Edward Dodge Discusses African Experiences and Future in CLF Talk BALTIMORE, November 15—Dr. Edward Dodge, MPH ’67, contrasted his early childhood upbringing and experiences in Africa with visits in recent years to an audience at the Bloomberg School of Public Health today. He talked about his family’s journeys through Angola, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe as a youth as part of his parent’s missionary work in the area. Dr. Dodge, who learned to speak Portuguese before English, discussed his assignment in the late1960s to Gondar, Ethiopia, for the U.S. Public Health Service and as an Assistant Professor of Public Health, and his studies of malnutrition among Ethiopian infants. “We had not expected to find family income to be a factor in malnutrition,” he said, explaining that basically, by U.S. standards, everyone was poor. He noted the dividing line between those who received proper nourishment and those malnourished was family income of over $40 dollars a month. In his talk, “Perspectives in Africa: 1937-2007,” Dr. Dodge also touched on the current political, social, and economic climate, and its profound effect on human health in Zimbabwe today. “The average life expectancy in Zimbabwe today is 37, and there are more than one million orphans in the country,” he said. Zimbabwe’s agricultural production system has been hit hard and the economy—where the Zimbabwe dollar used to equal the U.S. dollar—is in serious trouble. “Today it takes nearly one million dollars to equal one U.S. dollar,” he noted. Dr. Dodge concluded his talk, by referring to “Ecotopia,” a term defined as a “fusion of smart technology with smart ecology” proposed in a paper, “Alternate Visions for the Future,” by Dr. Robert Costanza of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics and the University of Vermont. “How do we arrive at Ecotopia? The Center for a Livable Future is among those organizations working to find answers to these questions. The time to establish sustainable lifestyles is now when we’re emerging from chaos in developing countries.” |
