Humans have long observed animals for advanced warnings of danger. What can they tell us about the growing threat of viruses and other infectious organisms in the age of climate change?
Coronaviruses jump from bats to chimpanzees to humans. You can give your cat the flu, and pass tuberculosis to an elephant. The scientific term for this — zoonosis — is a word of the future, one that reveals how human and animal lives are inextricably linked. For scientists now warn that human destruction of the environment is responsible for the accelerating spillover of animal diseases, posing a global health threat.
In a journey that will takes readers from southern China to West Africa, from Antarctica to Australia, journalist Michael Dulaney tracks the surprising ways that people and animals are navigating our shared future — along the way meeting camels in Saudi Arabian beauty pageants, coastal seals with bird flu, and genetically engineered disease-proof pigs. In prose that is entertaining, moving, and deeply informed, Sentinels is not just about fears of contagion, but about the wonder of nature, and understanding our species’ capacity to regenerate and revitalise as much as to destroy.
About the Author :
Michael Dulaney’s writing explores humanity’s links with the rest of non-human nature in the climate crisis. He was a reporter at the ABC for more than a decade, and his environment writing has been published by The Monthly, Literary Hub, The Big Issue, and the BBC, among others. He won the Overland Fair Australia Prize, and was a 2024 Climate Futures Fellow at the State Library Victoria.
Review :
‘A timely account of the way zoonotic diseases are rapidly accelerating, with our insatiable destruction of the natural world to blame … It’s a bracing read but also a beautiful one – Dulaney explores themes of resilience and regeneration with an urgent call to re-establish our intimate connection to nature.’
‘Journalist Dulaney debuts with an alarming examination of the accelerating spillover of infectious diseases from animals to humans … This lucid and comprehensive investigation makes for a bracing warning.’
‘Sentinels is for curious readers interested in the interconnectedness of humans’ place in the world, concerned about humanity’s relationship with nature, or looking for a glimmer of hope as existential threats loom in the near future.’
‘Well worth the read … Fascinating and well written case studies of medical detective work … Sentinels is also an example of great storytelling.’
‘Dulaney has given us an elegant and urgent exploration of humanity’s interconnectedness with the natural world, which we ignore at our peril. A must-read.’
‘Compulsively readable, politically astute, and meticulously researched, Sentinels is a brilliant book about humans and animals; about viruses, vulnerability, and ecological violence in an age of climate catastrophe. It is a meditation on the great web of being and an urgent call to arms. The new environmental journalism is here, and Dulaney is its finest correspondent.’
‘Visceral, vivid, and propulsive, Michael Dulaney’s writing is impossible to put down. A staggering feat of investigative reporting, Sentinels pulses with heart while asking the urgent questions of our time. Dulaney plunges us into tiny worlds with enormous consequences, rendering a piercing portrait of the world as it is and an honest look at what lies ahead, while leaving the reader with something rarer still: hope. Armed with knowledge, perhaps we can finally face the long-overdue reckoning.’
‘Incisive, well written, and wide ranging. Dulaney wrangles the messy and complicated layers of disease emergence to illuminate the bigger stories beneath the spillovers. You’ll be leaping from page to page faster than a novel flu strain in an industrial farm.’
‘Densely researched and packed with information both delightful and disturbing, Sentinels isn’t a grim tombstone-in-waiting outlining our failures past the point of no return. While it doesn’t shy away from the real dangers present in our current economic, agricultural, environmental, carceral and housing systems and practices, it shines a light on the hidden pockets of conservation, research, and resistance battling extinction … Compelling, concerning and ultimately hopeful, Sentinels may be hard to look at sometimes, but we as a species no longer have the luxury of ignoring what it has to tell us.’
