Ecosystem Health: Leadership at the Intersection of Humans, Animals, and the Environment
What are the effects of climate change, disease emergence, food and water security, gender, conflict and poverty, and sustainability of ecosystem services on health? Unfortunately, these large-scale problems often become overwhelming, making single solution-based progress seem daunting and difficult to implement in policy. Fortunately, the emerging discipline of Ecosystem Health provides an approach to these problems grounded in transdisciplinary science. Ecosystem Health recognizes the interdependence of human, animal and environmental health, and merges theories and methods of ecological, health and political sciences. It poses that health threats can be prevented, monitored and controlled via a variety of approaches and technologies that guide management action as well as policy. Thus, balancing human and animal health with the management of our ecosystems.
In this class, we will focus on the emerging discipline of ecosystem health, and how these theories, methods and computational technologies set the stage for solutions to grand challenges of health at the interface of humans, animals, and the environment. We will focus not only on the creation and evaluation of solutions but on their feasibility and implementation in the real world through policy and real time decision-making.
This will be taught in the active learning style classroom, requiring pre-class readings to support the didactic theory and case-based learning in class. Participation and both individual and group projects (written and oral presentation) will comprise most of the student evaluation. These projects may reflect innovative solutions, discoveries about unknowns, or development of methods useful for ecosystem health challenges. We envision that some of them will lead to peer-review publications, technical reports or other forms of publication.