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

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 …

tesing