Today the PLACE fellows met for the start of the second week of our virtual fellowship. Although this was not what we originally signed up for, we have had a great experience so far in our virtual program. Today we met with Deborah Wood, who works in education and youth engagement for Boston Harbor Now and National Parks of Boston. Deborah came to speak to us about a topic that is particularly relevant in the current situation: public health. More specifically though, we talked about the questions how does the environment affect human health?, and how are public land and public health connected? To analyze these questions Deborah provided some primary and secondary sources from past public health crises so we could see what solutions had been in the past.
We split up into two groups and looked at resources from different time-periods. One of the groups looked at the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, and the other group looked at resources from the cholera epidemic in London, which occurred during the 1830’s. We found many similarities between the two. They both occurred in crowded cities without lots of open space, which made it easier to spread disease.
This made us think about public lands, and how valuable they would have been in a time like this. We discussed why public land accessibility is so important, and that if people had more access to open land during epidemics of the past, they might not have been as bad. We talked about how public lands are important during the current coronavirus pandemic. We agreed that public lands are important for people to be able to use in times like this because they can really help both the physical and mental health of people. We also said that with the luxury of public land however, comes a responsibility. Just because there is public land that you can use doesn’t mean you should use it all the time, especially in this environment of social distancing where we should try to limit our interactions with people.
The main goal for today was to learn more from our resources about the connection between public health and public lands. We learned that they are connected and that having adequate public land can significantly improve people’s physical health. This made me hope that people will realize this in our current pandemic and that Covid-19 will make people better appreciate their public spaces.
