Environments, People, and Health

Establishing and maintaining healthy environments: Toward a social ecology of health promotion.

“…From an ecological perspective, however, health promotion is viewed not only in terms of the specific health behaviors of individuals, but more broadly as a dynamic transaction between individuals and groups and their sociophysical milieu. The social-ecological approach to health promotion requires explicit analysis of the interplay between the environmental resources available in an area and the particular health habits and life-styles of the people who occupy the area (Lindheim & Syme, 1983).…”

Toward a public health of situations: the re-contextualization of risk

“…Participants in these environments, he suggests, can be studied at varying levels of scale and complexity, with local settings being nested in more complex and remote settings. The social ecological approach to health promotion, Lindheim and Syme (1983) argue, requires explicit analysis of the interplay between the environmental resources available in an area and the health habits and life styles of the occupants of the area. Using Stokols' characterization of en-vironmental scale, situations are individual or group activities occurring at a particular time or place.…”

Nature and Health

“…We touch on clinically oriented work on contact with nature in therapeutic contexts, but we do not discuss benefits of companion animals, which may be taken as representations of nature (42; however, see 6). Although the core ideas we discuss have a durable legacy in public health practice, the topic has not previously been the focus of an Annual Review of Public Health article (however, see 44,80).…”