[Note: I’m posting this blog in honor of the annual meeting of the Association of Environmental Studies and Sciences, which is about to start here in Washington DC.] Campus sustainability programs are not just successful applications of sustainability models on a small scale. They can also serve as important demonstration projects and teaching opportunities. In…
Month: February 2021
Heat Events and Climate Change: Challenges to the Occupational Physician
I continue to believe that despite recent setbacks, specifically the US withdrawal from the COP21 agreement, there will be a shift in thinking and a return to practical thinking in dealing with this most serious of global problems. I am posting here a modest contribution that was written in 2016 for my fellow physicians in…
Why Do Research on Occupational Hazards and Risks?
Over the last six or seven weeks I have been involved in research reviews and had time to reflect on them while on several long plane rides. Here are some thoughts. Too often it is assumed that the big questions in occupational health are solved, or at least mitigated to the point where they are…
Climate Change and Occupational and Environmental Medicine
This posting is not a self-contained blog, as usual. Rather, I’d like to bring to your attention an important guidance document prepared with and my colleagues in the Section on Environmental Medicine of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, just published by the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine electronically in advance of…
Continuous Quality Improvement or Standards Setting
My colleagues and I in the Occupational Health and Safety Specialty Group of the Society for Risk Analysis organized a symposium for the SRA 2017 Annual Conference in Arlington, VA, last week. Here is a brief overview of what we talked about. Specifically, the symposium was about a policy of “continuous quality improvement” to occupational…
A Health Risk Assessment Agenda for Green Chemistry
Spurred on by innovations in organic chemistry and chemical engineering and seeking compliance with the regulation for Registration, Evaluation, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) of the European Union and the Precautionary Principle, chemical producers are adapting their processes to conform to the practices of “green chemistry” (also known as “sustainable chemistry”). The US EPA, which…
Clarifying Cancer Risk and Causation
In my long academic and professional career, I have often found myself arguing on the other side of the table from practicing oncologists who are serving as expert witnesses, members of task forces on prevention, consultants, or on panels and round tables. In my opinion, it is important to understand that oncologists are essential professionals…
Flygskam: A Traveler’s Dilemma
Flygskam (“flying shame” in Swedish) is the new trend, popularized by Greta Thunberg but a long time coming, of feeling guilt or shaming others for taking airplanes to get to where one needs to go. Aviation accounted for an estimated 2% of carbon dioxide emissions in 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/04/stayontheground-swedes-turn-to-trains-amid-climate-flight-shame It is a real issue, it is…
A Risk-Free World Does Not Exist, But We Can Pick the Risks Worth Having
On the occasion of being named a Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis, for which I am very grateful, I am posting here one of the earliest pieces I wrote on risk science, a short essay from 1995. It was prepared an an op-ed for the Globe and Mail (Toronto). My views have evolved…