Description
In an age characterized by a rapidly changing environment, in which emerging and reemerging diseases continue to confront us, how can we predict the next major threats to human health? Are we, in fact, aiding the spread of disease by destroying the barriers that keep us from it? In his series of seven e-seminars, Medical Ecology: Environmental Disturbance and Disease, Columbia professor of public health and microbiology Dickson Despommier illuminates the connections between the disruption of ecosystems and eruptions of human disease. In this second of the seven parts, The Normal Environment: The Way Things Are Now, Despommier describes the producer-consumer interactions that drive ecosystems, the types and characteristics of ecoregions of the world, and the often undervalued "free" services (and attempts to assign them a value) that ecosystems provide for us.

Minimal prior knowledge of science is required for this course, including basic concepts of atoms, molecules, and cells.