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 take 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 revitalize 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. Michael lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Review :
"Journalist Dulaney debuts with an alarming examination of the accelerating spillover of infectious diseases from animals to humans. Surveying outbreaks across the globe, he explains that the rise of zoonotic diseases is driven not by isolated biological events but by the interconnected forces of climate change, habitat destruction, factory farming, globalization, and inequality ... This lucid and comprehensive investigation makes for a bracing warning."
--Publishers Weekly
"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."
--Sophie Black, The Guardian
"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."
--Sarah Krasnostein, multi-award-winning author
"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."
--Alecia Simmonds, author of Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law, winner of the 2024 Australian History Prize in the NSW Premier's History Awards
"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."
--Sheree Joseph, author of Juicy: How to Live a Life in the Wreckage of Expectations
"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."
--Tom Mustill, author of How to Speak Whale: The Power and Wonder of Listening to Animals
