Ecological Futures – A Global Health Perspective Dr. Bruce Wilcox

1. Ecological Futures – A Global Health Perspective Dr. Bruce Wilcox

2. Ecological Futures – A Global Health Perspective Conservation, Development, and Health: Conflicting or Compatible? I. Prigogine - complex adaptive systems Pivotal Thinkers Conservation Science & Sustainability in the 20th Century A. Leopold - A Sand County Almanac C.S. Holling - social ecological systems & resilience theory R. Carson - Silent Spring

3. Ecological Futures – A Global Health Perspective Leopold’s “Land Ethic” “The practice of land management must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.” Aldo Leopold, 1947 Aldo Leopold, Graduate of Yale School of Forestry and a former US Forest Service Ranger and later Professor of Wildlife Ecology at U. of Wisconsin, His writings and lectures had a profound effect on American science, conservation movement, and founded the field of environmental ethics. Of his 5 children, 4 were elected to the National Academy of Sciences!

4. Ecological Futures – A Global Health Perspective Leopold and the concept of “The Land Health” “Land health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal” “Land management is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.” Leopold, 1949 Note: Leopold often referred to the “land pyramid”, meaning what we now call an “ecosystem” landethic.html

5. Ecological Futures – A Global Health Perspective Elinor Ostrom’s theory of self-governed common pool resources overturns the conventional wisdom and models: The classical model of resource management (e.g., fisheries, forests, etc.) assumes each harvester will only account for their marginal costs and revenues ignoring the fact that increases in their rate of extraction will at some point affect the returns of others as well as the health of future resources stocks…which inevitably leads to overharvesting and often ecosystem collapse. The classical paradigm was reinforced by Garett Hardin’s famous 1968 Science paper, Tragedy of the Commons. This cemented the idea that only privatization or government ownership or control could insure resource sustainability.

6. Ecological Futures – A Global Health Perspective Ray Dasmann on ecology and development transitions: ecosystem-biosphere People continuum model In the context of establishing protected areas, Dasmann observed in the 1970’s that much of the difficulty encountered in attempting to achieve ecologically sustainable ways of life associated is with people whose cultures have been disrupted or destroyed. As a result their means of working with the natural environment to which their ancestors were adapted is lost, but they have yet achieved a firm foothold in the global economy. They are in transition along a cultural continuum that can be defined in terms of ecosystem and biosphere people at the two extremes. Ecosystem people - live, and whose ancestors have lived and learned, within a particular ecosystem and how to do so within ecological limits. Biosphere people - tied to the global economy, and their livelihoods are not dependent on a particular ecosystem.

7. Adaptive Cycle Ecological Futures – A Global Health Perspective From Gunderson and Holling (2002)

8. REGIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE Population Technological capacity Socio-cultural organization Global climate change NATURAL ECOSYSTEM Agricultural intensification* * Includes food production HUMAN ECOSYSTEM Habitat alteration Urbanization Species’ Ecological-evolutionary Dynamics Opportunistic habitat expansion/ecological release Vector/Reservoir (domestication) Feral reservoir species Wildlife transport Human encroachment Host-Pathogen Dynamics Emergence Processes of ‘Host-Parasite Biology’ Host switching (host novelty) • Breaching of pathogen persistence thresholds Transmission amplification and genetic exchange (pathogen novelty) Disease Emergence (Based on Wilcox and Gubler 2005) ecosystem continuum