ABSTRACT
Sickle cell gene is the product of changing ecologies, arising either in the period of the Green Sahara, which was fertile before its subsequent extensive desertification, or with the removal of the forest canopy in favour of slash-and-burn agriculture in West Africa. Ecology and topography often outlast a single human generation, and so may wrongly be conceived of as natural and fixed, but nonetheless are subject to change, with or without human mediation. The climate, the ecology, the human red blood cell, the mosquito, and the protozoan parasite do not stay the same, but alter in ongoing and complex ways. The conflict between the utopia of the past and the utopia of the future must not occupy any longer. The realities of climate change and mass migration, changes that highlight the changing nature of human bodies and of the Earth itself, suggest that sickle cell as an issue will at last become less subaltern and more real in the future.
