(upbeat bright music) (insecnts chirping) Being outside can have a very positive effect on our health.

There are a lot of things in the outside world, some natural, a lot manmade, that can have a negative effect on us and our well-being.

We're shining a light on environmental hazards.

The dangerous details are just ahead on Spotlight Earth.

(bright music) Today, we're on the James River.

It's one of the most important waterways that flows through our state.

It's here that we continue the exploration of the connection between our environment and our health.

As we learned in the last episode, being outside in nature can be beneficial for our health outcomes.

But your environment can also produce negative health results.

Today we are going to take a look at environmental factors that can have adverse effects on our health and our quality of life.

Many of these risks exist naturally in the environment.

But they can also be caused by or made worse by human activities.

The James holds such examples.

It's a beautiful and scenic river.

But looking closer, we know that physical, biological, and chemical hazards can run along with the current.

Water is the best solvent around, meaning many things can be dissolved in water and carried by water.

So justice water is the key to life, it can also transport and disperse things that are harmful to living organisms.

This is Dr. Greg Garman.

He works at the Rice River Center downstream from our canoe adventure by about 60 miles.

The center is part of Virginia Commonwealth University and work here centers around water resources, climate science, and wildlife conservation.

We're standing here overlooking the James River, America's founding river, and of course, we get to call it that because of Jamestown inside of the initial European colonization.

There's a real good reason why for millennia human cultures have established and grown next to rivers, and that's particularly true for a coastal river, like the James.

All kinds of societal benefits and reasons to treat this ecosystem really well.

But then you also have the issues when we talk about pollution, water quality, the invasive species, and harmful algal blooms.

When I think of a physical hazard, you know, obviously sea level rise creates more flooding.

As you get more of that shallow surface water after a rainfall event, there's more of an opportunity for disease vectors like mosquitoes to grow.

So now you have more mosquitoes.

And if they're carrying a disease like Lyme's Disease or something like that, there is a very clear potential public health link.

This is still tidal fresh most of the time, but we're starting to see some salt water intrusion in the James, and that's caused by rising sea levels, which is a climate-driven change.

So as that salt wedge moves up, the vegetation's gonna change.

The critters that can live there will change.

But this tidal fresh water reach, it's just gonna get squeezed and it's gonna get smaller and smaller and smaller.

So the birds and the fish and all the critters that depend on this unique fresh water, but still tidal environment, you know, their habitat may, over the next couple of decades, become considerably diminished.

The loss of the full extent of that tidal fresh water reach, will have potentially direct impacts on access to municipal water sources for people and for businesses.

It's the only fresh water left that we haven't really already tapped out.

One of the things that lots of human activity and human development does is to put nutrients into the river.

So obviously that's coming from wastewater supplies.

It's coming from you're putting too much fertilizer on your lawn.

When those excess nutrients hit a big open tidal system like this, if you have warm water and you have sunlight and you have nutrients, that's what algae need that flourish.

Some of them produce toxins in the water.

In some years we get significant blooms of an algae called microsystem and it produces a toxin, and that toxin makes fish sick.

It can even make humans sick.

And then you have pollution.

We always use the river as a way to get rid of stuff we didn't want.

Sewage being the obvious example, but also other industrial effluence.

There's a legacy of the misuse of the river for those kinds of purposes.

The city of Richmond now does a really good job trying to keep untreated sewage from going into the river.

So we've really turned a pretty big corner, and now I just look at the river as a wonderful resource for the people who live along it or live close enough to get to it.

I've been working on the James River for almost 40 years now.

There have been a lot of success stories in terms of water quality, in terms of the return of some native species.

There are lots of reasons to be optimistic.

(gentle music) Across the James from Rice Rivers is the town of Hopewell, a hub of industry for more than 100 years.

That industry has propped up the economy, but also been a troublesome source of pollution for the region.

And some citizens here suffer from another kind of environmental health hazard, and that's behavioral.

One prominent Hopewell citizen knows firsthand the potential of this town and its people and is working to make Hopewell Virginia's first blue zone city.

