By Nelson Fabian from redorbit.com

For years, many in our profession have argued for expansive definitions of environmental health. This large segment of our professional community sees environmental health as encompassing virtually anything in the environment that could impact human health. If you are disposed to thinking of our profession in that way, then this Journal issue is especially for you! In this issue, we feature four articles on the fascinating topic of land use planning/design and environmental health. Land use planning isn't exactly the type of topic that one is prone to find in the daily conversations that most NEHA members have. Yet the relationship between the design of a community (and its "built environment") and human health has been drawing more and more attention lately. We now know that depending on how a community is designed, a wide variety of human health patterns are possible.

Knowing this, NEHA was able to obtain funding support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Environmental Health (CDC/NCEH) that enabled us to team up with the International City/County Management Association to examine four distinct examples of how four very different communities were infusing their land use planning with environmental health considerations. The objective of this effort has been to use these case studies to educate environmental health professionals and local government managers about how health goals can be advanced through land use and design planning and decision making.

As a part of this project, NEHA is publishing in this month's journal illuminating descriptions of how these four communities found a way to involve environmental health in their land use planning programs, and how the communities have changed as a result of this more coordinated approach. We hope that readers will both learn from these stories and discover insights that will help to accomplish similar kinds of coordination in many more communities throughout the country.