Environmental Bioethics

Changes in earth’s atmosphere, oceans, soil, weather patterns, and ecosystems are well documented by countless scientific disciplines. These manifestations of climate change harm public health. Given their goals and social responsibilities, influential health organizations recognize health impacts compounded by geography, social values, social determinants of health, health behaviors, and relationships between humans and environments primarily described in feminist ethics and environmental ethics. Health impacts are relevant to, but seldom addressed in bioethics, global health, public policy, or health or environmental policy. This book is the first to describe cultural, geographic, and socioeconomic factors that influence the regional significance of these impacts and frame them for bioethics and policy analyses.

As the state of the natural world declines, environmentally related health problems will increasingly shape the landscape of human health and disease. The confluence of several global trends - rapid population growth combined with an even more dramatic increase in natural resource consumption - drives ecological deterioration, and this in turn poses serious challenges to health. U.S. medicine and bioethics have too long ignored the relevance of these global trends to health care. This groundbreaking work is a call to attention. It brings bioethics and health care squarely into the 21st century. The book shows how environmental decline relates to human health and to health care practices in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. It outlines the environmental trends that will strongly affect health, and challenges us to see the connections between ways of practicing medicine and the very environmental problems that damage ecosystems and make people sick. In addition to philosophical analysis of the converging values of bioethics and environmental ethics, the book offers case studies as well as a number of practical suggestions for moving health care toward sustainability. The exploration of a hypothetical Green Health Center, in particular, offers an intellectual and moral framework for talking about environmental values in health care. Engaging and challenging, this book will appeal not only to health professionals and philosophers, but to anyone concerned about how to preserve and promote both human health and the health of the natural world.

Environmental bioethics addresses the environmental impact of the health care industry and climate change health hazards as two ethical issues which impact each other. This edited volume examines the theory of environmental bioethics and offers practical examples of practices which make health care more sustainable. Written in an accessible style which allows readers to understand what environmental bioethics is and why it is important, this book presents real-life case studies and thoughtful reflections from leading doctors, clinicians, and ethicists. Contributions to this volume address ethical frameworks for environmental bioethics and delve into the role of doctors in environmentally sustainable health care. Together, they offer hope for a more sustainable health care industry while also recognizing how much more needs to be done. A key resource for scholars, practitioners and researchers of philosophy, environmental studies, public health, and the allied health sciences, this book will also be relevant to international policymakers, especially in countries which have socialized health care (such as those in the EU), who want a rationale for health care decarbonization and practical examples. It will also appeal to educated citizens, particularly those that demand positive environmental change and are interested in the concept of sustainable health care. This book was originally published as a special issue of The New Bioethics.

Health care is ubiquitous in the industrialized world. Yet, every medical development, technique, and procedure impacts the environment. Green bioethics synthesizes environmental ethics and biomedical ethics, thus creating an interdisciplinary approach to sustainable health care. Notably, green bioethics addresses not the structure of environmental sustainability in health-care institutions but the sustainability of individual health-care offerings. It parallels traditional biomedical ethics by providing four principles for ethical guidance: distributive justice, resource conservation, simplicity, and ethical economics. Through these four principles, green bioethics presents a coherent framework for evaluating the sustainability of medical developments, techniques, and procedures. The future of our world may very well depend on how effectively we halt ecological destruction and conserve our resources in all areas of life. The principles of green bioethics, outlined in this book, will advance sustainability in health care.

Research Ethics for Environmental Health explores the ethical basis of environmental health research and related aspects of risk assessment and control. Environmental health encompasses the assessment and control of those environmental factors that can potentially affect human health, such as radiation, toxic chemicals and other hazardous agents. It is often assumed that the assessment part is just a matter of scientific research, and that control is a matter of implementing standards that unambiguously follow from that research. But it is less commonly understood that environmental health also requires addressing questions of an ethical nature. Coming from multiple disciplines and nine different countries, the contributors to this book critically examine a diverse range of ethical concerns in modern environmental health research. This book will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners of environmental health, as well as researchers in applied ethics, environmental ethics, medical ethics, bioethics and those concerned with chemical and radiation protection.

Environmental health encompasses the assessment and control of those environmental factors that can potentially affect human health, such as radiation, toxic chemicals and other hazardous agents. It is often assumed that the assessment part is just a matter of scientific research, and the control part a matter of implementing standards which unambiguously follow from that research. But it is less commonly understood that environmental health also requires addressing questions of an ethical nature. How can we determine the "acceptable" risk level for the general population or for certain groups? How should we deal with uneven distributions of risks and benefits? How do we communicate about risks with the stakeholders? This multidisciplinary collection brings together a number of leading researchers and scholars in order to generate discussion surrounding these key questions, and to bring the ethical implications of science and technology to the forefront of critical thought. Providing a broad overview of the Ethics of Environmental Health, its philosophical foundations and practical applications, this book offers a significant contribution to ongoing discussions in sustainable development and will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of Environmental Health, urban studies and healthcare.

Environmental Health Ethics illuminates the conflicts between protecting the environment and promoting human health. In this study, David B. Resnik develops a method for making ethical decisions on environmental health issues. He applies this method to various issues, including pesticide use, antibiotic resistance, nutrition policy, vegetarianism, urban development, occupational safety, disaster preparedness, and global climate change. Resnik provides readers with the scientific and technical background necessary to understand these issues. He explains that environmental health controversies cannot simply be reduced to humanity versus environment and explores the ways in which human values and concerns - health, economic development, rights, and justice - interact with environmental protection.

This work presents the first comprehensive and systematic treatment of all relevant issues and topics in contemporary global bioethics. Now that bioethics has entered into a novel global phase, a wider set of issues, problems and principles is emerging against the backdrop of globalization and in the context of global relations. This new stage in bioethics is furthermore promoted through the ethical framework presented in the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights adopted in 2005. This Declaration is the first political statement in the field of bioethics that has been adopted unanimously by all Member States of UNESCO. In contrast to other international documents, it formulates a commitment of governments and is part of international law (though not binding as a Convention). It presents a universal framework of ethical principles for the further development of bioethics at a global level. The Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics caters to the need for a comprehensive overview and systematic treatment of all pertinent new topics and issues in the emerging global bioethics debate. It provides descriptions and analysis of a vast range of important new issues from a truly global perspective and with a cross-cultural approach. New issues covered by the Encyclopedia and neglected in more traditional works on bioethics include, but are not limited to, sponsorship of research and education, scientific misconduct and research integrity, exploitation of research participants in resource-poor settings, brain drain and migration of healthcare workers, organ trafficking and transplant tourism, indigenous medicine, biodiversity, commodification of human tissue, benefit sharing, bio industry and food, malnutrition and hunger, human rights and climate change.