Global Warming and the Political Ecology of Health: Emerging Crises and Systemic Solutions (Advances in Critical Medical Anthropology) - Tapa dura

In this groundbreaking, global analysis of the relationship between climate change and human health, Hans Baer and Merrill Singer inventory and critically analyze the diversity of significant and sometimes devastating health implications of global warming. Using a range of theoretical tools from anthropology, medicine, and environmental sciences, they present ecosyndemics as a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between environmental change and disease. They also go beyond the traditional concept of disease to examine changes in subsistence and settlement patterns, land-use, and lifeways, throwing the sociopolitical and economic dimensions of climate change into stark relief. Revealing the systemic structures of inequality underlying global warming, they also issue a call to action, arguing that fundamental changes in the world system are essential to the mitigation of an array of emerging health crises link to anthropogenic climate and environmental change.

Hans Baer teaches in the Development Studies Program and Centre for Health and Society at the University of Melbourne. He is author, co-author, or co-editor of twelve books, including Introducing Medical Anthropology: A Discipline in Action (with Merrill Singer, AltaMira Press 2007), Toward an Integrative Medicine: Merging Alternative Therapies with Biomedicine (AltaMira Press 2004), and Medical Anthropology and the World System (with Merrill Singer and Ida Susser, Praeger, 2d Edn. 2003). He has also authored some 140 book chapters and journal articles, and was awarded the Rudolf Virchow Prize by the Critical Anthropology of Health division of the Society for Medical Anthropology. Merill Singer, who originated the concept of syndemics in the public health literature, is a senior research scientist at the Center for Health Intervention, and Prevention at the University of Connecticut, and also affiliated with the university's Department of Anthropology, Center for the Elimination of Health Disparities among Latinos, and Center for Health Communication on Marketing, and with Yale University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. He has published over 190 articles and chapters in health and social science journals and books and has authored or edited 20 books. Among his honors are the George Foster Memorial Award in Practicing Anthropology from the Society for Medical Anthropology and the Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study from the North America from the Society for the Anthropology of North America.