Globalization, Health, and the Environment: An Integrated Perspective

Globalization, Health, and the Environment: An Integrated Perspective. Greg Guest, ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. 274 pp.

This collection boasts a remarkably cohesive set of readings on the unwieldy theme of globalization and health. Collectively, contributors cross local-global, ecological, geopolitical, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries to tackle dimensions of political economy, environment, and disease while rarely losing sight of cultural context in illuminating the complex dynamics of world systems, resource degradation, and human well-being.

The introduction offers no surprises, but it effectively describes how global market forces drive ecosystem change and deteriorating health conditions. More importantly, it cites globalization's potential to advance medical services and challenges readers to sustain a "solution-oriented" perspective about disparities (p. 17). George Armelagos and Kristin Harper update earlier work, using insights from evolutionary theory to offer a deep-time perspective on both human action and social inequality in epidemiologic shifts. Thomas Leatherman explores more recent history to describe the chain reaction from macrolevel structural violence to microlevel social violence in Peru. Prolonged global economic disparity sparked failed agrarian reform, economic insecurity, and political upheaval, yielding a multigenerational legacy of...