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Statement Of Peter Bella
Environmental Protection Agency
Aging Initiative Public Listening Session
San Antonio, Texas
April 8, 2003
Peter Bella
Natural Resources Director
Alamo Area Council of Governments
Natural Resources Director
Alamo Area Council of Governments
Topic: Encouraging older adults to volunteer to reduce environmental health hazards
50 words submitted online:
"Public participation in environmental risk reduction is increasingly important since risks to individuals are increasingly generated by individuals in the course of their daily activities. Lifelong training in personal environmental risk and responsibility culminates in the aged as teachers of change, historians of the past, and communicators to the future."
Comments for the Listening Session:
Hello. I am Peter Bella, Director of the Natural Resources Department of the Alamo Area Council of Governments.
We are the generators of our own risks. That is, of all the threats to our health and well being, very few of them are not man-made. When I step out of my door in the morning, I've got to watch what I eat, watch the other driver, watch other people make judgements for me about clean air, water and soil.
I maintain that the public awareness required to ensure what is known as public health has come to require an increasingly educated public. This education now includes increasingly personal choices we all make even daily and hourly, and the consequences of the choices for us personally and for the environment. Awareness of personal environmental risk and responsibility must become a lifelong learning process.
Lifelong training in personal environmental risk and responsibility culminates in the aged as teachers of change, historians of the past, and communicators to the future. No one is better suited to show us the contrasts between the life we lead today and the way we lived not too long ago, and the risks which change presents.
To encourage a corps of older adults to actively participate in learning about environmental health hazards, I would ask the EPA to create, like the Peace Corps before it, a "Life Corps." Educate older adults about changes in the environment, ask them to teach us what they have learned from life and change, ask them to act on behalf of us all as volunteers to reduce environmental health hazards. They should become teachers of environmental change, environmental historians of the past, and communicators to the future.
Thank you.