A human rights approach to community based environmental health: A community guide

Starting from a human rights and environmental justice perspective, Hesperian's Community Guide to Environmental Health, was developed with community groups internationally as a practical guide to solving common environmental health problems. Faced with the increasing global crisis in environmental health, including the lack of clean water and air, healthy food and arable land, and increasingly toxic pollution, the Community Guide offers step-by-step solutions accessible to both rural and urban communities to some of the most common problems. As well, the Guide offers community organizing strategies used successfully by people throughout the world in their struggles for environmental health and justice. From plans for building dry, composting toilets, ways to insure clean water even in the face of environmental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the 2005 Southeast Asian tsunami, to simple steps to do a 'trash Walk' to assess your community's strengths and weaknesses in managing household and community-level wastes, and practical ways to grow food in urban as well as rural areas without using toxic chemicals, this Guide offers people hope and empowerment in the face of what seems like overwhelming “global chaos.”