EcoHealth DOI: 10.1007/s10393-014-0946-7

Ó 2014 International Association for Ecology and Health

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The Need for Heuristics in Ecosystem Approaches to Health In an attempt to promote health and well-being in the context of complex social and ecological interactions, ecosystem approaches to health have developed a set of core principles focused on systems thinking, transdisciplinarity, participatory approaches, social and gender equity, sustainability, and knowledge-to-action. While these principles can help guide how research might intervene in promoting social, political, and ecological change, we feel that principles alone are insufficient to think through and act upon an issue, hence our motivation for starting a dialog about the need for heuristics in Ecohealth research and training. Heuristics are tools that enable people to discover for themselves new knowledge, usually through applying a trial and error process and then reflecting on what has been learned. Take for example, the concept of panarchy in resilience thinking, which draws attention to cycles nested within different temporal and spatial scales and that considers ecological and social dimensions. When approaching an environmental or health issue, we use this particular heuristic to prompt ourselves to consider what temporal and spatial scales are relevant and if there are connections between them. So, in considering plantation workers’ exposure to pesticides, one might consider interactions at the molecular level as a pesticide gets absorbed through the skin all the way to the global trade agreements that organize large-scale commercial agriculture. In our experience of Ecohealth training through the Canadian Community of Practice in Ecosystem Approaches to Health, we have found substantial emphasis on establishing the principles of the Ecohealth approach, but less time is dedicated to exploring the use of heuristics that might enhance the learning process of students. We feel that the use of heuristic tools, such as Kay’s diamond diagram schematic, Waltner-Toews’ Adaptive Methodology

for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health (AMESH), or Parkes’ prism framework would improve the ability of emerging scholars to work out for themselves what it means to put the principles of Ecohealth into practice. Furthermore, it is important in Ecohealth to recognize the diversity of tools that people bring to address an issue, reflecting the range of their experiences and expertise. For instance, in Marta’s graduate work with the Bribri, an Indigenous group in Costa Rica, she encountered a different set of heuristic tools used to make sense of agricultural practices that were embedded within Bribri cosmology. In this case, it would make sense to combine the variety of tools available as a point of departure to inform, for instance, a public health intervention designed to curb the amount of pesticide use among farmers. What is the relationship between the plurality of possible heuristics and the cohesion of a community of practice, particularly a community where graduate students have a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds? In our experience, cohesion is developed through working on a problem together; it is not something that can be guaranteed in advance through adherence to guiding principles. Ultimately, cohesion emerges through consolidating learning and planning next steps. In Ecohealth, therefore, cohesion should not be about conforming to pre-given standards; rather it should be allowed to emerge anew through attempted interventions into complex socio-ecological systems—opening room for greater diversity in heuristic practice can only help in this regard. Heuristics arise from the need to learn, which is by no means limited to the academic community, so how do we address the need for heuristics in ecosystem approaches to health? We believe the answer has implications for the sustainability of communities of practice and the principles of Ecohealth, and therefore merits further attention.

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Marta Berbe´s-Bla´zquez York University, Faculty of Environmental Studies, Toronto, Canada Universidad Nacional, Instituto Regional de Estudios en Sustancias To´ xicas, Heredia, Costa Rica Community of Practice of Ecosystem Approaches to Health (CoPEH-Canada) Mathieu Feagan Ryerson University, Communication and Culture, Toronto, Canada York University, Communication and Culture, Toronto, Canada Community of Practice of Ecosystem Approaches to Health (CoPEH-Canada)

PROFESSIONAL RESPONSE BY DAVID WALTNER-TOEWS AND MARGOT PARKES Heuristics have been used extensively by atomic physicists and cell biologists to represent characteristics of objects of their study, many of which are inferred from responses to interventions rather than directly observed. Most of these heuristics have been intended for communication among scientists and to students of science. Some, such as the ‘‘models’’ of atoms as mini-universes and the color-coded spirals of DNA, have made their way into popular culture. More recently, heuristics have made their way into the ecological literature and into the literature on complex social-ecological systems. These include not only ‘‘diamond,’’ AMESH, and Prism frameworks identified by Berbe´s-Bla´zquez and Feagan, but also variations on Hancock’s ‘‘Mandala of Health,’’ VanLeeuwen et al’s ‘‘Butterfly Model of Health,’’ the resilience and panarchy models, the scenarios created by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology, and the narratives used by evolutionary biologists. Some leading scholars have argued that it is ‘‘dishonest, or at least it shows a lack of courage, to pretend we live in a classical or modern world.’’ Their segue is that mathematical models and conventional scientific constructs are insufficient to

understand and manage complexity, and that narratives (which are as a kind of heuristic) are essential scholarly tools. Heuristics in Ecohealth arose initially to enable scholars from dramatically different traditions (engineering, epidemiology, philosophy, biology, and biomedical sciences) to communicate with each other. These heuristics tend to be grounded in particular literatures (environmental management, medicine, development theory, and practice), with strengths being new understanding rather than measurement. ‘‘Ecosystem health,’’ for example, yields different insights as a heuristic to learn about the functioning, wellbeing, and sustainability of ecosystems, as compared to interpretation as a framework for assessment. A second kind of heuristic arose from the need to translate complex, uncertain, and often contradictory evidence into policy and management decisions at different scales. The communication needs here are quite different from those of the first kind, and the relationship to underlying scholarship is more ambiguous. Furthermore, some of these heuristics may be based on researcher biases and particular worldviews, even as they are presented as ‘‘objective.’’ As geographers have realized, color-coding of disease or risk maps reflect the biases of researchers and not the ‘‘real’’ situation on the ground. What Berbe´s-Bla´zquez and Feagan have identified is an urgent need to study the heuristics themselves, to determine the assumptions on which they are based, the messages they overtly or inadvertently convey, and whose needs they serve. David Waltner-Toews Community of Practice of Ecosystem Approaches to Health, Canada Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health, Canada Margot W. Parkes Community of Practice of Ecosystem Approaches to Health, Canada Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health, Canada University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, Canada

The need for heuristics in ecosystem approaches to health.

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