ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how people’s relationships with the physical aspects of their environment can encourage or discourage disease. It considers several ways to conceptualize the relationship between disease and environment, including ecological approaches to human health, landscape epidemiology, and disease cycles. Although philosophers and scholars have contemplated the impact of weather and climate on human health for generations, there has been increased interest in the topic as climate change makes it especially relevant. The influence of everyday practices on human health is well illustrated by changing living patterns influenced the range and incidence of Chagas disease in the Amazon. An ecological approach to health considers humans as biological entities within broader disease cycles. The natural and built environments can perhaps best be viewed as a continuum from mostly natural spaces such as the Amazon rainforest to highly humanized spaces such as Hong Kong, with most places falling somewhere in between.
