From water quality to social inequality, from raising crops to rising temperatures, how we use natural resources affects our health and well-being.
This highly-illustrated guide will help health promoters, educators, community leaders and ordinary people take charge of their communities’ environmental health. In small villages and large cities, ‘A Community Guide to Environmental Health’ can provide tools, knowledge, and inspiration to begin transforming the global crisis in evironmental health.
This book contains activities to stimulate critical thinking and environmental change, dozens of stories of communitites in action, and instructions for making simple technologies to purify water, clean without toxics, get rid of pests, and more.
Like all Hesperian books, this title was developed in consultation with organizations from around the world, ensuring its appropriateness and usefulness for a variety of cultures and circumstances.
What people say about A Community Guide to Environmental Health
“You have produced something quite extraordinary. The Community Guide will certainly be much used for the benefit of poor communities around the world. Too little has been done to provide this type of practical and useful information to communities. The human rights approach in the guide is especially useful.” – Ingvar Andersson
former Head of Water Division, Swedish International Development Cooperation (Sida)
“A Community Guide to Environmental Health will restore hope in communities that they can play active roles in preserving environmental health and by so doing, stay healthy. With this excellent Guide, community people can now learn how to protect themselves and also know what projects to resist in their communities. A very timely publication.” – Nnimmo Bassey
Director, Environmental Rights Action, Nigeria
“Community work, especially our water and sanitation programs, are more effective and efficient when we have tools that meet the needs and expectations of the communities. Hesperian produces materials so creative and communicative, and of such quality and precision, that they allow us to respond to the many common problems of communities while recognizing that each case is unique. The flexibility of these materials makes them useful in a wide variety of social and geographic contexts.” – Feliciano dos Santos
ESTAMOS, Mozambique
“This book shows the myriad ways in which water is essential to health, and how our health is threatened by those who would deny our right to water through privatization, pollution, and profiteering. An incredible educational and organizing tool in the struggle for water democracy and global survival.” – Maude Barlow
Director and co-founder, Blue Planet Project and National Chairperson, Council of Canadians
“A Community Guide to Environmental Health, another great book of the Hesperian Foundation on helping communities especially poor and marginalized communities is a welcome and very useful guide in addressing seemingly common but aggravating environmental health issues in the every day lives of people that don’t have access to formal and expensive health care programs. This book offers inexpensive and practical and environment friendly ways to handle health and environment problems in the home, work place and in the community in general.” – Sonia Mendoza
Director, Mother Earth Foundation, Philippines
The Watering Hole :: Jeff Conant 