Community Guide to Environmental Health: Book & CD

A Community Guide to Environmental Health
Jeff Conant and Pam Fadem
Paperback, 600 pages, illustrated, plus CD, $36
ISBN: 978-0-942364-56-9 (book) and ISBN 978-0-942364-62-0(CD)

This book and CD together cost $36, a savings of $10 off the retail price if bought separately!

From toilets to toxics, from watershed management to waste management, from raising crops to rising temperatures, how we use natural resources affects our health and well-being.

This highly illustrated guide helps health promoters, development workers, environmental activists, and community leaders take charge of their environmental health. In small villages and large cities, A Community Guide to Environmental Health can provide the tools, knowledge, and inspiration to begin transforming the crisis in environmental health.

This duo contains activities to stimulate critical thinking and discussion, inspirational stories, and instructions for simple health technologies such as water purification methods, safe toilets, and non-toxic cleaning products. 23 chapters cover topics including:

• preventing and reducing harm from toxic pollution
• forestry, restoring land, and planting trees
• protecting community water and watersheds
• food security and sustainable farming
• environmental health at home
• solid waste and health care waste
• how to reduce harm from mining, oil, and energy production

With dozens of activities to stimulate critical thinking and discussion, instructions for simple health technologies such as safe toilets, safe cleaning methods, and water purification methods, and hundreds of drawings to make the messages clear, A Community Guide to Environmental Health will be useful for people just beginning to address environmental health threats, as well as people with many years experience in the field.

Related Materials

• Download this book on our Free Downloads page.
• If you are interested in environmental issues, you may also be interested in titles from our Health & Empowerment Bookshelf: The Story of Stuff, Dam Nation, and Building Without Borders.
• You can also purchase this as a book or as a CD.
• One of the contributors to this book, Feliciano dos Santos, won the 2008 Goldman Environmental Prize for his work in Mozambique. To hear and purchase the music of Santos and his band Massukos, please visit the world’s first Fair Trade music company Calabash Music.

What people are saying 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 Barlowe
Director and co-founder, Blue Planet Project and National Chairperson, Council of Canadians