Professor James McCann BU Today Special Report, “Battling Ebola: Is Human Acitivity to Blame?”
Human ecology may hold key to longer-term solution says CAS professor.
For historical context on the virus and the role that deforestation and human activity may have played in the current outbreak, BU Today spoke with James C. McCann, a scholar on the history of the food, ecology, and agriculture of Africa. He is a faculty fellow for the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, associate director of the African Studies Center, chair of archaeology, and a professor of history. He is also a Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow. His numerous books include Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa, 1800–1900; Stirring the Pot: The Tastes and Textures of African Cookery; and Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500–2000, which won the 2006 George Perkins Marsh Prize as the best book on environmental history from the American Society for Environmental History.