Ommer, R.E. and the Coasts Under Stress research project team. Accepted. Coasts Under Stress: Restructuring and Social-Ecological Health. Montreal, PQ: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Table of Contents
Coasts Under Stress asked: what was the impact of environmental and social restructuring on the social-ecological health of the two coasts? The project identified the main causes of restructuring, as well as the associated interactivities between environment and society, and suggested mitigations and solutions. Researchers worked with policy makers to ensure that coastal communities will be direct beneficiaries. The team developed an intellectual framework to understand the complex interplay of economy, culture, environment, and health — a unique Canadian contribution to the international scene. In the process, they developed a new model of transdisciplinarity that has proved enormously effective in generating research, developing knowledge, and fostering wisdom. The Team answered their core question in several ways. First, they studied the history of remote coastal communities, their resource bases, their economies, and how the lives of people are embedded in their environments. To do this, they ranged across much intellectual and empirical territory to capture both the dramatic and more subtle forms of interactive restructuring and their impacts on social-ecological health. Second, they identified many of the pathways that connect the current state of the environment and society to social-ecological health (or ill-health). Third, they developed policy suggestions to alleviate or reverse many negative impacts and to encourage positive ones. Fourth, they offer a comprehensive new analytical framework to understand interactive restructuring and its impact on social-ecological health, coastally, nationally and beyond. This book is an overview of that work.


Sinclair, P.R. and R.E. Ommer (eds.). In Press. Power and Restructuring: Canada’s Coastal Society and Environment. St. John's, NL: ISER Books.
Table of Contents and authors
This is a book about power in small places, its perceptions and realities, where these conflict and where they come together. However, this is not just an examination of the local, but of the way broader concerns are played out on the coasts. This is a volume about the interaction of people and environment in coastal settings, the way power operates now, and how it has operated in the past. Our purpose is to frame and understand the current context through processes of early development and later restructuring. The book has two parts, the first with two subsections. The chapters in Part I, Power, Resources, and People, demonstrate the processes of power in various periods of development and restructuring, and this part is subdivided by time period. Indeed, the contemporary section contains two chapters that are forward-looking in their emphasis on policy. Most chapters in Part I stress people’s connection to the physical environment, but Kealey et al., in Chapter 5, remind us of the human health issues that are central to the project as a whole. In Part II, Power, Resistance, and Resilience, we focus on how local people have demonstrated their resistance to those changes that had negative impacts on them. Various strategies and practices show possibilities of resistance in the face of restructuring. For the concluding chapter, we invited political scientist Stephen Tomblin to take the lead in revisiting the book with us to consider implications of what we have learned for the analysis of participation, policy, and the state.


Parrish, C.C., N.J. Turner, and S.M. Solberg (eds.). Accepted. Resetting the Kitchen Table: Food Security, Culture, Health and Resilience in Coastal Communities. Hauppague, NY: Nova Science Publishers
Table of Contents and authors
Food is a fundamental human need, and food security is recognized as a critical issue in communities all over the world. This book examines many aspects of food security in coastal communities: historical, cultural, nutritional and educational. Most importantly, it connects food security to changing ecosystems. 'Resetting the kitchen table' is a metaphor for changes that are occurring in families and communities not only in daily food consumption but also in local availability of food, and hence in local culture as expressed in local practices for growing or collecting ("gathering") foodstuffs. Although in this contributed volume we use Canadian examples in order to identify the pathways between regional and national systems, our findings are of relevance to all resource-based coastal communities in the developed world, and probably also beyond that to rural communities everywhere. We examine some of the basic nutritional requirements for human health and well-being, and the important links between environment, lifestyles, economies, social structures, cultures and institutions, knowledge acquisition and transmission, biodiversity conservation and human nutrition.


Lutz, J. and B. Neis (eds.). Submitted. Making and Moving Knowledge. Montreal, PQ: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Table of Contents and authors
In a world increasingly supplied with information, how do we know what is “knowledge” and how can we act wisely? In a world with scarce research resources and numerous social and scientific conflicts to resolve how can we maximize the impact of the research that scholars do and effectively combine that with knowledge already extant in “lay” or “local” communities? This book is among the first in Canada to directly engage these vital issues. The focus is both on 1) how knowledge is created and transferred and used, and 2) perhaps most important, how it is blocked and atrophies. The book documents, in a critical and reflexive fashion, what an interdisciplinary team of researchers engaged in an innovative project (Coasts Under Stress) have learned about moving and integrating knowledge from community to university and back.


A. Holly Dolan, Martin Taylor, Barbara Neis, Rosemary Ommer, John Eyles, David Schneider, Bill Montevecchi. 2005. Restructuring and Health in Canadian Coastal Communities, EcoHealth 2(3):195-208
download PDF

Link to Journal

Newsletters
Coasts Under Stress Newsletter - June 2005
Coasts Under Stress Newsletter - April 2004
Coasts Under Stress Newsletter - September 2003