Learning from Eco-social Approaches to Public Health
Jena Webb is Director of programmes at the Canadian Community of Practice in Ecosystem Approaches to Health (CoPEH-Canada), where she leads communications and co-leads networking and teaching.
For the past two decades, Jena Webb's work, both nationally and internationally, has focused on the links between health, society and ecosystems. Her training began in the natural sciences with a B.S. in biology and an M.S. in environmental science. During her Ph.D. she conducted research that straddled physical and human geography, focusing the impacts of deforestation and oil extraction in the Amazon on mercury and hydrocarbon levels in fish and Indigenous peoples. She is currently a research professional on several projects at the intersection of her main interests.
In 2016, she moved to the Ecuadorian Amazon, on Ai’Kofan territory, with her family where she was scientific advisor, wrote scientific blogs related to health and spearheaded the biomonitoring initiative work with an international NGO, Amazon Frontlines, and an association of four indigenous communities, the Ceibo Alliance, to protect their ancestral lands.
Jena is especially interested in promoting people’s capacity and desire to engage in transformation toward a more sustainable and just future, this involves training like the yearly CoPEH-Canada hybrid course on ecosystem approaches to health (https://copeh-canada.org/en/key-areas/training-and-capacity-building/course.html) and also growing hope and inspiration through reflective practices, like writing (https://www.openphysiojournal.com/portfolio/healthpunk-volume-2/).
