once breathed in, these substances are transported through the bloodstream to all our major organs, causing respiratory and coronary problems, and, recently discovered, diabetes. Some are known carcinogens, and some are known to impair mental function. So not only is idling bad for respiratory health, it also contains neurotoxins that affect learning. You can see the irony here. (Not to mention escalating obesity rates because kids don't even get to walk to school anymore.)

Students can work together with other members of their families and school communities to ensure their schools, play spaces and homes are safe and healthy places for them to learn, play, live and grow.

Ecosystem Health Must Be Our Concern, Too

Healthy ecosystems are characterized by resilience and productivity. Ecosystem health refers to ecological integrity — the ability of ecosystems to maintain stability, complexity, diversity and capacity for self-organization. In 1942, Aldo Leopold described it as "nature's capacity for self-renewal."

It's probably easier to picture "ecosystem illness" than ecosystem health (perhaps because many of us have never studied ecology). Think habitat destruction, deforestation, drained wetlands, desertification, invasive species, contamination.

Picture all the woods, meadows, streams and creeks that have been cut down, filled in or otherwise ruined for the sake of barren asphalt "playgrounds" or easy-to-mow green deserts of grass.

But children need green spaces and "wild" places in order to thrive physically, mentally and emotionally — not to mention, in their spirits — and most schoolyards just don't cut it.

We create flat, lifeless playgrounds to make our lives easier (supervision is easier, maintenance is easier), but we're imprisoning our students in wastelands that can't possibly kindle their connection to nature. (Which can lead to a "barreness" of spirit, which leads to discipline problems, which makes our jobs tougher, which....) Children deserve to spend time with their brothers and sisters and friends of other species.

Where would you rather spend time with your students?
(Sorry for the extremes, but thanks to Trey Wheeler
for the primary prison photo.)

(And you should see that garden now ... a grape arbour for shade, Three Sisters plantings, and a variety of fun vegetables for the kids to enjoy, some before summer and many more that welcome them back to school in the fall.)

"All human institutions, programs, and activities must now be judged primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore or foster a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship." –Father Thomas Berry

• about their environmental health and their special susceptibility as children


• the importance for their well being of healthy and intact ecosystems


• the environmentally friendly behaviours that will enhance their own health and the health of the rest of nature

And our students have the right to spend
the school "third" of their lives in
a beautiful, healthy, "learningful" place,
connected with the rest of nature.

For more information, check out

• Pollution Probe’s Child Health and the Environment – A Primer
  


• Children’s Environmental Health Project by the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE)

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