Читать книгу Ecosystem Crises Interactions - Merrill Singer - Страница 12

This book is about connections, often unexpected links in a complex world. It brings together detailed information about seemingly disparate subjects. In the process, the growing air traffic of Miami International Airport is shown to be connected to the city’s low‐lying status in the ocean, to the use of sediment rock in the area’s hydraulic and drinking water filtration systems, and to king and red tides. Elsewhere, the connections are examined between the climate of Earth and human evolution, the peopling of the world, and the historic development of modern society. Also of concern are the multiple ways national and international development under capitalism are entwined with deforestation, coral die‐off, emergent infectious disease, and mounting food insecurity around the world. This list could go on, but the basic point is that a holistic perspective on diverse issues is needed in the investigation of the interaction of contemporary ecological dangers, human behavior, and health.

In visiting ecocrises around the globe, from U.S. nuclear waste buried below the melting glaciers of Iceland to the deteriorating asbestos cement used to construct homes in Australia, and many other catastrophes in many places in between, a considerable amount of detail is offered. Why such a thoroughgoing approach to cases and examples? Because, while there are redundancies reflective of the unfortunate fact that in countless ways adverse elements of environmental history repeat themselves, it is by knowing a multitude of events that the patterns and their determinants are brought into sight. In this way, we begin to see the forest through the trees. It is a critical moment for this task, as the logger’s saw, intensifying wildfires, climate change‐induced pest invasions, drought, global warming, and over‐extraction conspire to denude the planet of oxygen‐generating forests, depopulate the oceans, melt the cryosphere, and put human well‐being at risk.