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Green Path Solutions combines expertise in environmental communication, editing, research, and sustainability consulting with a commitment to your mission and values. Together, we can preserve and improve the environment and thrive in the process.

A path leads you forward. It’s a process of discovery. Sometimes the path can be straight as an arrow. Sometimes it can meander and lead you to places you’d never imagined. You don’t always know exactly where you will end up, or what twists and turns lie between you and your destination, but if you follow the path, you know you will get there. Green Path Solutions supports your process of discovery. Whether you need to tell your story quickly and directly, or you are still working out the details, Green Path will get you where you need to go.

Green Path Solutions advocates for your issues and goals on a project basis or through ongoing services. As a client, you will receive a robust mix of communication skill, subject matter expertise, and dedication to your environmental objectives. Whether your focus is local or global, public sector or private, community-based or corporate, Green Path’s flexibility will keep your needs first. Your priorities inform our process.

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Breast Cancer as an Environmental Health Issue

06/30/18

My friend and colleague, Michele Goldwasser, died of breast cancer recently. She was diagnosed with cancer initially 10 years ago, and it recurred in 2015. She was in treatment for the rest of her life. This post isn’t specifically about my friend, or the other women I know who are currently being treated for breast cancer. It’s about the little-discussed links between breast cancer and our environment.

According to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, one in eight women in the United States is diagnosed with breast cancer each year. In the 1960s, that number was much lower, and a woman’s lifetime risk for breast cancer was one in twenty. Family history accounts for about ten percent of breast cancer diagnoses. What accounts for the rest?

A lot of that depends on how you view health. In the United States, our main model for understanding health and disease is the biomedical model. Individuals are diagnosed with illnesses or health problems, and are treated individually for those specific problems. There is a lot of talk of prevention as well, but prevention takes the form of “individual lifestyle choices,” mainly diet and exercise. Our rising obesity is linked to many health problems, including breast cancer, but is still mostly treated as an individual problem requiring better diet and increased exercise.

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Is Our Problem Overpopulation or Overconsumption?

06/29/18

Population growth is one of the biggest environmental challenges humanity faces. Or is it? Quite often in discussions of population, growth alone is seen as the main problem. How will we feed, house, clothe ten billion people? In my own lifetime so far, the human population of the earth has more than doubled, from 3.4 billion to over 7.4 billion. Surely this is the root of our problems? Wouldn’t curbing population growth solve many of our biggest environmental problems?

Alan Weisman seems to think so. In his 2013 book Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? Weisman argues that “the Earth can’t sustain our current numbers, and inevitably, one way or another, those numbers must come down” (p. 430). There is an awful lot to this 431-page book, and it is definitely worth reading, but the basic argument hinges on how many people can live on our planet. The human population has grown beyond the bounds of the planet to support it, and that we must take drastic measures to reduce it before Nature does it for us. This is a popular argument, and one that has been around for a long time.

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