Abstract
Reviewed by: Rosemary Kelly Sokas, School of Nursing and Health Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
In Bridging Silos: Collaborating for Environmental Health and Justice in Urban Communities, Katrina Smith Korfmacher persuasively argues the importance of making connections between public health and environmental health, while also addressing the need to cross multiple social and disciplinary divides.
Korfmacher is an associate professor at the University of Rochester who holds joint appointments in Environmental Medicine, Public Health Science, and Community Health and Prevention. Although she has a PhD in environmental science, she describes herself as a policy scientist who focuses on the use of science for policy-making. As such, she is well positioned to understand and describe crossing barriers at many levels. In this book, she uses three in-depth examples to draw clear, generalizable lessons for those working to promote environmental justice.
For a reader like me accustomed to the biomedical model of peer-reviewed scientific publications, the book-length discussion occasionally becomes repetitive or just plain long. However, the clarity of presentation and the author’s attention to detail—including explanations of authorizing legislation, descriptions of all underlying concepts, the use of tables and summaries, and the emphasis on outcomes and impact—provide the reader with an outstanding introduction to the complexities of community-based participatory action, including its challenges and facilitators. It is an excellent course text for students engaged in the study of environmental justice.
The book is organized into nine chapters. The first three set the stage by describing the need for systems approaches to address environmental health, explaining the historical divide between public health and environmental health, and elaborating potential ways to bridge the existing gaps and build true systems. These initial chapters provide an exceptionally clear introduction to environmental law and policy as well as to such community health concepts as the ecologic framework. Importantly, they do so without presupposing reader familiarity with any of the concepts or acronyms.
In the three chapters that follow, Korfmacher provides exquisitely detailed, in-depth discussions of three successful large-scale efforts in community collaboration. The first—an effort to prevent lead poisoning in a post-industrial urban center by reframing the issue as a housing concern—is one in which Korfmacher was intimately engaged through work at the University of Rochester. By moving the intervention upstream through changes in local housing policy, the multiyear, multisector efforts succeeded in demonstrating actual impact through blood lead level measurements over time.
The second case addresses a quite different issue—the implementation of classic public health outreach for nutrition and exercise through recognition of such environmental factors as unsafe walking spaces and food deserts in the Healthy Duluth effort. Again, local policy successes emerged to address transportation changes, improving access to healthy foods and encouraging intentional walking among those using bus transportation.
For her third major intervention, Korfmacher describes a project that sought to reduce classic environmental air pollution caused by transporting goods from the port of Los Angeles. Community activists and academics documented the harms caused by particulate pollution and succeeded in implementing local ordinances to reduce the pollutants. By engaging workers to address the misclassification of truck drivers as self-employed, and to move the onus for upgrades to less-polluting vehicles to the large corporations, the effort offers an encouraging—and powerful —example of a labor—community alliance.
In the closing chapters, Korfmacher identifies ways in which collaboration between sectors has facilitated the ability of public health and environmental health to bridge their divide, and she then offers some generalizable lessons. Each successful case was sparked by passionate community activists, each required identification of substantial resources by various partners, and each passed through different stages of activity, including quiescence. Among the more challenging lessons is that those communities with the deepest need are unlikely to be the ones able to successfully collaborate. Whether or not one agrees with all of the conclusions, the book fills an important need by providing rich background material to spark classroom discussions and to engage students in thoughtful evaluation of community-based learning.