Ecosystem Crises Interactions Human Health and the Changing Environment

Explores the human impacts on environment that lead to serious ecological crises, an innovative resource for students, professionals, and researchers alike

Ecosystem Crises Interaction: Human Health and the Changing Environment provides a timely and innovative framework for understanding how negative human activity impacts the environment, and how seemingly disparate factors connect to, and magnify, hazardous consequences under a changing climate. Presenting a coherent, holistic perspective to the subject, this compelling textbook and reference examines the diverse, often unexpected links that connect our complex world in context of global climate change.

The text illustrates how eco-crisis interaction—the synergistic interface of two or more environmental events or pollutants—can multiply to produce harmful health effects that are greater than their additive impact. This concept is highlighted through numerous real and relatable examples, from the use of sediment rock in hydraulic and drinking water filtration systems, to the connections between human development and crises such as deforestation, emergent infectious diseases, and global food insecurity. Throughout the text, specific examples present opportunities to consider broader questions about the extinction of species, populations, and ways of life. Presenting a balanced investigation of the interaction of contemporary ecological dangers, human behavior, and health, this unique resource:

• Explores how complex interactions between global warming and anthropogenic impairments magnify the diverse ecological perils and threats facing humans and other species
• Discusses roadblocks to addressing environmental risk, such as global elite polluters, the organized denial of climate change, and deliberate environmental disruption for financial gain
• Describes how the production and use of fossil fuels are driving a significant rise in carbon dioxide and other pollutants in the atmosphere and in the oceans
• Illustrates how industrial production is contributing to an array of environmental crises, including fuel spills, waste leakages, and loss of biodiversity
• Examines the critical ecosystems that are at risk from interacting stressors of human origin 

Ecosystem Crises Interaction: Human Health and the Changing Environment is an ideal textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in courses including public and allied health, environmental studies, medical ecology, medical anthropology, and geo-health, and a valuable reference for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in fields such as environmental health, global and planetary health, public health, climate change, and medical social science.

Merrill Singer, Professor, Departments of Anthropology and Community Medicine, University of Connecticut; Senior Research Scientist, Center for Health, Intervention and Prevention, University of Connecticut; and Affiliated Scientist, Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, Yale University. 

Preface

Chapter 1. Introduction: Public Health, Ecohealth, Planetary Health and You
From Individual to Public Health
Ecohealth: How changes in Earth’s Ecosystems Affect Health
From Global to Planetary Health
Introducing Ecocrisis Interaction and Health
Age of the Anthropocene
The Hottest Year on Record
Organization of this Book

Section I: Impact on Ecosystems

Chapter 2. Intricacies of Ecosystems
Developing an Historic Understanding of Ecology and Ecosystems
Modern Ecology

Chapter 3. The Social, Economic, and Technological Making of Environmental Crisis
The Longue Durée and the Rise and Development of Capitalism
Polluting Elites
The Anthropocene or the Capitolocene?
The Capitalist Global Environment and the Future of “Eaarth”

Chapter 4 Engaging Catastrophe

Chapter 5 A Home in Peril: Major Contemporary Environmental Crises

Chapter 6. The Threat of Eco-crisis Interaction
Multiplying Risk
Impact: Case Studies of Ecocrisis Interaction

Section II: Environmental Crisis

Chapter 7. Beyond Single Threats: Mechanisms and Pathways of Interaction
Conventional Single-Threat Approaches
Mounting Number of Contemporary Threats and Interactions
The Complexities of Adverse Interaction

Chapter 8. Climate Change, Crisis Enhancement
Breaking Records: Current Climate Change
Climate Change and Ecosystem Understanding
Climate Change, the Primary Driver of Perilous Interaction

Chapter 9. Business as Deadly Usual: Resisting Environmental Science
A Time of Questioning Environmental Science
Deadly Business: Making and Denying Climate Change
Financing Climate Change Denial
The Politics of Climate Change Denial
Public Attitudes about Climate Change

Section III: Human Health Risks with Changing Environment 

Chapter 10. Crossing Thresholds
Key Biogeochemical and Biophysical Earth System Processes
Are there Planetary Boundaries?
When Boundaries are Traversed

Chapter 11. Time for Change? Toward Sustainability, Toward Life
Mitigation and Adaptation
Glossary

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