ENVIRONMENT: THE ECOSYSTEM IS OUR HEALTH SYSTEM Dr. Shannon Waters, Medical Health Officer for the Cowichan Valley Region at Island Health – Vancouver Island Health Authority
Indigenous peoples in Canada are diverse, but we share many perspectives on our relationship with the environment. Many Indigenous peoples have nurtured relationships with their surrounding environment for generations upon generations. Intimate knowledge of place— inclusive of land, water, animals, and plants—can be developed and shared over the life course. These relationships and this knowledge can support emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual health and reinforce that everything is connected. As Indigenous peoples, we have responsibility to, and are in reciprocity with, both the beings around us now and those who will comprise future generations. In what became Canada, Indigenous knowledge about relationship, responsibility, and reciprocity was confronted by a differing worldview starting in the late-15th century. Settlers viewed environments, inclusive of Indigenous peoples living within them, as commodities that could be claimed, controlled, and colonized. Colonizers’
anthropocentric view of the world drove their policies and actions, harming the health of the environment and all beings connected with it. As the 21st century unfolds, the effects of this anthropocentric worldview are becoming increasingly blatant. Humans have exploited the natural infrastructure of Mother Earth, leaving one million species currently threatened with extinction (Diaz, 2019). This biodiversity loss damages relationships between all beings. What is more, people who depend on these relationships find their livelihoods, food security, health, and quality of life endangered. Biodiversity loss, through means such as the carbon dioxide emissions from the destruction of forests (Watts et al., 2021), also contributes to climate change, which has been declared the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century, and which has already rendered some places uninhabitable for the beings within them. Biodiversity loss and climate change are intricately linked (Pörtner et al., 2021), and their
common basis must be addressed. To achieve this, the ecosystems of Mother Earth need to be recognized as foundational to the health of all beings because the ecosystem is our health system. We must shift from anthropocentric worldviews and re-learn that we, as humans, are part of a complex and interdependent web. Recent events have brought attention to the growing evidence that human-dominated ecosystems, where biodiversity is diminished to create economic growth, can increase the risk of disease pandemics such as COVID-19 (Gibb et al., 2020). While protecting biodiversity may play a role in preventing future pandemics, the natural world also provided ways to support health during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a Hul’qumi’num woman who works as a Medical Health Officer in my home territory, I go to the rivers to bathe, as Elders have taught me. I ask the water to carry my heaviness away. The land and waters are healers, as recent research has shown. Across nine different countries
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