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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Andrew Jameton, PhD, Preventive & Societal Medicine, University of Nebraska Medical Center, 986075 Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE 68198-6075, 402-559-4680, ajameton@unmc.edu

If the modern world is to succeed in addressing the public health challenges posed by environmental decline, it will require a revolution in values. Key elements of this reorientation of public health values include:

1. We need a fundamental re-orientation of how we view our material priorities in public health. We must find cultural and technological ways to support public health adequately while radically reducing consumption. Successful, sustainable, public health will be measured by its modesty, not its size or growth.

2. The main props of ordinary public health ethics – the individual client, “Georgetown” principles, and utility theory – must be displaced by a more environmentally sound set of ethical principles and values, emphasizing interconnectedness, global justice, community, harmonious balance, and modest life-styles. The supremacy of the individual can no longer dominate ethical principles, nor can insulation from nature continue to be the main priority of the built environment.

3. The relationship of ethics to economic infrastructure will need to be re-examined, and creative economic principles and relationships will need to be explored to support collective social change capable of slowing environmental degradation.

If we do not move quickly to an environmentally more responsible culture, environmental degradation will inexorably and catastrophically continue to reduce the public health status of humanity worldwide, and many of the ethical commitments and value statements of public health professionals which now seem admirable will be discovered, on reflection, to have been corrupt and unresponsive to the public health realities of the declining global environment.

Learning Objectives: At the end of this session, participants will be able to

• Describe how large environmental changes are beginning to supersede the common priority placed on the individual in ethics.
• Identify key elements of an ethos based on interconnection and global justice.
• Define alternative roles of ethical principles as a function of the responsiveness of societies to environmental decline.

Keywords: Ethics, Environmental Justice

Related Web page: www.unmc.edu/green

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No