Abstract: During the twentieth century, disease ecology emerged as a distinct disciplinary network within infectious diseases research. The key figures were Theobald Smith, F. Macfarlane Burnet, Rene Dubos, and Frank Fenner. They all drew on Darwinian evolutionism to fashion an integrative (but rarely holistic) understanding of disease processes, distinguishing themselves from reductionist "chemists" and mere "microbe hunters." They sought a more complex, biologically informed epidemiology. Their emphasis on competition and mutualism in the animated environment differed from the physical determinism that prevailed in much medical geography and environmental health research. Disease ecology derived in part from studies of the interaction of organisms - micro and macro - in tropical medicine, veterinary pathology, and immunology. It developed in postcolonial settler societies. Once a minority interest, disease ecology has attracted more attention since the 1980s for its explanations of disease emergence, antibiotic resistance, bioterrorism, and the health impacts of climate change.

Abstract: The concept of scale politics offers historians a useful framework for analyzing the connections between environment and health. This essay examines the public health campaign around emerging diseases during the 1990s, particularly the ways in which different actors employed scale in geographic and political representations; how they configured cause, consequence, and intervention at different scales; and the moments at which they shifted between different scales in the presentation of their arguments. Biomedical scientists, the mass media, and public health and national security experts contributed to this campaign, exploiting Americans' ambivalence about globalization and the role of modernity in the production of new risks, framing them in terms that made particular interventions appear necessary, logical, or practical.

Abstract: In the postwar period, modernist frameworks of the human body, which described the body as both cosmopolitan and separated from its environment, competed with ecological frameworks that constructed the body as inherently porous and tightly linked to the surrounding world The history of pesticide-related illness among farmworkers, and the gradual recognition that pesticides posed a new kind of public health problem, illustrates how these competing understandings were adopted, mobilized, and applied by different groups, as well as how politics shaped the emergence of new medical facts New forms of illness generated new knowledge about the modern landscape and made visible material links between bodies and their environments

Abstract: This essay describes the development of information technology and culture in the environmental field since the 1980s and how this has led to new understandings of risk communication. The essay also describes how environmental information systems operate as instruments of power, in the way they configure and provide access to knowledge, in the way they manage uncertainty, and in the way they build in and project particular modes of subjectivity. The goal is to provide a brief yet compelling glimpse into the "informating of environmentalism."

Abstract: Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. The history of British attempts to understand and control African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in cattle), following the intense human epidemics that broke out between 1895 and 1910, reveals hitherto ignored scientific research in the fields of ecology, epidemiology, and tropical medicine that helped produce a new understanding of the "ecology of disease." Often generated within a transnational and interdisciplinary context, this knowledge increasingly assumed that vector-borne diseases in tropical environments were highly complex, dynamic, and interrelated phenomena. Thus while many people continued to hope that trypanosomiasis could be eradicated, research results made this prospect seem unlikely, if not impossible.

Abstract: This paper locates the EPA national headquarters within the racialized local geography of southwest Washington, D.C. By focusing on the formation of a scientist union and the union's struggle to make visible an episode of chemical exposure in its own offices, the paper connects the work of racialized privilege with the difficulty of proving chemical exposures in the 1980s.

Abstract: Before World War I, British and American public health officials correlated tuberculosis in dairy cattle with severe infections in milk-drinking children. They traced bacteria in municipal milk supplies, mapped the locations of infected animals, and sought regulatory power to destroy them. Consumers, milk producers, municipal officials, veterinarians, and physicians all influenced the shape of antituberculosis regulations. Many condemned pasteurization as too costly and as masking tubercular contamination and poor sanitation. They saw milk-borne tuberculosis as an environmental as well as a bacteriological problem. Similar to other zoonotic diseases such as BSE, bovine tuberculosis blurred the boundaries between urban and rural, production and consumption, and human and animal bodies.

Abstract: This essay uses oral histories of dust disease in twentieth-century Scotland to illustrate the ways in which such history can illuminate how the working environment and work cultures affect workers' bodies and how workers come to terms with the ill-health caused by their employment. It emphasizes the agency of the interpreter but argues further that oral histories of dust disease in twentieth-century Scotland are simultaneously influenced by, and evidence for, material conditions. The essay explores the notion that the bodies, not just the voices of interviewees, are material testament to health-corroding work practices, cultures, and habitat. The focus is the problems caused by the inhalation of coal and asbestos dust.

