Eco Health - History

History

Ecosystem approaches to health, or ecohealth, emerged as a defined field of inquiry and application in the 1990s, primarily through the global research supported by the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa (IDRC), Canada (Lebel, 2003). However, this was a resurrection of an approach to health and ecology that can be traced back, in Western societies, to Hippocrates, and to much earlier eras in Eastern societies. The approach was prominent among many scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries, but fell into disfavour in the twentieth century, when technical professionalism and expertise were assumed to be sufficient to deal with health and disease. In this relatively brief era, evaluation of the negative human health impacts of environmental change (both the natural and built environment) was allotted to the fields of medicine and environmental health. One medicine, as championed by scholars and practitioners such as Calvin Schwabe, was largely considered a marginal activity.

Integrated approaches to health and ecology re-emerged in the 1990s, and included one health, conservation medicine, ecological resilience, ecological integrity, health communities, and a variety of other approaches. These new movements were able to draw on a tradition that stretches from Hippocrates, to Rudolf Virchow and Louis Pasteur, who did not recognize the boundaries between human and animal medicine, and environmental and social change; to William Osler, who was a member of both the McGill medical faculty and the Montreal Veterinary College; Calvin Schwabe, whose 1984 book, Veterinary Medicine and Human Health, is a classic in the field; and James Steele, who founded the first veterinary public health unit in the United States.

Ecohealth approaches as currently practiced are participatory, systems-based approaches to understanding and promoting health and wellbeing in the context of social and ecological interactions. What differentiates these approaches from earlier integrative attempts is a firm grounding in complexity theories and post-normal science (Waltner-Toews, 2004; Waltner-Toews et al., 2008). While a variety of organizations promote integrative approaches such as One Health, the primary funder and promoter of ecohealth in particular, world-wide, is the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa (http://www.idrc.ca/ecohealth/).

After a decade of international conferences in North America and Australia under the more contentious umbrella of "ecosystem health", the first "ecosystem approach to human health" (ecohealth) forum was held in Montreal in 2003, followed by conferences and forums in Wisconsin, U.S., and Mérida, Mexico, all with major support from IDRC. Since then the International Association for Ecology and Health, and the journal Ecohealth have established the field as a legitimate scholarly and development activity (www.ecohealth.net).