Human Frontiers, Environments and Disease

Human Frontiers, Environments and Disease: Past Patterns, Uncertain Futures Hardcover – July 16, 2001

Author: Tony McMichael | Language: English | ISBN: 052180311X | Format: PDF, EPUB

• Description
• Book Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

Human Frontiers, Environments and Disease: Past Patterns, Uncertain Futures – July 16, 2001
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Review

"...very valuable reading for advanced students, or anyone else interested in the place of humans in the world..." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society

"This book achieves an unusual and important synthesis of the large-scale evolutionary, social and environmental influences on human health and survival. This ecological perspective, highlighting the history of disease and wellness, the state of our epidemiological environment, and the general impacts of recent cultural trends on well-being, is essential if we are to achieve a sustainable future." Paul R. Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University, and author of Human Natures

"Human Frontiers, Enviornments and Disease is a big, beautiful, and infuriating book that must be read by anyone seriously concerned with the viability of our only planet." Devra Davis, Lancet

"This impressive book by an eminent public health scientist explores our most important relationship: our interaction with the environment. Broad in scope, it is essential reading for all concerned with assuring future human health--and our very survival." Robert Beaglehole, Professor of Public Health, University of Auckland Senior Advisor, Health and Sustainable Development, World Health Organization

"The style is relaxed but succinct: I have seldom encountered a text where the essential points about disease causation were given so pleasantly and effectively within a short paragraph." British Journal of General Practice

"In this book Tony McMichael brings alive this fascinating dimension of history. Here is a book to make us think differently....it is a clear, lively, elegantly presented argument of wide scope in which unfamiliar issues are neatly put together. It is a tract for our times." Financial Times

"Outstanding, intellectually stimulating, and with refreshing new ideas, it is a meticulously researched book, with a 36-page bibliography. It merits a prominent place on the bookshelf of policy-makers, researchers, and teachers alike." Global Change and Human Health

"a big, beautiful, and infuriating book that must be read by anyone seriously concerned with the viability of our only planet...important work." Lancet

"The British epidemiologist McMichael takes his readers on a sweeping but accessible excursion covering the relationship between people and diseases since the beginning of civilization."ls Foreign Affairs

"...this book is innovative and important not only because of its subject matter, but also because of the way in which it is addressed. McMichael discusses the major public health issues of today by showing us how we got to where we are now, and synthesizes the large-scale evolutionary, social and environmental influences that have shaped human health over the last few millenia...outstanding..." International Journal of Epidemiology

Book Description

This compelling account charts the relentless trajectory of humankind across time and geography, and its changing survival patterns, from several million years ago when our ancient ancestors roamed the African savannah to today's populous, industrialised, globalising world. This dynamic expansion of human frontiers--geographic, climatic, cultural and technological--has encountered frequent setbacks from disease, famine and dwindling resources. The central theme of the book encompasses the social and environmental transformations wrought by agrarianism, industrialisation, fertility control, social modernisation, urbanisation and consumerism and how this affects patterns of health and disease.

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• Hardcover: 430 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (July 16, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 052180311X
• ISBN-13: 978-0521803113
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,108,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

McMichael's synthesis is the evolutionary synthesis and he is ruthless in his rigour. People are humans ... are Homo sapiens ... are one of the primates ... one of the animals ... one of the planet's living species. By any objective criteria humans have reached plague proportions and our future is bleak.
McMichael takes Darwin's theory of natural selection, with its three elements, variation, competition and differential reproductive success and extends Darwin's approach using the more recent ideas of self-organizing complexity and of emergent properties.
He considers the way humans have diverged in the last 10,000 years from the pattern established over 5 million years of evolution. This diversion has (a) lead to many diseases and unhealthy conditions and (b) modified the local and global environment in ways which have clear health implications for the human species.
I do not have space here to go through his description of the diseases and conditions, so will merely list some of them and refer you to the book for an illuminating, scientific discussion of their causes, why they have become more common over the past half century and their possible treatments. Auto-immune diseases, polio, childhood asthma and hay fever, inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, insulin-dependent (childhood onset) diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, lactose intolerance, skin cancer.
McMichael also deals with the contentious issue of genetically modified foods. This is one of the best parts of the book as it takes the non-specialist reader carefully through the underlying science and presents the pros and cons of GM.

While the author does mention the issue of mental health in relationship to our wacked-out species within the planet's growing urban population, I think he misses an opportunity to consider the obvious that the human ecologist Paul Shepard covered in his book NATURE AND MANDESS: our species developed into what it is biologically and psychologically in the Pleistocene. When that 'world' ended thousands of years ago, our species--in the blink of eye evolutionarily speaking--was not equipped in its brain to deal with the changes. The birhrate, and humane methods of raising children changed over night as well. Shepard seems to argue that we literally went 'nuts' as a result (agriculture, wars, walled chaotic cities, shorter life spans of dubious quality during the rise of ag, psychotic leaders, strange other-worldly monotheistic religious-belief systems, George Bush..need I go on?)

I bring up Shepard because this author is aware of his work. McMichael says on page 21: "We can thus understand, says Shepard, the inner human needs for contact with wilderness, with animal species, and with symbolic place. To depart from the conditions, the rhythms, and the interdependence of the natural world is both to stunt our own human essence and to risk damaging the environment's support systems.

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