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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Polly Hoppin, ScD, Environmental Health Initiative, University of Massachusetts Lowell, 600 Suffolk St, Lowell, MA 01854, 978-934-4941, phoppin@envhealth.net and Joel Tickner, ScD, Department of Community Health and Sustainability, University of Massachusetts Lowell, 3 Solomont Way, Lowell, MA 01854.

Toward Tomorrow: A Common Agenda for Health and Environment

For many years in the United States, scientists, advocates, and policymakers have largely reacted to immediate health and ecosystem threats without a clear vision or corresponding set of future goals. This failure to articulate a vision has contributed to perceptions that the environmental and health movements are thoughtlessly oppositional, and impediments to technological and economic development.

The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production is bringing together leaders and scholars from diverse fields--both people late in their careers and those who will shape and implement programs and policies over the next forty years--to develop a common agenda for environment and human health. We aim to identify goals that will inspire and guide the next generation as they address the complex linkages between human and ecosystem health: linkages critical for the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of global health threats. The Toward Tomorrow initiative is predicated on the belief that scientists, government officials, and community, health, environment and business leaders can find common cause in recognizing human consumption and production as sources of both problems and solutions.

This paper will report on the first year and a half of project activities, including a series of oral histories with people whose work has substantially contributed to movements that seek economically, environmentally and socially equitable and sustainable systems of human activity, and the development of a common agenda for action on environmental and human health in the coming decades.

Learning Objectives: