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Health & Fitness Healthy Living

Sustainable Communities for a Healthy Planet

by (author) Katharine Zywert

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2024
Category
Healthy Living, Economic Conditions, General
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781487548032
    Publish Date
    Apr 2024
    List Price
    $110.00
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781487548667
    Publish Date
    Apr 2024
    List Price
    $54.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487550455
    Publish Date
    Mar 2024
    List Price
    $54.95

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Description

Sustainable Communities for a Healthy Planet presents an unconventional collection of ideas, practices, and ways of living together with the potential to enable long-term human and planetary health. Grounded in first-hand accounts from researchers, health practitioners, and social innovators across diverse fields, Katharine Zywert’s book argues that the most promising approaches often depart substantially from the incentive structures, goals, and mindsets that define the status quo and do not necessarily align with mainstream sustainability discourses.

 

The book instead presents promising approaches that disrupt dominant ideas about mental health, ageing, and chronic illness; circumvent exploitative markets for medications, medical technologies, and professionalized care; attend not only to the health of individual human bodies, but to the health of internal ecologies, human populations, nonhuman species, and the planet as a whole; and embody alternative, more inclusive ways of practicing medicine within communities and ecosystems. The stories assembled in this book illustrate how human beings might live healthy lives, supported by health systems that are not dependent on perpetual economic growth.

 

Sustainable Communities for a Healthy Planet challenges conventional ways of thinking about the future of health systems and asks hard questions about what it takes to cultivate human and planetary health in a time of rapid ecological, economic, and social change.

About the author

Katharine Zywert is an independent researcher and writer working at the intersection of social-ecological systems change and health.

Katharine Zywert's profile page