Cover -- Health Ecology -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- List of contributors -- Foreword -- 1 Health ecology: an introduction -- Introduction -- Ecology -- Human ecology -- Health -- Health ecology -- Health impact assessment -- Health ecology -- PART I Health in macro ecosystems -- 2 Good planets are hard to find -- The concept of an ecological public health -- Societal developments -- The societal response to health risk patterns -- A new public health agenda -- From the sewerage principle to an ecological principle -- Theoretical base of an ecological public health -- The pattern that connects -- Strategies and approaches -- Consequences of a new public health strategy -- Changing expectations and social perceptions -- Political ecology -- 3 Health and conservation: shared values -- Introduction -- Principal components -- Ecology and the environment -- People -- Discussion -- Conclusion -- 4 Human health as an ecological problem -- A conceptual overview -- Environment -- Organism -- Organism-environment relation: a criterion of human health -- Genetic determinants and environment -- Positive indices of health -- Negative indices of health and cultural maladjustments -- Contemporary civilisation-affected diseases -- 5 Health through sustainable development -- Defining sustainable development -- Sustainable development and sustainable health -- Planning for sustainable health: the potential -- Planning for sustainable health: the tools -- The Ultimate Environmental Threshold method -- Conclusions -- 6 Health and political ecology: public opinion, political ideology, political parties, policies and the press -- Introduction -- The climate of policy making in the 1990s -- Public opinion -- Political ideology -- The press -- Political parties and other stakeholders.

Policy impacts on health -- Conclusion -- PART II Health in micro ecosystems -- 7 Health of women: changing lifestyles and reproductive health -- Introduction -- Health and reproductive health -- Secular changes in the biological determinants of fertile life -- Behavioural determinants of fertile life use -- Fertility changes over time in Spain -- Socio-economic variation -- Methods of birth control: type, medical surveillance and failure -- Health consequences of change in reproductive patterns -- 8 Health of children: causal pathways from macro to micro environment -- Introduction -- Brief overview of micro environmental explanations -- Brief overview of macro explanations -- Mediators linking the macro to the micro -- Temporal, inter-generational and cumulative effects -- Causal pathways from macro to micro environment -- A theoretical framework for the analysis of causal relationships in child health -- Summary and conclusions -- 9 Healthy homes -- Introduction -- Characteristics of healthy homes -- Conclusion -- PART III Selected case studies -- 10 Health ecology and the biodiversity of natural medicine: perspectives from traditional and complementary health systems -- Traditional health systems: policy, biodiversity and global inter-dependence -- The global context -- Health care costs and traditional health services -- Research policy in traditional health care -- Biodiversity -- Conclusions -- 11 Health of rural and urban communities in developing countries: a case study in Indonesia -- Introduction -- An overview of the issues in developing countries -- Population of developing countries and their environment -- Health and health outcomes in rural Javanese villages -- Health and health outcomes in urban Jakarta: air pollution -- Conclusion -- 12 Health and psychology of water -- Introduction -- Water as a scientific and cultural construct.

The historical duality of water -- Waste water and reclaimed water -- Reclaiming our dreaming -- Designing a social ecology of water -- Conclusion -- 13 Health Impact Assessment in Flanders: contribution to environmental management and health -- Introduction -- Guidelines for Environmental Health Impact Assessment in Flanders -- Elements of the process of EHIA -- Post-monitoring and post-evaluation -- Conclusion -- Index.