Abstract: In 1962, after high levels of the isotope Iodine-131 were detected in Utah milk supplies, Dr. Harold Knapp, a mathematician working for the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine, developed a new model for estimating, first, the relation between a single deposition of radioactive fallout on pasturage and the levels of Iodine-131 in fresh milk and, second, the total dose to human thyroids resulting from daily intake of the contaminated milk. The implications of Knapp's findings were enormous. They suggested that short-living radioiodine, rather than long-living nuclides such as radiostrontium, posed the greatest hazard from nuclear test fallout and that children raised in Nevada and Utah during the 1950s had been exposed to internal radiation doses far in excess of recommended guidelines. This paper explores the explicit historical revisionism of Knapp's study, his refusal, contra normal AEC practices of knowledge production and spatial representation, to distance himself from the people and places downwin...

Abstract: An exercise in "historical ontology," this paper charts the contrasting ways fluoridated water and its effects crystallized as objects of knowledge and concern in three quite different realms over the mid twentieth century. Among U.S. health officials and experts, fluoridated water emerged and stabilized as a public health goal, preventing tooth decay. Indian doctors and scientists defined it as a public health problem, causing "skeletal fluorosis." Fluoridated water also acquired an intense presence among laypeople in the United States, especially those voting in local referenda on fluoridation. More often than not rejecting it, suspecting bias and myopia in profluoridation expertise, they cobbled together a lay ontology that proved predictive of the varied and changing flows of fluoridated water itself. The paper concludes by suggesting a principle of environmental symmetry as an aid to this kind of comparative ontology.

Abstract: Many people believe that Rhodesia, struggling to maintain minority rule in Africa, used chemical and biological weapons against African guerilla armies in the liberation war. Clothes and food were routinely poisoned, and Rhodesian agents, perhaps in concert with global forces of reaction, caused the largest single outbreak of anthrax in modern times. Oral interviews with traditional healers and Rhodesians' confessional memoirs of the war suggest that deaths by poisoning or disease were not so straightforward, that guerillas and healers and doctors struggled to understand not only what caused death but also what kind of death a poisoned uniform or poisoned boot was.

Abstract: This article examines the transnational networking practices of Teresa Leal, an environmental justice activist living and working on the U.S.-Mexico border. It shows, through the method of engaged ethnography, how she and other community activists respond to the effects of global economic restructuring policies such as NAFTA. Grounded in an ecological epistemology, Leal blends "local" and "scientific" knowledges about the deteriorating health, economic, and environmental conditions at the border and constructs a "global sense of place" that brings into focus the everyday realities of neoliberal globalization. The article documents a daylong "toxic tour" of the Ambos Nogales region and highlights the multiple border crossings (epistemic, geographic, political, cultural) undertaken by Leal, other activists, and the author, a visitor to the region, to narrate a history of community health and environmental action in a transnational context.

Abstract: Across the western landscape of the United States, health was a natural resource, mined and sold by late-nineteenth and twentieth-century town boosters and physicians to those afflicted with chronic pulmonary illnesses such as tuberculosis and asthma. Regional economies of health were built upon climate and sunshine. After the Second World War, children, rather than nature, increasingly became a vital resource upon which institutions such as Denver's Jewish National Home for Asthmatic Children expanded the economic networks through which capital and drugs flowed. Despite these changes, the material traces of past landscapes lingered and resurfaced in the reconfigured places where hope dwelled.

Abstract: A neglected aspect of the history of germ theories is its use in the purification of sewage. In the 1890s, progressive reformers rapidly developed bacteriological methods of wastewater treatment. A comparison of the United Kingdom's Manchester and the United States' Chicago shows, however, that science and technology were mediated by political culture and institutions. In Manchester, a politics of deference and strong extralocal government gave the authority of scientific expertise a decisive role in policy formation. In Chicago, devolution of power to the ward bosses meant a quarter-century of defiance against the national authority and its effort to get the city to install a modern sanitation system.

Abstract: Correspondence surrounding the death from consumption of a New England woman on the Santa Fe Trail in 1857 demonstrates how gender roles and economic networks influenced health travel and the search for healthy places in the nineteenth-century United States. Women did travel seeking healing or relief from sickness-sometimes, as here, in arduous, overland trips-but in ways subtly different from male health seekers: family attachments, as well as their own health concerns, impelled and justified women in their decisions to take journeys. Yet for women as for men, decisions about health travel were also bound up with the economic considerations that shaped their families' lives.

Abstract: W HILE THOUSANDS of government delegates, corporate leaders, and NGO representatives made final travel plans in August 2002 for the United Nations' World Summit on Sustainable Development, in Johannesburg, South Africa, a cocktail unlike any to be served at the diplomatic dinners there was mixing above the southern Indian Ocean. One week before the Rio+10 conference the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released findings of the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX), a study begun seven years earlier by a team of 200 European, Indian, and U.S. scientists. Originally funded to carry questions about global climate change from