Ethnobiologists Sounding the Depths and Scaling the Heights of Global Health in a Changing World

In this roundtable discussion, ethnobiologists demonstrate their broad range of contributions to transdisciplinary explorations of the ways changing interactions between people and their surroundings influence multispecies wellbeing. Roundtable panelists illustrate how they address the conventional concerns of ethnobiology while pushing the envelope with their critical analyses of global health. Panelists aim to capture the real nuances of people’s lives through collaborations with communities who are witnessing, adapting to, mitigating, and otherwise coping with global change. Panelists share how they interpret and explain people’s differential experiences with global change using engaged scholarship combined with empirical research methods framed in robust theories.

This roundtable, hosted by the editors of the Global Change/Global Health book series, showcases the ways engaged scholars can enact change through, among other practices, writing and publishing. Like authors of monographs in the series, panelists in this roundtable at the SoE 2025 conference dive into the health-related causes and consequences of environmental change. We contribute to emerging debates about climate, health, political and social restructurings and comment on global change and global health in relationship to conflicts as well as coalitions. Panelists examine the spatiotemporal depths, heights, and midlands of environmental change where it concerns wellbeing in its full spectrum of meanings.