Journal Articles by Benjamin Crawford
Anthropocene, 2020
Pandemics have accelerated in frequency in recent decades, with COVID-19 the latest to join the l... more Pandemics have accelerated in frequency in recent decades, with COVID-19 the latest to join the list.Emerging in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, the virus has spread quickly through the world, affecting billionsof people through quarantine, and at the same time claiming more than 800,000 lives worldwide. Whileearly reflections from the academic community have tended to target the microbiology, medicine, andanimal science communities, this article articulates a viewpoint from a perspective of humaninteractions with Earth systems. We highlight the link between rising pandemics and accelerating globalhuman impacts on Earth, thereby suggesting that pandemics may be an emerging element of the“Anthropocene.” Examples from Denver, Colorado, USA, show how policy responses to the COVID-19pandemic changed human-environment interactions and created anomalous landscapes at the localscale, in relation to the quality of air and patterns of acquiring and consuming food. In recognizing thesignificance of novel infectious diseases as part of understanding human-landscape interactions in theAnthropocene, as well as the multi-scale interconnectedness between environment and health, thisviewpoint converges toward an urgent need for new paradigms for research and teaching. The program required extends well beyond the already broad interdisciplinary scholarship essential for addressing human-landscape interactions, by integrating the work of health scientists, disease specialists, immunologists, virologists, veterinarians, behavioral scientists, and health policy experts.
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Journal Articles by Benjamin Crawford