ABSTRACT
Human health exists at the interface of environment and society. Decades of work by researchers, practitioners and policy-makers has shown human health to be shaped by a myriad of factors, including the biophysical environment, climate, political economy, gender, resource access, immune systems, social networks, culture, and infrastructure. Research has concentrated upon infectious and non-infectious disease patterns to examine exposure and vulnerabilities within diverse contexts. Other studies have analyzed the ways that environmental and ecological factors contribute to the spread of disease, reduce quality of life and well-being, and shape the possibilities for healthy decision-making. The growth of the environmental justice movement in the United States, and its subsequent expansion around the world, is a reminder of inequitable exposure to carcinogens and other pollutants that are a product, at least in part, of political and economic systems. The environmental justice concept has broadened since its origins by addressing how disproportionate access to social and environmental amenities, such as green space and recreational opportunities, contribute to human health. A major theme of these research studies and social movements is that human health is increasingly understood as being shaped by social and ecological systems that intersect across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Yet while there is continued, and emerging, interest within the natural and social sciences on the social and ecological dimensions of human disease and health, there have been few studies that address them in an integrated manner. The central objective of this volume is to bring together contributions from the natural and social sciences to examine the social and ecological dimensions of human health. Ecologies and Politics of Health is intended to make substantive contributions by addressing three key themes: the ecological dimensions of health and vulnerability, the socio-political dimensions of human health, and the intersections between the ecological and social dimensions of health. This volume combines theoretical, methodological, and heuristic contributions from various disciplines to provide a fuller understanding of the multiple and varied dimensions of human health. Investigating the nexus of the ecologies and politics of health necessarily involves moving beyond critique in order to establish a new and integrated realm of theory and practice that is greater than the sum of its parts. Specifically, Ecologies and Politics of Health works to demonstrate what this hybrid approach offers to research and policy beyond simply socializing the ecological or ecologizing the social. That is, to call for integrating the social and natural sciences into a multidisciplinary (or even interdisciplinary) approach is neither new nor helpful. Rather, what is needed is an approach to health that leverages these fields not merely to supplement each other but to fuse them together in ways that are unanticipated, synergistic, and transformative.
