Foreword, Changing Planet, Changing Health : How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do About It
in Changing Planet, Changing Health : How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do About It
By Paul R. Epstein, Dan Ferber
This is a book about complexity—the complexity of humanity’s pre dicament at the start of the twentyfirst century. The predicament is easy to state, hard to understand, and perhaps hardest to solve. With nearly seven billion people on the planet producing and consuming at an unprecedented rate, humanity is deranging the world’s ecosystems and threatening the survival of our own species and millions of other species with which we share the planet. How we are doing that is a scientific detective story of the first order, told with brilliance and relish by one of the world’s great ecological detectives. What we are going to do about this remains hidden in the fog of complexity. The answers here are incomplete and may be wrong in many specifics. However, this fascinat ing book is important because it is a cry to take our survival seriously and to address it from the vantage points of science, ethics, and a moral commitment to the most vulnerable among us.