Human Frontiers, Environments and Disease by Tony McMichael, Cambridge
University Press, 拢14.95, ISBN 0521004942
EVERYONE knows about the three blind men who investigated an elephant. Each
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came back sure the entire beast must be like the bit he had felt: the tail, the
trunk, the leg. No one had the whole picture.
Humanity is now faced with an elephantine crisis of its own making made of
similarly disparate bits that aren鈥檛 always obviously related. Our physical
domination of this planet is altering all our fundamental life-support systems.
These are the processes that give us our food and water and air, our social
stability, and ultimately our health. It鈥檚 happening so fast and on such a scale
that comprehending the whole process is almost impossible.
杏吧原创s deal with this elephant in their methodical, piecemeal way,
feeling their way around a collapsing fishery here, an emerging disease there,
epidemics of obesity and starvation, climate change and population growth. And
with each discovery comes yet another warning that something else that we do
threatens us all, from driving cars to eating meat.
It鈥檚 become fashionable to mock all this doom and destruction. 鈥淥h dear, what
will be bad for us next?鈥� smirk the pundits. They behave as if the warnings came
from some covert political agenda rather than reality. If you don鈥檛 realise that
most of the problems are bits of the same enormous, onrushing elephant, it can
seem as though the 鈥渄oomsayers鈥� are merely vying for attention and grant
money.
But they aren鈥檛, as Tony McMichael鈥檚 book tries to show us. Although he isn鈥檛
entirely successful, there is enough in Human Frontiers, Environments and
Disease to show that all these diverse warnings are not merely a ploy to upset
the (even blinder) optimists. They all stem from the same, huge fact: that
having taken over the planet, we aren鈥檛 running it in our collective best
interests.
Perhaps we don鈥檛 know what our best interests are. McMichael says we need to
understand human ecology 鈥� our relationships with nature and the way we
evolved 鈥� before we can know what makes for a healthy population.
To reach this understanding, McMichael attempts to bring into focus a vast
range of subjects, from hunter-gatherer diets to the history of germ theory. He
even includes topics such as workplace safety and income distribution, social
factors that can be crucial to health, and which can have a global impact in a
global economy.
This brings into welcome perspective our obsession with free trade. Under
current trade agreements, industries can compete by spending so little on wages
and infrastructure, such as decent sewerage, that their labourers end up in very
poor health. The result: Guatemalan farm workers inadvertently contaminate New
Yorkers鈥� strawberries with a nasty gut pathogen. This turns the battle for
minimum labour standards in trade agreements into enlightened self-interest.
To see this even mentioned by an epidemiologist is a joy.
Sometimes McMichael manages to pull things together: how trade,
migration, poverty and dirty water spread cholera, for instance. At other times
it seems he is merely listing everything he knows, about malaria or DDT or
climate. But he knows a lot. The book is worth reading if only to learn more
about these important, under-taught subjects, even though the gargantuan task of
linking them all sometimes gets a bit lost, and the solutions proposed can seem
a bit simplistic. His book ought to have been more rigorously fact-checked and
edited, and often doesn鈥檛 give enough of its sources.
Still, I now know why Pythagoras couldn鈥檛 run away from the mob that killed
him: his escape was cut off by a field of fava beans. He carried a genetic
mutation that gave him increased resistance to malaria, but also a
potentially fatal allergy to fava pollen. After reading this book, I wonder if
we are all courting a similar demise, trapped between our political ineptitude