Richard Joseph Jackson, MD MPH FAAP HonAIA HonFASLA, is Professor emeritus at the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA, where he was Department Chair in Environmental Health Sciences. A pediatrician, he served in many leadership positions with the California Health Department, including the highest as the State Health Officer. For nine years he was Director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health and received the Presidential Distinguished Service Award at the White House. In October 2011 he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and has co-led NAM’s Health and Climate and the Gun Violence Interest Groups.

My family relocated when I took the role with the CDC. My wife and I did what all parents do when moving with children; We researched good public schools and tried to live nearby. We settled in North Atlanta, and our children took buses to attend three different schools at their varying ages. Some of those schools didn’t have sidewalks within two miles of them. The only way to get there was in a car or on the bus. Students have been killed trying to cross busy streets trying to get home after after-school activities. That’s a public health issue.

I was shocked that everywhere I went there were no sidewalks, and you didn't see people out walking. It’s hot in Atlanta, why would you want to walk? Well, it’s especially hot when there are no trees along paved streets that lead to major businesses and services. One day in my car I passed an old woman trudging alongside the road carrying two bags of groceries. And I thought to myself, ‘Gosh, if she collapses in the ditch, the emergency team that finds her may list her cause of death as heat stroke, but in reality she will have died of inadequate public walkways. We just aren’t in the habit of thinking of it that way.

At the Centers for Disease Control, we reserved three percent of every grant we awarded for evaluation. We felt it was important to look back and evaluate how a grantee’s work was going, as well as what they're doing and what works and what doesn't work. It was our way of building in course-correction, if you will, over time.

Failure analysis is essential. And it isn’t done to blame somebody; It is done to find the lessons we can apply. I’ll speak about the construction of hospitals. We will make mistakes, even with the best planning. In one case I remember, the hospital architects didn’t include bedpan washing facilities. Hugely important for sanitation, right? But it was missed.

Historians can be failure analysis people, in a way, can’t they? Or success analysis. I think many people – myself included at a young age – feel history is all names, dates, and places strung out in a line never ending. But it’s really about pattern recognition, much like medicine is. As we look at the history, what does what we know about buildings, cities, gardens suggest about the kinds of policies we need now? That’s immensely valuable to me.

Can you give us a teaser of one of the stories or case studies you will share in your Eduard F. Sekler talk on May 1?

In 1999, I vowed I would never give another talk without reflecting on climate heating and climate change. Expect to hear about how built environment contributes to heat and heat to human health.

Unrelated, I wrote an epilogue for the book Epidemic Urbanism: Contagious Diseases in Global Cities co-edited by Mohammad Gharipour – who invited me to speak to SAH – and Caitlin DeClercq. In that epilogue, I wrote, “Learning about the past is important, but learning from the past is urgent.” It's important to look back, but it's also very important to see how it informs us as we look forward, and that will be my theme.

Richard Joseph Jackson, MD MPH FAAP HonAIA HonFASLA, is Professor emeritus at the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA, where he was Department Chair in Environmental Health Sciences. A pediatrician, he served in many leadership positions with the California Health Department, including the highest as the State Health Officer. For nine years he was Director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health and received the Presidential Distinguished Service Award at the White House. In October 2011 he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and has co-led NAM’s Health and Climate and the Gun Violence Interest Groups.

My family relocated when I took the role with the CDC. My wife and I did what all parents do when moving with children; We researched good public schools and tried to live nearby. We settled in North Atlanta, and our children took buses to attend three different schools at their varying ages. Some of those schools didn’t have sidewalks within two miles of them. The only way to get there was in a car or on the bus. Students have been killed trying to cross busy streets trying to get home after after-school activities. That’s a public health issue.

I was shocked that everywhere I went there were no sidewalks, and you didn't see people out walking. It’s hot in Atlanta, why would you want to walk? Well, it’s especially hot when there are no trees along paved streets that lead to major businesses and services. One day in my car I passed an old woman trudging alongside the road carrying two bags of groceries. And I thought to myself, ‘Gosh, if she collapses in the ditch, the emergency team that finds her may list her cause of death as heat stroke, but in reality she will have died of inadequate public walkways. We just aren’t in the habit of thinking of it that way.

At the Centers for Disease Control, we reserved three percent of every grant we awarded for evaluation. We felt it was important to look back and evaluate how a grantee’s work was going, as well as what they're doing and what works and what doesn't work. It was our way of building in course-correction, if you will, over time.

Failure analysis is essential. And it isn’t done to blame somebody; It is done to find the lessons we can apply. I’ll speak about the construction of hospitals. We will make mistakes, even with the best planning. In one case I remember, the hospital architects didn’t include bedpan washing facilities. Hugely important for sanitation, right? But it was missed.

Historians can be failure analysis people, in a way, can’t they? Or success analysis. I think many people – myself included at a young age – feel history is all names, dates, and places strung out in a line never ending. But it’s really about pattern recognition, much like medicine is. As we look at the history, what does what we know about buildings, cities, gardens suggest about the kinds of policies we need now? That’s immensely valuable to me.

Can you give us a teaser of one of the stories or case studies you will share in your Eduard F. Sekler talk on May 1?

In 1999, I vowed I would never give another talk without reflecting on climate heating and climate change. Expect to hear about how built environment contributes to heat and heat to human health.

Unrelated, I wrote an epilogue for the book Epidemic Urbanism: Contagious Diseases in Global Cities co-edited by Mohammad Gharipour – who invited me to speak to SAH – and Caitlin DeClercq. In that epilogue, I wrote, “Learning about the past is important, but learning from the past is urgent.” It's important to look back, but it's also very important to see how it informs us as we look forward, and that will be my theme.