Excerpt
Canada's coasts have experienced significant social and environmental and changes, including rising unemployment and increasingly stressed fisheries. What is the impact of these environmental and social changes on the social-ecological health of the east and west coasts of Canada?
Our Coasts Under Stress team answered this question in several ways. First, we looked at the history of the remote communities of these coasts, their resource bases, their economies over time, and the way in which the lives of people are embedded in the environments to which they belong and on which they depend. To do this, we moved back and forward across time and also through several scales of analysis in order to capture both the dramatic and the more subtle forms of restructuring and their impacts on social-ecological health. Second, we came as close as possible to the reality in which coastal people live, without losing sight of the overall patterns that continue to shape their lives, by exploring how the current state of the environment and society is related to coastal social-ecological health (or ill health). Third, we developed a range of policy reflections that we think will alleviate or even reverse many of the negative impacts of…
Footnotes
Rosemary E. Ommer is director of the Institute for Coastal and Oceans Research, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
- © 2009 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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