Prevention is Green Health

Healthy People, Healthy Communities, Healthy Planet

As an organization committed to health and equity, Prevention Institute recognizes the vital need for convergence of health, equity and environmental efforts. This is an essential time to build greater momentum for policies and practices that can simultaneously impact the health of people and our planet. This special Earth Day edition of our e-alert highlights important arenas for action.

An unprecedented confluence of environmental and health issues, from climate change and accelerating health care costs to rising rates of certain diseases, threaten to severely degrade our quality of life. Disadvantaged communities are hardest hit.

Fortunately, there is also a confluence of solutions. Analyzing these challenges through the lens of prevention leads us back to the underlying community factors that are fundamental determinants of both human and environmental health.

Policies and practices are needed to improve the conditions of communities across a host of issues, including ensuring clean air and water, preserving agricultural lands, reducing exposure to toxins, and providing economic opportunity, quality housing and safe streets. Shifting towards a more sustainable food system and altering our transportation systems to support public transportation, walking and biking, are among the initiatives that hold multiple environmental and health benefits by virtue of reducing green house gases and our dependence on fossil fuels, as well as improving air quality and increasing physical activity.  These changes reduce the number of people getting sick and injured in the first place as well as the severity of those diseases, thereby increasing the accessibility and affordability of quality health care for all and reducing the ecological footprint of our health care institutions.

Reject Greenwashing

Today, the Strategic Alliance for Healthy Food and Activity Environments (ENACT) releases a new brief, Food Marketers Greenwash Junk Food: Companies Tout Link to Health and Environmental Movements, authored by Berkeley Media Studies Group. Food and beverage companies are launching and marketing new product lines with “green” components – evoking and intentionally blending positive associations with green as good for health and good for the earth. Despite the greenwashing, many of these products are neither nutritious nor sustainably produced. Environmental, consumer, and health groups alike have a common goal in protecting the public from confusing and deceptive practices.

• Food Marketers Greenwash Junk Food: Companies Tout Link to Health and Environmental Movements
• Setting the Bar: Recommendations for Food and Beverage Industry Action
• Consumer Reports Greener Choices Eco-labels center

Prioritize Equity

Improvements in community conditions must particularly reach those who are most deeply affected by current health and environmental inequities. Community factors that support or inhibit health are unevenly distributed and improvements in both health outcomes and the environment should no longer fail to reach communities of color or low income communities.  Health and environmental advocates working together to prioritize social justice will build on efforts already underway and add forceful advocacy to this growing movement. Prevention Institute publications highlight the community elements, encompassing both environmental and health concerns, which must be improved to reduce and eliminate disparities.

• Disparity Reducing Advances Project:
  • Laying the Groundwork for a Movement to Reduce Health Disparities
  • The Imperative of Reducing Health Disparities through Prevention: Challenges, Implications and Opportunities
• THRIVE: Tool for Health and Resilience in Vulnerable Environments
• Communities for a Better Environment

Support Smart Transportation

Decisions about transportation should improve air quality and reduce greenhouse gases, as well as promote physical activity and reduce rates of injury, asthma and other respiratory illnesses. The Transportation Equity Act will be reauthorized in 2009. Federal transportation funds, which at $286 billion dollars rival the defense department budget, are an important focal point for action.  The bill is an opportunity for a new paradigm for US transportation - promoting public transportation, walking and biking and reducing the growth of superhighways.   Transportation for America is a broad-based coalition embracing a closer alignment between transportation investments and an array of issues high on the public agenda - economic opportunity and competitiveness, climate change, energy security, housing, public health and community development - as a way to enhance sustainability and quality of life for all.

• Transportation for America
• National Center for Bicycling and Walking
• Complete Streets Coalition
• Safe Routes to School
• Local Government Commission

Design Healthy Places

Policy decisions related to land use, transportation and community design are an opportunity to demonstrate that a good solution solves multiple problems. Environmental efforts to preserve open space, promote mixed-use development and prevent urban sprawl in order to protect air, water and soil, can be further linked to the activities of health advocates who support these same measures to promote social connection, ensure access to active recreation and allow residents to walk or bike to work, school and retail. Health and environmental leaders must emphasize the inclusion of their concerns in community decision making. Strategic Alliance’s ENACT Local Policy Database contains examples of zoning and land use ordinances that incorporate multiple health and environmental goals.  In California, the Healthy Places Coalition is bringing together a diverse set of partners, including public health, planning, and environmental professionals and advocates to develop policies and tools that promote healthy communities.

• The Environmental Nutrition and Activity Community Tool (ENACT): Community Environments
• ENACT Local Policy Database
• PolicyLink Center for Health and Place
• Planning for Healthy Places
• Smart Growth America

Foster a Sustainable Food System

Concerns about health and the environment have created increasing interest in sustainable food systems and a new social movement focused on production methods that promote human health, enhance environmental quality, protect natural resources, and provide a livable income and fair working conditions for growers and laborers. Cultivating Common Ground: Linking Health and Sustainable Agriculture demonstrates how health professionals and environmental advocates can work together on these issues in order to build a collaborative movement for a just, sustainable, health-promoting food system. New additions to ENACT highlight community strategies to promote sustainable food systems. Federal, state, and local policies can connect locally grown food to local retail,  create regional food processing and distribution infrastructure, and establish farmers' markets in order to  reduce food transportation miles, decrease the need for packaging, and preserve farmland.  Additionally, the food purchasing policies and practices of institutions such as schools, government, and workplace, can serve to strengthen access to healthy food for staff and visitors and reduce environmental impacts. 

• Sustainable Food System Strategies in ENACT
• Cultivating Common Ground: Linking Health and Sustainable Agriculture
• Community Food Security Coalition
• Farm and Food Policy Project

Create Health Care Without Harm

Hospitals across the country, with the help of the Health Care Without Harm Campaign, are adopting practices that embrace a vision of a health care industry that first does no harm, and promotes the health of people and the environment.  Hospitals are actively eliminating the market for toxic medical products and equipment, minimizing the amount and contamination of generated waste, transforming the design and construction of facilities, and developing food purchasing systems that support sustainable production and distribution.  By using sustainable products and practices, the health care industry can reduce disease and be a catalyst for healing, not only in the health care setting, but also in society at large.

• Health Care Without Harm Campaign
• Green Guide for Health Care
• Hospitals for a Healthy Environment (H2E)

Green the Workplace

Companies, large and small, are working to think about how their own practices can support both the environment and health. Their practices help shape expectations and norms across society and can either reinforce complacency or foster health and sustainability.  With all the time we spend at our workplaces, they reflect a key opportunity to cultivate a new level of consciousness and action.  Here are just a few things your organization can do to promote a healthy staff and a healthy planet:

• Reduce paper: Use recycled paper, print documents on a double-sided printer, or reuse scrap paper; 
• Preserve energy: Install motion detectors and sectional lighting; maximize natural lighting; purchase energy efficient appliances;
• Go virtual: Use technology to have web- and phone-based meetings;
• Adopt food policies: develop nutrition, health, and environmental guidelines for purchasing to ensure food served and/or sold  in the workplace include healthy and sustainable choices

At Prevention Institute, we take this responsibility seriously, while also recognizing the constraints of being a small non-profit. Some of the steps we have taken include:

• Renovating an older building with lots of natural light;
• Using recycled windows between offices to retain light
• Locating near public transportation
• Buying a weekly organic fruit box and emphasizing local sustainable food for staff meeting and events

For more on creating healthy, sustainable organizations, visit:

• ENACT Strategy: Develop a Workplace Food Policy
• APHA’s Healthy Climate Pledge
• LEED Resources

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