*Flashback Friday*

*This post originally appeared on The PediaBlog October 8, 2020.

 

Everything Around Us

 

 

 

The environment is everything around us.

The environment supports and sustains us, and wherever we live we are intricately connected to it. We bring the environment into our bodies with every breath, every touch, and every swallow. Every smell and sight and sound connects us with the environment around us. 

But the environment can also threaten our health and safety. For example, extreme weather events fueled by climate change threaten life and limb. Microscopic life forms live in the environment along with us — molds, bacteria, and viruses like coronavirus — and these microbes can make us sneeze, make us sick, and even kill us. Natural toxins like plant oils can give us rashes, pollens can make us wheeze, and snake venom can make us die. 

There are things that humans do that damage the environment. We allow the byproducts of our existence — human waste, but also the waste of all our activities — to contaminate the air, water and soil that we depend on to sustain us, and to sustain all living things in the environment. When the environment is degraded, the diversity of life is diminished. And so are we because of our intimate connection to the environment.

We are inhabiting the environment together, but we are not all living in it together equally. As we learned back in July, children are especially vulnerable to environmental degradation and destruction. Voiceless in our society, children have the most to gain when grown-ups use our voices to protect and preserve our shared environmental inheritance, and the most to lose when we don’t.

The American Public Health Association puts a finer point on why protecting children’s health from threats in the environment is so important:

Young children often are hardest hit by the consequences of poor environmental public health systems. For their size, they breathe more air and eat more food than adults, making them particularly vulnerable to environmental public health hazards. And even low levels of toxic exposures can affect children’s physical and mental development.

While everyone suffers the consequences of environmental contaminants, communities of color and low-income communities are disproportionately affected. Historic and current-day policies and practices, such as structural racism, have led to and continue health inequities.

 

Last year for Children’s Environmental Health Day, we put kids first by prioritizing their environmental rights:

„>  All children have the right to breathe clean air, eat safe and healthful food, drink pure water, and enjoy toys and products free from environmental health and safety threats;

„>  All children have the right to healthy, safe, and secure homes, child care facilities, schools, and communities;

„>  All children and their parents and caretakers have the right to know about proven and potential hazards to their environmental health and safety and to protection from these threats.

 

Here in Pennsylvania, the state’s Constitution gives the people “the right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.” Furthermore, “Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come.” All the people and children who haven’t even been born yet.

Today marks the fifth annual Children’s Environmental Health Day. It’s a day of education and action for a healthier environment for all our children. Pediatricians, nurses, teachers, and parents will be leading the day-long event that puts children at the center of advocacy for clean air, pure water, and an environment that is struggling to keep up with the abuse.

Read more about Children’s Environmental Health Day from the Children’s Environmental Health Network here.

 

 

source http://www.thepediablog.com/2021/10/08/flashback-friday-175/