Environmental Health Clinic

Links to Oyster Creek related material and literature review. Understanding the remediation issues.  Organisms; monitoring opportunities

Originally given at San Jose City Hall, Council Chambers, as part of FUSE the presentation was streamed live to Ars Virtua in Second Life [ http://slurl.com/secondlife/Seventh%20Eye/6/77/48] and is available as a podcast. The talk was entitled “The Environmental Health Clinic: on structuring participation in the environmental movement, or more specifically, in re-imagining, refiguring and rebuilding our relationships to natural systems”—intro below. However the presentation in 2nd life, its second life, underscores the questions about participation–what actions are available to your avatar? does it matter who you are? or that you are an avatar in the material and bodily questions involved in environmental health?

Intro:

Does anyone know what to do about global warming? I am guessing that everyone has a few ideas, no? But how does anyone one of us go about developing these ideas, trying them out, testing, developing, and learning more? And how many people are interested in doing something about climate change and other environmental issues? I don’t know anyone who is not. But somehow the bombastic “what you can do” guides in every green issue of a magazine do not foster a social movement; signing petitions, writing letters to political representatives doesn’t make me feel like I have …

Domino: Williamsburg Brooklyn, NY

NOLA: Emergency Environmental Health Clinic. New Orleans, LA.

Oldenburg: Germany

Environmental Art Activism and Social Networking Platforms
E90.1022.01Professor: Natalie Jeremijenko
TA: Max LiboironW
8:55 am – 12:15 pm

What to do in the face of a climate crisis? How does the social movement around environmental change coalesce? How do cultural ideas interact with technical, material and economic constraints to develop the movement around new environmentalism? How does the contemporary environmental movement differ from its predecessors? How can we reimagine our relationship to natural systems?

TOPICS
Environmental Art Activism, Social Networking, Innovative and Inclusive Design

Projects
1) Me++: Become an Environmental ImPatient
2) Where++:
3) Them++: HowStuffisMade
4) How++: Environmental Health Clinic: Brown sites
5) When++:

Texts:
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin Co, 2007)Link to The Death of Environmentalism

Response by Carl Pope from the Sierra Club, Laura Fauth from AdBusters, and the Climate Progress Blog.

Kate Stohr, Cameron Sinclair, Design Like you Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humantarian Crisis (Metropolis Books, 2006)

Alex Stephen, World Changing (website)

Simon M. Reader and Kevin N. Laland, Animal Innovation (2003).

Phil Brown, Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement (Columbia Uninversity Press, 2007)

John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (MIT Press, 2006).

Charles …

The Environmental Health Clinic at NYU is a clinic and lab, modeled on other health clinics at universities. However the project approaches health from an understanding of its dependence on external local environments; rather than on the internal biology and genetic predispositions of an individual.

The clinic works like this. You make an appointment, just like you would at a traditional health clinic, to talk about your particular environmental health concerns. What differs is that you walk out with a prescription not for pharmaceuticals but for actions: local data collection and urban interventions directed at understanding and
improving your environmental health; plus referrals, not to medical
specialists but to specific art, design and participatory projects,
local environmental organizations and local government or civil
society groups: organizations that can use the data and actions prescribed as legitimate forms of participation to promote social change.

As with traditional healthcare, the responsibility ultimately …

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