A brief introduction - I am a professor of epidemiology, a veterinarian, and an essayist, poet, fiction writer. My books include 7 of poetry, one of poetry & recipes, one of fiction, three of popular nonfiction (One Animal Among Many: Gaia Goats & Garlic; Food Sex and Salmenonella: the risks of environmental intimacy; Good for your Animals: Good for You), and a text (Ecosystem Sustainability & Health: a practical approach, Cambridge, 2004). I have co-edited & written a text (with the late James Kay) - The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability (Columbia U Press date TBA). In my spare time, I am founding president of the Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health (www.nesh.ca) and Veterinarians without Borders-Canada (www.vwb-vsf.ca). I am a firm proponent of integrating participatory research in communities with systemic & ecological thinking/ investigation. I figure we may have multiple understandings of the world, but if one "understanding" blows it up or destroys it, all of our "understandings" have to live with the consequences. Hence I think that 1) there is a global narrative within which we have partial knowledge and our own narratives and 2) it is impossible to know what that global narrative is (we are all inside it with partial understanding) and that therefore 3) our journey toward what we hope is a convivial and reasonably long-lived planet must be the result of some sort of negotiation. One of the biggest challenges I see is how we can maintain "quality control" in such a situation (differentiating delusional thinking from just substantially different perspectives) without degenerating into an "expert-knows" mode.
So much for being short. -- David Waltner-Toews Professor Department of Population Medicine University of Guelph Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G 2W1 Tel 519-824-4120 ext 54745 Fax 519-763-3117 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web sites: www.vwb-vsf.ca www.ovcnet.uoguelph.ca/popmed/ecosys/index.html (personal/professional/courses) www.nesh.ca (Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health) www.eccho.ca (Ecosystems, Climate Change and Health Omnibus Project) _______________________________________________ IntSci mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.learningforsustainability.net/mailman/listinfo/intsci_learningforsustainability.net