(uplifting music) Hopewell is about 20 to 30,000 people, mostly blue collar.

We have a a downtown Main Street project, which is bringing in brand new businesses to the city.

We've got the usual things that nice cities have.

We've got a nice wonderful farmer's market downtown.

It's a burgeoning city.

It's got that nice small quaint feel.

So it's a perfect place for change to happen.

I first came in 1996.

I've been taking care of the folks here at Hopewell for quite some time, and have grown to love it.

You have areas of Hopewell that are plagued by food deserts, and they usually are in areas of lower social economic status.

That does translate into poor health, mainly because you don't have access to the choices that are available to other areas of the city.

Literally within a nine mile radius, you have a difference of nine years.

That's what we know is death by zip code.

If you live in one area, you are going to be living a little bit longer than if you live in another area.

Over the 30 years, I have seen it all trickles down to my office and I'll wind up taking care of the diabetes and the needless amputations and the dialysis.

I get the downstream of it all, and it's made me appreciate the importance of prevention.

Behavior is everything.

Behavior depends on where you live.

You'll be more inclined to go to a farmer's market if there's a farmer's market by you.

Sometimes it's transportation issues.

That's one of the things that my patients deal with all the time.

Blue Zones are places in the world like Ikaria, Greece, Sardinia, Italy, Costa Rica, where people on average live 10 to 15 years longer than they do here in the United States.

What's the secret sauce?

What is it that keeps all these places alive?

They discovered through a study, the Blue Zone Power 9, nine key principles that all these places have in common.

When you take these Power 9 principles and you apply them to a population, you start to get some amazing changes slowly over time.

Through these Blue Zones, you will create more walkable spaces, more open air spaces in nature, so you get more people that want to get out and walk.

And this improves overall quality of life.

When you get people who are healthier, they're spending less money on their healthcare, and therefore they're gonna spend that money back into the city.

So it's an economic expansion also.

And it just seems to keep on giving.

The Blue Zone Project is currently working with 50 to 60 different cities across the United States.

They have a certain set of criterion that you have to meet in order to become a Blue Zone designated city.

And the Blue Zone Project has a feasibility team to really make sure the city's ready.

This is a whole city experience, from the government to area business to the school system.

We're literally going after the soul of the city and making a change from the inside out.

It's slowly building, the momentum is really contagious.

I've been using these principles in my office, and more often my patients started getting better, and I got my first patient offered their medication by helping them to adjust their lifestyle.

We now know that 90% of these chronic medical problems is from poor lifestyle.

You go to most doctors' offices, they'll usually be writing prescriptions most of the time and spend very little time on the lifestyle that created the problem.

We've decided to flip that on its head.

We're gonna spend 90% of our efforts on the lifestyle, and then we wind up taking people off their medications.

At our front door in my office, I have a small container.

This is our trophy case and it has over 500 empty pill bottles in it of people we've gotten off of their diabetic and their high blood pressure medication by changing their lifestyle.

You often can't change a person, but you can change their behavior and the circumstances around them, and then their behavior starts to change, and that's when the magic starts heart.

I'd like to see Hopewell become the first blue zone in the state of Virginia, and I think Hopewell's a perfect place to show the world what can happen.

Being the cardiologist here, treating a lot of the patients here for many years, and with the love they have for this city, one of the greatest things we can do to empower the city is to make people healthier.

The end result is gonna be absolutely amazing.

As you can see from the works of Doctors Morris and Garman, environmental health and justice are not easily achieved.

It requires a mix of efforts by a multitude of entities.

Research, education, community engagement, and taking action at the grassroots level are vital.

This can lead to government regulations to further ensure that our environment is not a source of harm.

This brings us to the inspiring work of the James River Association.

This nonprofit organization is actively involved in river restoration efforts along the James.

Through various initiatives such as the Restoration, River Hero Home, River Keepers, community conservation and education programs, they're making a significant impact.

They and many similar organizations across Virginia and the entire country are making a big difference in the effort to make our environment safe for everyone.

Thanks for joining us on this journey.

See you next time on "Spotlight Earth."

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