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Résumé :
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This compelling account charts the relentless trajectory of humankind and its changing survival patterns across time and landscape, from when our ancestors roamed the African savannah to today’s populous, industrialised, globalising world. This expansion of human frontiers geographic, climatic, cultural and technological has entailed many setbacks from disease, famine and depleted resources. The changes in human ecology due to agrarianism, industrialisation, fertility control, social modernisation, urbanisation and modern lifestyles have profoundly affected patterns of health and disease. Today, while life expectancies rise, Earth’s ecosystems are being disrupted by the combined weight of population size and intensive consumption. The resultant climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, loss of biodiversity and other environmental changes pose risks to human health, perhaps survival. Recognising how population health, long term, depends on environmental conditions, can we achieve a transition to sustainability? Whilst the canvas that Tony McMichael covers is vast, the detail he brings to bear on this immense subject is both illuminating and dramatic. This account succeeds on many levels: as a chronicle of human colonisation and environmental impact; as a description of how recent technological changes have induced mismatches between our biological needs and our ways of living; and as an analysis of our rapidly changing demographic and social profile and its environmental and health consequences
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