NESH History

In the mid 1990s, James Kay, former Associate Professor, Environmental Studies, University of Waterloo, David Waltner-Toews, Professor, Population Medicine, OVC, University of Guelph and David Cressman, an agronomist and president of the consulting firm Ecologistics, sat down to design a response to the problem of organizational mismatch between the challenges posed by sustainability and the kinds of intellectual and practical work needed to address them. Discussions were held with International Development Research Centre (IDRC) about linking the projects in a newly emerging Ecosystem Approaches to Health program, as well as with other researchers and practitioners. A new network of knowledge and practice was envisioned that would bring together cutting-edge theoretical research into complex eco-social systems, with the most immediate and urgent management and development issues in health, agriculture and environment.

The founders decided that it had to be a network, where knowledge was shared across physical, intellectual and organizational boundaries, rather than an institute, with its implications of a center from which knowledge would flow. In particular, the network was seen as a way to link and promote a community of research and practice in ecosystem approaches to sustainable development. In this way, it was imagined that the people involved in projects in Kenya, Nepal, Peru, Canada and elsewhere could share their knowledge, pose questions, disseminate results and develop new projects.

To this end, with the organizational help of Michelle Boyle, currently at the University of British Columbia, the non-profit organization, the Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health was established. (Find out more about Who We Are). Our members are from all over the world.

NESH exists "to foster a global vision of sustainable, equitable and enjoyable development while maintaining the health and integrity of ecosystems at the local level." NESH does this by promoting collaborations, providing educational opportunities, providing peer review, and disseminating the relevant findings of network members both electronically and through traditional publications, meetings and short courses.

Building on his ground-breaking work on thermodynamics, complexity and ecology, James Kay saw NESH as an unprecedented opportunity to stimulate the development of complex systems theory and, more urgently, its applications to the challenges of fostering local and global sustainable development.

This website, which became NESH's first action item, has large "hidden areas" accessible only to NESH project participants that facilitates collaborative work by automatically tracking revisions to documents and notifying participants of updates as they occur.

Within the past few years, NESH has developed partnerships and collaborations with several other networks and organizations, including the International Support Group , Conservation International, the Ecosystems, Climate Change and Health Omnibus Project, and more recently the EcoHealth Network. We have mounted short courses in different countries, and a new book, based on our work, has been published by Cambridge University Press with the NESH imprint (Waltner-Toews, 2004a).