Healthy Communities Regional Experts
James Baker, Project Director, Tennessee Water Sentinels, a water quality initiative of the national Sierra Club
Connie Binkowitz, Manager, Community Health, Memphis and Shelby County Health Department
Rita Harris, Sierra Club
Dr. Marian Levy, Associate Professor and Director, MPH Program at the University of Memphis (Chair)
Healthy Communities Top Five Recommendations:
- Employ an interconnected approach to addressing the physical, social, economic environments within communities resulting in aesthetically pleasing and safe neighborhoods that promote physical use and social integration.
- Invest in technologies to utilize waste and minimize pollution via closed loop systems; create economic opportunity through job placement, quality education and green jobs; encourage local industries to use inherently safe raw materials and processes.
- Each neighborhood, industry, community-based organization to accept responsibility to develop a green plan and network it with others to effect policy change.
- Ensure schools promote and implement policies and activities that encourage healthy lifestyles (nutrition, physical activity, safe environments).
- Environmental justice. All policies enacted will work with the goal that no one geographic or socioeconomic group is being unfairly impacted by environmental pollution and hazards.
Healthy Communities Additional Recommendations
- Reducing air pollution from all major sources; Safe clean air; decrease emissions of toxic and greenhouse gases.
- Aesthetically pleasing neighborhoods with open space, which will be pedestrian and bike-friendly, diverse in uses and opportunities for social interaction and enhanced by plants/other natural elements as well as passive and active recreation with an equitable distribution of parks, trees, pathways, and bikeways throughout the community.
- Reduce, with the ultimate goal of eliminating, the exposure of people and other organisms to harmful levels of environmental contaminants, with the focus being not just on separate hazards but on the way they and the ecosystems they affect are interrelated. Protect people from eating fish from contaminated water bodies.
- Community education; Encourage community members of all ages to understand the basic principles of sustainability and use those principles to guide decisions and actions.
- Environmental justice. All policies enacted will work with the goal that no one geographic or socioeconomic group in the County is being unfairly impacted by environmental pollution. Make sure communities are factored into any emergency management planning that occurs, with special regard for chemical company accidents, trains carrying hazardous cargo, etc.
- Set goal for equitable urban land use and transportation planning and policies to create compact, ACCESSIBLE mixed-use projects, forming urban villages designed to maximize mixed income housing, schools within walking distance of residents, organic recycling, urban and rooftop gardening, and reduced energy use, and also to encourage walking, bicycling and use of existing and future public transit systems.
- Adopt comprehensive, community-based watershed management strategies as the drive of water quality, quantity and habitat decisions.
- Adopt the 2003 Edition of the International Code Council Energy Conservation Code with appropriate and applicable amendments to be effective by December 31, 2008; amend existing Technical Codes (Building, Plumbing, Electric, Mechanical and Fuel Gas) by June 30, 2009 to eliminate identified obstacles to sustainable growth.
- Significantly decrease overall community consumption, specifically the consumption of non-local, non-renewable, non-recyclable materials, water, energy, and fuels. They County should take a leadership role in encouraging sustainable procurement, extended producer responsibility, and should explore innovative strategies to become a zero waste County.
- Convert government fleets to alternative energy efficiency and multi-fuel source.
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