In Pursuit of Healthy Environments

Book excerpt: In Pursuit of Healthy Environments brings temporal depth to a highly topical issue, the interaction between health and the environment. By means of a rich set of historical case studies from Americas to Europe and from the tropics to the Arctic, the volume demonstrates that the concern for creating and finding healthy environments is not a new one, shows how the link between the environment and health has been perceived at different times and in different cultures, and discusses the practical implications of these conceptualizations. The book written by scholars from architecture, cultural anthropology, history, Indigenous Studies, media studies and sociology will be of interest to a reader interested in the historical roots of present health-related environmental issues. It discusses the spatiality and materiality of the conceptions of health and the practices of nurture in colonial and post-colonial environments and shows how greatly indigenous and colonial mindsets have differed during the last 300 years. It also investigates how certain environments have become labelled as healthy and life-preserving while others stigmatized by death and disease and how fluctuating these notions can be. Finally, it analyses the materialities and immaterialities, as well as the transgenerational and transboundary characters of environmental and medical knowledge.