| UC Toxics News: Winter
2005
Faculty members at UC Berkeley are taking a broad look at how California’s development over the next several decades will affect human health and the state’s ecosystems, with an emphasis on solving problems associated with toxic substances. A series of seminars being developed by the School of Public Health, the Department of City and Regional Planning, and the College of Natural Resources will serve as a forum in which researchers from many universities, politicians, government representatives, private sector leaders, and graduate students can come together to identify key issues and define the areas of research and training needed to address these issues. A $45,000 grant from UC’s Toxic Substances Research and Teaching Program is supporting this interdisciplinary planning effort. “California’s population is expected to grow dramatically by 2020, accompanied by dramatic change in land use,” said Robert Spear, professor of environmental health and director of COEH’s component of the planning effort. “This growth and change will affect air, soil, and water quality and potentially increase toxic hazards. We need to develop new methods and Mitigating the Impact of Toxics on Health, Environment technologies for acquiring, processing, and analyzing spatial data so that we can understand these changes and mitigate adverse effects.” Spear said the seminars will examine the demographic and economic trends that are likely to condition California’s development over the next 15 to 20 years. In the spring, the seminars will focus on regions where these trends will likely have the strongest impact—for example, the Sierra foothills, California’s South Coast (Los Angeles to San Diego), and the Central Valley. Based on the exchange at the seminars, graduate students will have the opportunity to receive course credit by writing background papers exploring in greater depth the challenges of protecting environmental quality, and improving human health. “The papers and the seminars will be an important mechanism for addressing issues that cut across disciplinary, political, and institutional lines so that we can develop a program of teaching and research that will help us to prepare graduates who can look at these problems with new insights and new tools,” Spear said.
|
