ancient cities

Key events that prompted the post–World War II
rise of environmental awareness and legislation
include the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent
Spring, the first Earth Day public mobilization,
the creation of a federal environmental agency
followed by the state counterpart agencies, and
the rapid, successive passage of federal environmental
legislation throughout the 1970s. Silent
Spring was published in 1962 and warned that
chemical pesticides in agriculture and weed control
constitute a “peacetime” war on nature
which would endanger life along the ecological
pathways of air, water, soil, plants, and organisms
throughout the food chain. Twenty million
people participated in Earth Day, April 22, 1970,
by joining in urban river cleanups, recycling campaigns,
and environmental teach-ins. In the same
year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
was created. A ferment of legislative interest and
activity over the next decade resulted in the enactment
of environmental laws and amendments
governing air, rivers and wetlands, pesticide registration,
toxic industrial substances, and solid
and hazardous waste. The effect of these laws and
their subsequent regulations was to partition the
natural environment into the media of air, water,
and soil with measurable physical, biological, and
chemical properties. The identification of contamination
of these environmental media was a
catalyst for a growing set of new environmental
remediation technologies.
The paradigms of nature and the natural environment
that shaped much of the twentiethcentury
environmental consciousness need to be
reexamined in the light of global urbanization. The
majority of the world’s population now lives in
cities, and migration to cities and metropolitan
areas is increasing in developing countries in the
same pattern that occurred a century earlier in the
industrial countries. As the world continues to
urbanize, the complex living environment of urban
people and urban environmental protection are
not adequately addressed by either the archetype
of nature as wilderness remote from people or by
the regulatory model of the physical environment
as the media of air, water, and soil.
Cities and their metropolitan areas account for
the largest human ecological footprint on the
planet. In the industrialized countries and in
urbanizing developing countries, most national
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economy is generated in metropolitan areas. Yet,
cities have not been the focus of past environmental
protection initiatives. The potential impact of
cities and their metropolitan areas on global warming,
waste generation, nonrenewable raw material
use, and so on—because of their economic power
and economies of scale—must become a central
focus of environmental health initiatives. These
problems take on added importance with the
growth of megacities in the developing nations,
which now experience, on a greater scale, many of
the environmental health risks found in the early
industrial era in the United States and Great
Britain. Among these are squatter and slum housing,
heavily polluted indoor and ambient air, contaminated
drinking water, proximity to dangerous
industries, and increased risk of accident and
injury. At the same time, some cities in newly
industrializing countries are touchstones for sound
environmental development. For example, Curitiba,
Brazil, has an efficient and widely accessible public
transportation system that has been studied by
urban transportation planners in the United States.
According to the Mega-Cities Project, many programs
initiated in third world cities, such as food
distribution, recycling, and ecological restoration
of wasteland, serve as models for New York City,
Los Angeles, and London. In many of these programs,
local women have emerged as community
leaders, creating a social model of leadership for
poor women.
Conclusion
Urban health, as an area of research, practice, and
policy, has arisen at the intersection of (1) demographic
trends, specifically, the migration of people
to cities; (2) the impetus and findings of recent
research on social factors and neighborhood-level
effects on health; and (3) the new paradigm of
environment as the lived environment where people
reside, work, play, and pray. It offers the
potential of interdisciplinary approaches, from
fields such as public and community health, urban
planning, and environmental protection, which are
needed to address the interrelated and multifactorial
effects of urbanization on human and ecological
health.
H. Patricia Hynes