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Home Ecophagus by Warren M. Hern is a wide-ranging look at the major problems for the survival of not just the human species, but all other species on¿ Earth due to human activities over the past tens of thousands years. The title of the book indicates Hern's new name for the human species: "The man who devours the ecosystem." Over the course of its evolution, Hern observes, humans have evolved cultures and adaptations that have now become malignant and that the human species, at the global level, has all the major characteristics of a malignant neoplasm - converting all plant, animal, organic, and inorganic material into human biomass or its adaptive adjuncts and support systems. Hern contends that this process is incompatible with continued survival of the human species and most other species on the planet, offering a diagnosis and prognosis of the current environmental impasse.
List of contents
PART ONEOverview - what's the problem?
- "Save that. We might need it someday"
- Public health and politics in West Africa
- Medical school and the Amazon: "You are very keen in your diagnosis"
- Brazil, Chile, and abortion
- Public health; research; and revelation
- A new calling
- Threat to the Holy Cross Wilderness
- Family planning, Amazon style
- "You may not ask that question"
- "As you know, the human population has just doubled for the first time"
PART TWO
Manifestations of malignancy
- What the fractal is this?
- Malignant expansion and retroactive heterotrophicity in modern urbanizations
- Effects of malignant human activity on small, local ecosystems
- Human contact and island ecosystems
- Effects of human activities on regional ecosystems
- Effects of human activity on continental ecosystems
- The oceans
- Toxic trash, oncometabolites, and cow farts
- Effects of human activity on biodiversity
- Effects of human activity on the global ecosystem
PART THREE
Analysis and policy choices
- Humans as cancer: Metaphor, model, analogy, hypothesis, or diagnosis?
- Human activities and malignant entropy
- Human culture and the ecophagic imperative
- "What will be the limiting factor for the human population?"
- "We have met the enemy, and he is us"
- Epilogue: "Great Bringer of Death to Paradise"
About the author
Warren M. Hern, MD, is a practicing physician in Boulder, Colorado, where he is also on the anthropology faculty at the University of Colorado. He holds a Master of Public Health degree and a PhD in epidemiology. His clinical and epidemiologic research has been published widely in scientific and medical journals, including
BioScience and
Population Studies. His public advocacy of reproductive rights has appeared in
The New York Times, Washington Post, CBS'
60 Minutes, and other prominent venues. He has conducted decades of research in fertility and population trends based in the Peruvian Amazon.
Summary
Homo Ecophagus brings population back to the fore in the analysis of how the human world has been brought to a point where human extinction is foreseeable. Identifying a "malignant ecopathological process," Warren Hern documents a wide array of human systems activities that are subject to break down if current trends continue.
