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Drawing on ecosystem thinking, complexity and postnormal science, Ecological Health offers a radical new way of thinking about the health issues of the 21st Century. This volume reflects on recent social scientific engagement with Ecosystem Health research and practice and sets out a vision for the future.

The inaugural gathering of The Environment Community Health Observatory (ECHO) Network is a network of academic, non-profit, and health authority scholars and practitioners committed to understanding and responding to the cumulative impacts of resource extraction. The Network is embedded within multiple jurisdictions and institutional contexts, reflecting the Network's efforts to work across sectors to address questions arising in communities and regions experiencing the overlapping influences of rurality, remoteness, and resource extraction. In this paper, we draw from entrance interviews and a group exercise with Network members to explore the complexity of accountability as an unfolding challenge for research that addresses resource extraction in Canada. We locate these findings within the current settler colonial context in which the Network is embroiled, arguing that a condition of settler colonialism is erasing not only Indigenous legal orders but also accountability mechanisms outside of state-based discourses. In making this argument, we understand settler colonialism as a failed yet persistent project. We contend that collectively engaging through situated and relational accountabilities beyond simply accounting for "accountability", ECHO Network members—and others looking to social and environmental change—are critically challenged to approach settler-state apparatuses for transformative engagement beyond merely recognizing that accountability is relational.

Abstract Political ecology pushes back against the apolitical and ahistorical ecologies frequently found in mainstream scientific accounts of nature and the environment, and has increasingly focused on how scientific knowledge is 'socially constructed.' In this article, we argue for political ecological engagement with the highly influential knowledge-to-action (KTA) movement in science about health and the environment. We introduce KTA using results of a survey conducted under the auspices of a Canada-Latin America-Caribbean 'ecosystem approaches to health' (ecohealth) collaboration, and then narrow our focus to a single illustrative ecohealth project, dealing with the health impacts of small-scale gold mining in southwestern Ecuador. We employ an ecology of knowledge framework for integrating insights from science and technology studies,illustrating the interacting actors, material artifacts, institutions and discourses involved in not only the generation but also the application of health-environment science. The origins of ecohealth research in the Americas reflect interacting epistemological and political factors, as sophisticated, complex systemic analyses of health-environment interactions occurred amidst increasing neoliberalization of knowledge production. Simultaneously, corporate actors such as large mining companies influenced both the distribution of healthdamaging environmental conditions in the Americas, and the ways in which they were studied. This analysis motivates our advocacy of specifically political ecologies of health-environment knowledge, in which inequitable power dynamics and non-human actors are foregrounded in studies of the social production and application of science. The political ecology of knowledge framework that we envision would allow for simultaneous consideration of how societal contexts influence scientific knowledge production, and how the resulting knowledge can be better applied to protect the health of communities facing environmental injustice. Key words: ecohealth; mining; praxis; science and technology studies; knowledge-to-action; Canada; Ecuador