Occupation Mediates Ecosystem Services with Human Well-Being

Abstract

The 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment linked ecosystem services, the benefits people obtain from ecosystems, directly with four constituents of human well-being: security, basic material for good life, health, and freedom of choice and action. No explicit model of the role of human activity in the transformation of ecosystem services into well-being was, however, developed by the Assessment and the connective relations between ecosystem services and human well-being remain poorly understood. The authors of this paper argue that the concept of “occupation” is a crucial addition to understanding these connective relations. It is proposed that human well-being, human activity, and ecosystem services are mediated by, i.e., connected through the medium of, occupational performance. Some implications of this proposal for the study of the human dimensions of global environmental change are briefly discussed.

Keywords:

• Ecosystem services
• Human activity
• Occupation
• Well-being
• Global environmental change
• Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants-in-aid from Nishikyushu University for the project “Utilizing cultural properties in environmental conservation in Kanzaki: An occupational dimensions approach”, from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan for the project “Pan Pacific Environmental Changes and Civilizations”, and from Alaska EPSCoR NSF award #EPS-0701898 and the state of Alaska. Earlier versions of parts of this work were presented at the conference “Medical Anthropology at the Intersections: Celebrating 50 Years of Interdisciplinarity” at Yale University in 2009 and at the Center for Alaska Native Health Research (CANHR), University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2010. We thank Lynn Morgan and Merrill Singer, and Bert Boyer and the CANHR staff for their comments on those presentations and the two anonymous referees for their advice on this manuscript.

Notes

1. The “our” in this definition is, of course, problematic and should be replaced by something like “in the lexicon of the culture concerned.”