Global Health Colloquium: From Global Health to Planetary Health: Lessons from Nicaragua's Sugarcane Zone

This talk will focus on fieldwork from Nicaragua to discuss medical anthropology's contribution to the emerging interdisciplinary field of planetary health. One of the consequences of climate change is a new form of disease emergence, in which ostensibly noncommunicable diseases become epidemics as ecological damage accretes in specific landscapes. Linking Alex's work on an epidemic of chronic kidney disease to previous research on (communicable) mosquito-borne disease in Nicaragua, he suggests that attention to the landscape, its structures, and its temporal and labor dimensions, can help us understand how collective action can respond to conjoined environmental and health crisis.