Product Description

Charting the relentless trajectory of humankind across time and geography, Tony McMichael highlights the changing survival patterns of our ancient ancestors, who roamed the African savannahs several million years ago, to today's populous, industrialized, and globalized world. McMichael explores the changes in human biology, culture, and surrounding environments that have influenced patterns of health and disease over the course of humankind's history, arguing that the health of populations is primarily a product of the interaction of human societies with the wider environment, its various ecosystems, and other life-support processes. Tony McMichael is professor of epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has held positions in Australia, USA, and UK, and has taught widely in Asia, Africa, and Europe. He has advised WHO, UNEP, the World Bank and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on public health issues. His previous book, Planetary Overload (Cambridge University Press, 1993) was a widely acclaimed and influential account of global environmental change and the health of the human species.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1378464 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 430 pages

Review
'This impressive book by an eminent public health scientist explores our most important relationship: our interaction with the environment. It is essential reading for all concerned with assuring future human health - and our very survival.' Robert Beaglehole, Professor and Head, Department of Community Health, University of Auckland '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, Environments and Disease is an innovative and constructive analysis of a problem fundamental to mankind, past, present and future. No one concerned with the bio-medical prospects of the human race could fail to find Professor McMichael's accomplished account thought-provoking and eye-opening.' Roy Porter, The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine 'The combination of infection, malnutrition, and population pressure has sapped the vitality of communities for generations. New problems are being added constantly. Industrial development, often without restraining regulations, is causing environmental damage and disease; some of the worst health dangers of the industrialised world, such as cigarette smoking and traffic injury, are becoming increasingly common. McMichael has produced an excellent treatise on these changing patterns of human ecology and disease.' British Medical Journal 'As a GP, I found this book very interesting and relevant to my personal medical practice. It was very thought provoking, and stimulated consideration of what the human race has done to affect the evolution of disease processes.' Doctors.net 'In his closing sections, McMichael argues that today's global population cannot sustain current uses of water, air, and soil. Almost half the world's population lacks proper sanitation, and one in six do not have safe drinking water. At the same time, we produce 12 times more carbon dioxide and have four times more people living on the planet than a century ago, with widening gaps between rich and poor. ... Spinoza advised that those who want the future to be different from the past, should study the past, a view heartily endorsed by McMichael in this important work.' The Lancet 'McMichael examines one by one the various threats to our welfare and their medical implications ... here is a book to make us think differently ... a clear, lively, elegantly presented argument of wide scope in which unfamiliar issues are neatly put together. It is a tract for our times.' The Financial Times '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.' The British Journal of General Practice 'McMichael is one of the few public health scientists who have found ways to stand back from sectional interests and study the relationship between individuals, societies and the environment in which we live as a whole ... the information is well organized, well illustrated, easy to read and delivered with a welcome sense of humour. It is essential reading for public health scientists, practitioners, academics and students, and for economists of all specialization's and ideological persuasions, given their increasing influence on public health debates.' Bulletin of the World Health Organization 'Outstanding, intelectually stimulating, and with refreshing new ideas ... merits a prominent place on the bookshelf of policy-makers, researchers, and teachers alike.' Global Change & Human Health 'What I find most interesting and valuable about this book is that it provides one of the best examples I have seen of the global epidemiology approach. It addresses the major global public health issues by considering all of the available epidemiological evidence, some of it stretching back for several millennia ... read it for the substantive content, but also read it as an outstanding example of the approach to epidemiology that we will be, or should be, taking in the 21st century.' International Journal of Epidemiology 'Professor McMichael tells a wonderful story of humankind. To explain the human condition and our challenges for the future. The book is well organised and well produced. The book deserves to be read by all those with an interest in the human condition. Tony McMichael's book represents a major intellectual contribution to public health. Many of his admiring friends and colleagues, myself included, would wish for the ability to have written it themselves.' Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 'To attempt to cover the history, geography, biology and evolutionary significance of human health, and provide convincing future scenarios, takes a brave author with an unusual breadth of knowledge. McMichael shows that he is up to the task in this book, which will become a benchmark for discussions of global public health.' The Times 'Well written and easily read ... a compelling text.' Pediatric Endocrinology Reviews 'This is a transcendental and grandiose book on a par with H. G. Wells' 'History of the World'.' Medical Sociology News

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 Info
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. Textbook explores the ways human biology, culture and the environment have influenced patterns of health and disease over time. Offers a narrative account of the evolution of this impact and ways of living and how those have affected patterns of health. Hardcover, softcover also available.

