Episode # 19 
Alice is a Senior Research Associate working in the Norwich Medical School at the University of East Anglia in the UK. Alice is a geographer and she is interested in understanding the health implications of how we interact with the environment around us. Recently, she has been exploring the role that neighbourhood green space may play in protecting people from certain health outcomes, such as cardiovascular disease.

I can see how a medical school would really value your knowledge and the tools that you use as a geographer. Could you tell us a little bit about those? 

We have a range of tools at our fingertips here. The main thing that I use is called “geographic information systems (GIS)”. We use these systems to understand how we interact with our environment.

Now that sounds like a bit of a mouth full, but the first example of GIS was a British physician called John Snow back in the 19th century. He lived in Soho in London and he was very interested in the causes of the cholera outbreak in Soho. There were lots of deaths and he was trying to work out what was going on here on a population level. What he did was map the location of all the streets and houses in this area. Then he mapped the locations of water sources – where people went to collect their fresh water. He noticed that there was a cluster around one particular water pump. He could attribute the cholera cases to this one pump. The map that he created is known as the “map that changed the world.” He created this link between water borne disease and public health for the first time. Dr John Snow was considered one of founders of epidemiology as a result. Epidemiology is the study of patterns of health and disease at the population level…rather than at the individual level. So that is an early example of how you can use a map to overlay different aspects to explore a problem and potentially come up with a solution. 

Of course, these days we have very sophisticated software and big data sets where you can overlay layers of mapping. You can analyze and use statistics to look different aspects of the problem.

Listeners if you would like to follow Alice Dalton’s research you can find her at 

https://people.uea.ac.uk/a_dalton

Her email is [email protected]

You can find her paper ‘Residential neighbourhood greenspace is associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease: A prospective cohort study’, here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226524

 My book

For peer reviewed research on how your time spent in green space can change your mindset, balance your nervous system and your heart rate please go to verlafortier.substack.com and check out my books Take Back Your Outside Mindset: Live Longer, Stress Less, and Control Your Chronic Illness and Optimize Your Heart Rate: Balance Your Mind and Body With Green Space