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Accurate Comparisons in Environmental Health
Related to this project: Food4Health

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The folks at the WorldChanging blog posted a piece looking at the problem of providing comparative measures for issues around climate change

[http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009431.html]

We've all seen stats that speak to the overwhelming impact of human life on the environment that, if you stopped to add things up, don't quite make for good math. If 30% of greenhouse gasses come from cars, 40% from food systems production and transportation, 30% from buildings, 10% from airplanes, 35% from biomass degredation etcc.... you get some numbers that don't make sense.

In his post, Alex Steffen makes the case that we're not often talking the same language in terms of stats and stories.

Its one of the reasons why we've been undertaking a systematic review of youth engagement because, just like climate change, we talk about it a lot and all know what we mean by it...don't we?? As we're starting to find out, maybe we don't all know what we mean and what the implications and impact of youth engagement really is on health.

Likewise, one of the important things we hope to is find some common language among the tools used to measure change and influence on health within the area of chronic disease and food systems. The reasons for such things are less academic than communicative. Once we know what we know and what language we know it in, it's easier to find out where our points of departure are. The goal isn't to come up with the 'one' way of doing things, rather it is the opposite: to find out more about the diversity of ways to express the idea and what common threads (if any) tie them together.

Otherwise, we might be talking past each other than with each other, failing to ask the questions that Alex does about whether or not we're comparing the same things or not.

March 2, 2009 | 11:01 AM Comments  0 comments

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