Reifications in Disease Ecology 1: Demystifying Land Use Change in Pathogen Emergence

Disease ecology has the potential to help build a new society where the contradictions of our time are recognized and confronted in the pursuit of a more considered, and just, understanding of the interrelationships of organisms with the environment. Unfortunately, the discipline is facing a major dilemma as the advent of new technologies, access to remote data, and lack of engagement with the contexts where diseases emerge and are transmitted, has resulted in the creation of Blame Local Indigenous and Peasant Populations (BLIPP) narratives that align with hegemonic globalizing agents and processes. Here, in the first half of a two-part essay about reifications in disease ecology, thinking with dialectical materialism, we demystify BLIPP narratives around land use change in disease emergence.