Customer Reviews

This book sets the agenda for the 21st century
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. McMichael invokes the 'precautionary principle' to come down - at the present time - against GM, an unusual position for a trained scientist. His position is based solely on science, not on emotion, tradition, or any mystical notion of what is "natural".

The book also deals with the pressures human population is putting on the survival of all the other species on the planet. Here he brings up to date the work of Joel Cohen's 1995 book (How Many People Can Earth Support) and uses the 'ecological footprint' methodology to consider the number of people the planet can (a) feed, (b) supply with fresh water, (c) supply with energy, (d) support without reducing biodiversity.

His answers, of course, depend upon the consumption levels which are assumed for the population, but in almost all cases, these answers are less than the planet's present six billion people. How can this be?

There are two reasons. First because of 'ecological deficit budgeting' or, in the catchy phrase of Tim Flannery, because Homo sapiens is a 'future eater'. (See Flannery's two books The Future Eaters, and The Eternal Frontier - check my review of the latter here at amazon.com.)

Secondly because of the time lags which accompany environmental change. McMichael brings this home with the fact that, if we can halt the build-up of greenhouse gases by 2070, the world's oceans will continue to warm and expand for another thousand years! One of the key questions for our time is: Can our opinion leaders and decision makers give such unfamiliar time frames their due weight?

As a member of the International Panel on Climate Change, McMichael also has a useful presentation, explanation and discussion on global climate change. The recent fires in the US, freezing and floods in Europe and climatic records (extremes) have brought home to ordinary people, non-scientists, that something unusual is happening. This book explains why, explains how and looks into the future for the effects of climate change on human health. McMichael concludes that "It will be reasonable from here on to regard each extreme weather event as containing at least some human-induced component".

The book addresses the issue of globalization. The author paints a picture of deregulation reducing labour and environmental controls and increasing disease and social disruption in both the West and in low-income countries.

What of the future? McMichael considers far more than I can squeeze into this review, but an interesting observation concerns the importance of the way in which the tension between two evolutionarily-determined human mental attributes is played out. Humans have a long standing expertise at dealing with urgent crises, 'flight-or-fight'. But this tendency has got us to our present environmental predicament. The question is whether can we use our more recently acquired abilities for long-term planning, sophisticated scientific reasoning and information technology to rescue us from the short-termism of flight-or-fight.

The book uses brilliantly conceived and very telling graphs which are powerful examples of a picture being worth a thousand words. Each repays careful study.

Each chapter ends with a useful 2-3 page summary and conclusion. There are 36 pages of annotated bibliography, many references from 2000, even 2001.

If you'd like a taste for the fast pace of the book and the author's scientific approach, I recommend his account of Lyme disease on page 117.

Ecology - human, animal, vegetable and planetary
This is a tour de force, a brilliant, densely packed account of human evolutionary biology and ecology, setting the progress of the human race and its civilizations and cultures in the context of shifting environmental, climatic, social, cultural and ecological forces over the lifetime of our species. Tony McMichael describes and explains how we have reached the present human situation, the interplay of our species with the plants and animals that supply our food, and the microbes that often shorten our lives. In the short period since the industrial revolution we have made spectacular progress in every way imaginable, but now our own ingenuity and industries may threaten our very survivsl - we are at risk of endangering our life support systems to an extent that could harm them badly enough to raise questions about our own prospects for survival as a species. This is an important book for everyone who cares about life - our lives, and the lives of other species with which we are interdependent.