Boston Flora

Tag: Center for Health and the Global Environment

  • Wednesday, July 26, 5:30 pm – Global Environmental Threats: How Medical Models Can Help Us Understand Them

    On Wednesday, July 26 at 5:30 pm at the Polly Hill Arboretum, 809 State Road in West Tisbury, Dr. Eric Chivian, founder and former director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, will present a talk on recognizing and addressing global environmental threats. His lecture will also touch on Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, a topic of great importance to the Island community. In 1980, Dr. Chivian co-founded the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. During the past 26 years, he has worked to involve physicians in the United States and abroad in efforts to increase public understanding of the potential human health consequences of global environmental change, and in 2008 was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. Dr. Chivian is the senior editor and author of Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity, named “Best Biology Book of 2008” by Library Journal. He currently directs a new nonprofit, the Program for Preserving the Natural World. The lecture is co-sponsored with the Vineyard Conservation Society. $10 / $5 for PHA and VCS members.

  • Wednesday, November 30, 6:00 pm – Sustainable Tourism on a Finite Planet

    Megan Epler Wood, Director, International Sustainable Tourism Initiative, Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, will speak on Wednesday, November 30 beginning at 6 pm at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

    Megan Epler Wood will draw from her new book, Sustainable Tourism on a Finite Planet, to explore how the growth of the global tourism economy over the next 20 years will affect vital natural and social treasures worldwide. She will present visualizations of the impact of unmanaged growth and present far-reaching thoughts on the type of reforms required to lower tourism’s impacts and protect the health of local populations, ecosystems, cultures, and monuments worldwide.

    Presented in collaboration with the Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
    This program is located at the Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street. Free parking is available at the 52 Oxford Street Garage.
    Free and open to the public.

  • Wednesday, May 1, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm – Global Environmental Threats: Why They are So Hard to See and How Using a Medical Model Can Help

    Tragically and self-destructively, we human beings have so much difficulty recognizing that we are an integral, inseparable part of the natural world and that we have no other choice but to preserve it. Our failure in understanding this fundamental truth is central to our difficulty in seeing the changes, happening before our eyes, that we are making to the global environment and in acting to prevent them. This talk, given by Eric Chivian, MD, Director of the Program on Biodiversity and Human Health, Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard School of Public Health, shall look at why these alterations are so hard to see and how looking at their consequences from a medical perspective can be helpful. The session will take place on Wednesday, May 1 beginning at 7 pm in the Hunnewell Building of the Arnold Arboretum, $5 for Arboretum members, $10 for nonmembers. Sign up on line at www.arboretum.harvard.edu.  And here he is below with Harrison Ford – perhaps not the photo the Arboretum had in mind for this post, and we doubt anyone will mistake Mr. Ford as an environmental threat, but we just couldn’t resist.

    http://archives.focus.hms.harvard.edu/2002/June7_2002/harrison_ford449.jpg