Policy sciences, the environment and public health

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Abstract
Human interrelationships with environmental systems and processes demonstrate complexity far in excess of the intellectual capacities of the usual scientific (including social scientific) disciplines and professions. Indeed this mismatch between practical realities in the world around us and our quite limited intellectual tools, theories, and techniques has been widened by fragmentary and particularistic impulses in the disciplines themselves. There are notable exceptions, however, although the common aspects and links between policy sciences, ecology, and public health—three exceptions—have not yet been noticed, explored, and developed. This essay begins with the policy sciences and ecology, where the case is somewhat clearer, and then proceeds to implicate public health in terms of environmental monitoring (especially for human health effects), various and ongoing studies of global change, instances of environmental insult, and finally, ecological collapse and reconstitution. Emphasis on the considerable challenges a joining of policy sciences, ecology, and public health portends runs throughout the essay.

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