Global warming and the political ecology of health: Emerging crises and systemic solutions

摘要

About the time of the Kyoto agreement (1997), a friend who is a Presbyterian minister invited me to present on global warming to a study group in her congregation. I asked pairs of them to roleplay the impact of global warming in various communities - low-income seniors in a New York City high rise during a heat wave, farmers in a flooded village in Bangladesh, and so on. It was powerful stuff, particularly as the class came to realise that they were responsible for producing a lot more greenhouse gases than the vulnerable persons they were portraying. 'There's a book in this', I thought at the time. I am grateful to Baer and Singer for having written that book, framing climate change as an issue of social justice, its impact marked by changes in health status among the poor. This framing of the climate issue will be persuasive to a segment of readers that may have been resistant to the usual framing in apocalyptic, doomsday language or images of polar bears and pandas on the way to extinction.