Healthful Environments

We believe young people need to engage the natural world repeatedly and in multiple ways to mature responsibly and lead satisfying and balanced lives.  And they must find safety and meaning in their social environments. Yet for many children, as well as for adults, modern society is producing increasingly degraded natural and social environments that offer fewer opportunities to richly integrate nature with ordinary life and learning.

Likewise, an impoverished natural environment deprives children of an essential association with nature.  A growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our experience with nature.  New studies indicate that restoring children’s connections to nature may reduce the symptoms of ADHD, and improve children’s cognitive abilities and resistance to negative stressors.  The disconnection from nature that can result from loss of a safe and healthy natural habitat carries grave consequences for human health, well-being, and child development.

Health cannot be seen in a vacuum.  Recent scientific evidence indicates a growing relationship between a range of environmental factors—including socio-economic dimensions—and children’s health.  We know that children, because they are developing physically, suffer most from environmental degradation.  Their intake of toxins may be significantly higher than that of adults and they are more vulnerable to infections. 

Additionally, our accelerated society promotes fast foods that increasingly put children—and the rest of us—at high risk of obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related illnesses.   Chronic diseases and disabilities have reached epidemic proportions in the US, affecting more than one third of the population.  The economic cost alone exceeds $325 billion.  The human cost to families and communities is immeasurable.

Rising rates of asthma, autism, cancers, and developmental disabilities are increasingly linked to accelerating exposure to pesticides, industrial chemicals, personal care products, and other pollutants found in food, water, and air.  In a globalizing world, these environmental health challenges manifest themselves as:

• growing dietary health risks among children (and adults) and insufficient access to health care;
• increasingly toxic environments that contain materials hazardous to physical health, over-stimulate visually and mentally, and are ecologically unsustainable;
• growing socio-economic inequalities that put neighborhoods in poverty at greater risk of environmental hazards, make greater economic demands on families, and are socially isolating;
• loss of biodiversity and critical natural habitats that sustain healthy ecosystems;
• breakdown of a public consciousness to promote strong public health initiatives.

Restoring and sustaining strong community and personal health practices requires educational institutions dedicated to promoting strong ecological practices, sensibilities, and habits.  The Blue Adobe Project uniquely links issues of public health to educational programs of environmental justice and sustainability, healthy habitats, and vital communities.

Designing healthy schools

We see good health is an essential resource for everyday life and not the object of living.  In an ecological concept of health, health becomes a positive concept emphasizing social, cultural, and personal resources as well as physical capacities.

As human beings, we require fully activated senses in order to feel vital and alive—we need direct experiences with the natural world that are about feeling, smelling, tasting, and getting our hands on the earth, touching it.  Increased awareness of the power of nature and our built environments to sustain and improve physical and emotional health can lead us to redesign how schools are conceptualized and built,

Healthy schools provide the needed opportunity for children and the adults who work with them to become highly reflective, even critical participants, in environmental issues in their own communities, including the school itself.  These schools will also equip students and teachers with the ability to think about and make global connections to local issues of environmental justice and toxic sites.

Therefore, at The Blue Adobe Project we:

• Recognize that schools are an integral part of a healthy community and provide opportunities for students to learn about local health issues and to contribute actively to the environmental health of their communities;
• Believe schools should be a positive place to be—teachers and students have good working conditions and feel supported in their work;
• Require teacher training in health and environmental issues, and develop school alliances with local health and environmental organizations;
• Provide opportunities for physical activity, inviting natural surroundings and outdoor gathering spaces;
• Make nutritious foods available, and develop an organic garden and edible orchard to supply lunches and snacks;    
•  Plan to provide an on-site aerobic exercise and weight training facility.