REFERENCE: Murray, T., Kay, J., Waltner-Toews D., Raez-Luna, E.; 2002. "Linking Human and Ecosystem Health on the Amazon Frontier: An Adaptive Ecosystem Approach", Aguirre, A. A., R. S. Ostfeld, C. A. House, G. M. Tabor and M. C. Pearl (eds.), Conservation Medicine: Ecological Health in Practice Oxford University Press. (Chapter 23, in press)

Linking Human and Ecosystem Health on the Amazon Frontier: An Adaptive Ecosystem Approach

Murray, T., Kay, J., Waltner-Toews D., Raez-Luna, E.;

Our ability to enhance the health of ecosystems is predicated on an understanding of the interactions among ecosystem dynamics, natural resource use and human health. Since 1996, a team of Canadian and Peruvian researchers has been developing an adaptive ecosystem approach to human health. In keeping with the standard definition of methodology used in the systems literature (Checkland & Scholes 1990), the ecosystem approach provides an inter-disciplinary, holistic guide to how to investigate complex socio-ecological problems, drawing on, and bringing together, a wide variety of methods, actors and scales of investigation. In the case study explored in this chapter, we have been particularly interested in the relationships between the structure and function of stressed ecosystems and land use strategies, natural resource use and nutritional status, and anthropogenic environmental changes and the transmission of disease. The intent of our work is to improve human health of local people through better management of their natural resources. Drawing on WHO documents and reviews of the health literature in relation to people, animals, plants and ecosystems, we derived a working definition of health as being the capacity to achieve socially-determined goals (mental, physical, and social well-being, vigour, resilience, productivity, flourishing), within a set of socio-ecological constraints, only one of which is disease (Sundsvall, 1991; Waltner-Toews & Wall, 1997; WHO 1978, 1986, 2000). This chapter describes the evolution of the ecosystem approach as it was applied in the frontier regions of the Peruvian Amazon.

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