Environmentalism is commonly criticized for replacing an
overly human-centred worldview with one that ignores, even alienates,
people. The ecological mindset is pie-in-the-sky long-term soothsaying
at the expense of our immediate needs, critics say.
Speaking with Daniel Rainham, an environmental science professor at
Dalhousie University, it becomes apparent how wrong those critics
are.
Rainham is at the forefront of a new field of study. “I’m interested
in the relationship between environment and health,” he says. But
unlike the environmental health that puts the microscope on links
between pollutants and illness, Rainham’s perspective is broad. Global,
even. “I’m looking from the movement of natural capital and its
ecological footprint, down to how neighbourhoods are designed and their
affects on air quality and our health, to the built environment’s
contribution to obesity and how people recover from illness more
quickly when they’re exposed to parks and public gardens.”
Too abstract? Rainham is making those connections real with global
positioning satellite technology, which he uses to track volunteers as
they move around the city. “Using GPS we can look at what areas are
more or less likely to be exposed to air pollution and identify
relationships between neighbourhood characteristics, mode of
transportation and health,” he says.
Although his focus is human health, his conclusions are startlingly
similar to the sermons given by annoying environmentalists from atop
the high seats of their bicycles. Turns out healthy neighbourhoods are
those with good soil quality, minimal noise and vehicle traffic, clean
air, plentiful sidewalks for walkability, ample green space and
playgrounds, trees, quality housing and opportunities for outdoor
social gatherings.
“Current forms of planning fail us in the long-run in terms of
resource use and health,” Rainham says. That’s because municipalities
are designed, very poorly, around the automobile, giving rise to social
isolation, air pollution, noise, traffic fatalities, obesity and water
pollution from parking-lot chemical runoff.
He argues that by simply honing in on a specific, comprehensive
goal, whether it’s human health or creating energy efficient transit,
city and neighbourhood planners could create vibrant, fun, healthy,
sustainable places with real meaning for their residents. Sharpening
our focus, while keeping well-informed on numerous schools of thought,
Rainham feels, creates a natural synergy between community, health and
environment. “They go hand-in-hand,” he says.
Community leaders might start by creating safer open places to
congregate. Car-free zones have been shown to build neighbourly
conviviality. Rainham cites a recent UK study in which residents were
asked to draw lines on a map from home to all the neighbours they knew.
On a high traffic street, there might be a line or two. On a pedestrian
street, the residents turned the map into a spider’s web. We saw a
local example on Halifax’s Black Street last year, when residents threw
a car-free block party and rocked the night, building on a sense of
neighbourliness and community. Black Street remains one of the
tightest-knit communities in Halifax.
Once the cars have been put aside, there is more room for humans and
all those non-human entities treehuggers are always pining for: like
trees. Rainham recalls playing as a child in huge development-free
buffer zones around waterways in Waterloo. The green spaces they
provided allowed children a network of play-space, corridors through
which they could travel without encountering cars.
Green spaces are a nice example of Rainham’s theory that, when it
comes to health, what is good for kids is good for adults too. Since
becoming a parent himself, he’s had to slow down and more fully
interact with the places he inhabits. “I require more places to sit
down, or to find a washroom,” he says. At that slower speed, one
realizes just how much our city is designed for cars and one asks
questions like, “Can a child or an elderly person make it across six
lanes of traffic? No.”
Most parents, when they aren’t pondering such things, seek homes
that will give their pride and joy safe opportunities to gather with
other kids, run around, go on little adventures. Open spaces and trees
are great for this: so are relatively dense communities with a
neighbourhood feel where, because people know each other, violent crime
becomes unthinkable.
Rainham points to the areas around Agricola and Gottingen as
examples of blossoming healthy neighbourhoods, human in scale with
indoor and outdoor gathering places and well-integrated with the
natural habitat. These have grown recently with little or no support
from city planners, who are too busy with regional exercises in
document production, showing us something else the environmentalists
were right about: Good things tend to grow from the ground up.
What’s the best walking neighbourhood in Halifax? Let
Chris Benjamin know at chrisb@thecoast.ca.
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2009.