Читать книгу Ecosystem Crises Interactions - Merrill Singer - Страница 45

Human ecology is the subfield of ecology that is specifically concerned with understanding relationships between people and their environment, including the built environment of human construction (e.g., an urban neighborhood, a riverine village, or a fishing camp). The presence of humans on Earth is the zig‐zagging, undirected product of evolutionary history, played out under the influence of complex and changing environmental and climatic conditions.

In human ecology, as in the broader field, the environment is conceptualized as an ecosystem. Thus, in human ecology research, a single farm can be studied as an ecosystem, as can New York City. Notably, humans are never the only organisms that inhabit built environments. Some nonhuman species, like dogs and zoo animals, occupy human‐constructed environments because we bring them there. Others, like termites, coyotes, and brown rats, are uninvited but find such settlements contain abundant desirable resources. Of special note to human health in built environments is the role of animal disease vectors like mosquitoes and rats in the spread of infectious pathogens as a result of interacting ecocrises like climate change and flooding.

Some wild species, like the house sparrow (Passer domesticus), are so anthrodependent that if humans abandon a location, the local population goes extinct. The house sparrow is also quite sensitive to changes in human landscapes. In some urban areas, especially in the United Kingdom and Western Europe, their numbers are now declining because of changes in human ecology such as gentrification, which reduces the number of nesting sites and food availability.

Human social systems are a dominant feature of human‐impacted ecosystems. As Marten (2001, p. 1) states:

Although humans are part of the ecosystem, it is useful to think of human–environment interaction as interaction between the human social system and the rest of the ecosystem … The social system is a central concept in human ecology because human activities that impact on ecosystems are strongly influenced by the society in which people live. Values and knowledge … shape the way that we process and interpret information and translate it into action.

Human activities in an environment, such as driving a car, building a new factory, cutting down trees in a rainforest, drilling for oil in a deep‐water site, launching a fleet of factory stern trawler fishing and processing vessels, or planting a field of corn, trigger a chain of effects that reverberate between social systems and ecosystems (Fig. 2.5). Marten (2001, p. 2) cites the following example of this echo process. People in many parts of India traditionally have used wood extracted from the environment for cooking fuel. This was not a great threat to the balance and regenerative capacity of the forest environment until the human population expanded rapidly beginning in the 1950s. As a result:

Fig. 2.5 Feedbacks between human activities and Earth properties leading to global change.

Source: Modified from Hooper et al. (2005).

Many forests have disappeared in recent years because people have cut so many trees and bushes for cooking fuel. Now there are not enough trees and bushes to provide all the fuel that people need. People have responded … by having their children search for anything that can be burned, such as twigs, crop residues … and cow dung. Fuel collection makes children even more valuable to their families, so parents have more children. The resulting increase in population leads to more demand for fuel.

(Marten 2001)

More recently, India’s fertility rate has stabilized, with the average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime dropping from 5.9 in 1951 to 2.3 in 2011 (Nagajan 2016). But India’s population remains quite large and the damage to the environment has been done, not only by small farmers but also by large planation corporations, beginning with colonial British commercial forestry operations. Forest loss has impacted many species and contributed to a growing water crisis in the country’s villages and cities. This poses threats to health, particularly among poorer families.

As this last comment indicates, a central feature in contemporary human societies that shapes the way humans interact with the environment is social inequality. Health anthropologists have developed what they call an ecobiopolitical model for comprehending the complexities of societal–environmental interaction in the production of health and health inequality within society. This approach is informed by a synthetic and holistic exploration of the linkages that connect power and social structures, societal/environmental relations, and health and the environment. The term “ecobiopolitics” draws needed attention to the complex entwinements across conceptual domains that underlie the making of human health and disease.

In the ethnographic book Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown, for example, the authors Javier Auyero and Debora Swistun (2009) describe a highly and multiply polluted slum area in Buenos Aires. Called Villa Inflamable, this shantytown is surrounded by a petrochemical complex, leather tanneries, various other factories, open‐air garbage dumps, and the contaminated waters of the Río de la Plata, a river named for a ship explosion that occurred just offshore. The people of the community also face an indifferent state bureaucracy and duplicitous corporations controlled by elite polluters. The shanty and the surface water around it have high concentrations of arsenic (a potent, potentially lethal poison), cadmium (a carcinogen), chrome (which causes dermatitis, an ulceration of the skin), mercury (a neurotoxin, which damages all body systems), cyanide (which causes weakness, giddiness, headaches, vertigo, confusion, and heart stoppage), and phenol (which is corrosive to the eyes, the skin, and the respiratory tract, and causes burns), and blood samples drawn from some of the local inhabitants show startlingly high levels of lead. Residents suffer from diarrhea, respiratory problems, skin diseases, cancers, allergies, and anemia.

The people who live in the shanty endure what Auyero & Swistun (2009) call “environmental suffering,” a term derived from the health social science concept of social suffering, which refers to experiences of group misery caused by occupying an oppressed or marginalized social ranking in a hierarchical social system. Environmental suffering can be defined as social suffering mediated by the environment, in this case among people living and working in a polluted or toxic environment that is the product of anthropogenic activities by dominant groups in the wider society. Social inequality commonly produces environmental inequality, environmental suffering, and health inequality.

Being in such an environment, people’s lived experience can be highly stressful because of the direct effects of the illnesses of family members, the constant threat of such illnesses to household economic viability, and the persistent uncertainty about what is happening. A heavily polluted environment is a stressful environment, and the burden of living there is twofold: 1) direct health effects of pollutants on the body; and 2) the stress of being in a constant state of threat.

With multiple toxins in the land, air, and water, the people of Villa Inflamable are at constant risk of the perils of ecocrises interaction (e.g., interaction between hydrocarbons in the polluted air and runoff of tannery chemicals in the polluted water). Toxicological interactions among environmental pollutants that increase adverse health effects have been described (Krishnan & Brodeur 1994). Such interactions of two or more chemical contaminants may occur simultaneously or sequentially (involving interaction among toxins stored over time in body tissues). Other adverse ecocrises of diverse kinds also threaten human health and well‐being, as detailed in subsequent chapters.