Cortes Island Field School
This hybrid course is centered around field based learning on Cortes Island. The course combines rural and remote island field experiences focused on integrative approaches to health, environment and community issues, with real-time connections with students and instructors from five universities (Guelph, UNBC, University of Calgary, UQAM, SFU), and access to asynchronous climate justice curricula developed in collaboration from a pan-Canadian team of experts and practitioners.
6-Day Schedule
Day 1
Go to Manson’s Lagoon
Visit the School & Talk to Community
Film Viewing
Day 2
Firehall Activities
Tour of Rainbow Ridge
Visit the Market and Museum
Opening Circle
Mindfulness + Morning Circle
Walk to Children’s Forest
Debrief Circle
Day 5
Movement Activity: Pilates
Mindful Grounding + Content Circle
Farm Walks
Day 6
Mindful Grounding
Klahoose First Nation
Klahoose Film Viewing
Day 3
Grounding in Place
Framing the Week
Day 4
Each year, the participants of CoPEH-Canada's hybrid course write a blog or short story on a topic of their choice related to ecosystem approaches to health and share with the other participants. Then, everyone votes on their top three and the three highest scoring pieces are published on the CoPEH-Canada website.
Click on the images below to explore the 2026 Hybrid Course Participants' Blogs!
Your local ecohealth Gossip Guru
by Carla Hamilton
“Six hundred and nineteen individuals died in their apartments in one week in 2021 (BC Coroners Service, 2022). Hello, Lower Mainland. Did you miss me? Let's talk.”
The Memory Carried by the Land
by Andrea Moyah Nygren
“Not a dream. Not imagination. A remembering. It came after a pipe ceremony near Credit River; in a place my family has loved for many years. My husband and our five children have spent countless summer days beneath the trees. Two of my children attended preschool in the “Village” preschool, and every summer we float gently down the river together, carried by the current while the trees sway overhead.”
How Gardening Saved My Life
by Andrea Sadowski
“I scattered wildflower seeds from a West Coast Seeds packet directly onto the cold, brown earth contained within a five-litre pot on my apartment’s patio. Despite having a comfortable life, with a loving partner, a steady job, and an angel of a dog, I no longer wanted to be alive. I didn’t want to kill myself, per se, but the thought of not existing anymore was a great temptation. These thoughts came every winter as the days got shorter and colder, and life seemed to shrink in on itself.”
