School of Environmental Planning, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, BC, Canada.
Ecohealth. 2010 Sep;7(3):351-60. doi: 10.1007/s10393-010-0353-7. Epub 2010 Nov 23.
Using ecohealth as a transdisciplinary lens to explore the connections among overlapping domains of inquiry, this article examines methodological relations between Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystem Health, two approaches for improving rural health and well-being. The experience of working on a project tasked with developing an integrated, systems-based approach for understanding the nature of rural livelihoods and ecosystems provides the base for analysis. Several key insights are discussed: The overarching goals of health and sustainability facilitate collaboration among disciplines; differences arise from how each approach operationalizes systems as variables and indicators; the dependent variables for one approach can be used as the independent variables for the other. In summary, while broad concepts like health and sustainability help transcend differences across disciplines and scales of analysis, variables and indicators cannot, as they are bound to how an observed system is operationalized. An advantage of using an ecohealth lens is that it creates conceptual and analytical spaces in which differences can be reconciled and used as sources of synergy. A source of synergy revealed in this article is the interdependence of variables used by each approach.
本文运用生态健康学这一跨学科视角，探讨重叠研究领域之间的联系，审视可持续生计与生态系统健康这两种增进农村健康与福祉的方法之间在方法论上的关系。本文的分析以参与一个旨在开发综合系统方法以理解农村生计和生态系统性质的项目的经验为基础。文中讨论了若干关键见解：健康与可持续性的总体目标有助于各学科之间的合作；由于每个方法将系统作为变量和指标来操作，因此会产生差异；一个方法的因变量可以用作另一个方法的自变量。总之，尽管健康和可持续性等广泛概念有助于跨越学科和分析规模的差异，但变量和指标却不能，因为它们取决于所观察系统的操作方式。使用生态健康学视角的一个优势是，它可以在其中调和差异并将其用作协同的来源，从而创造出概念和分析空间。本文揭示的一个协同来源是两种方法所使用的变量之间的相互依存关系。
