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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 WALKLEY AWARD
Humans have long observed animals for advanced warnings of danger. What can they tell us about the growing threat of contagion in the age of climate change?
Diseases today reveal our close ties to animals. Viruses leap from bats to camels to humans. Cats catch the flu, and tourists pass tuberculosis to elephants. In recent years, however, something has changed. Exploitation of the environment is causing more diseases to jump species than ever before - a threat to life that rivals climate change. The science is clear: the cause of this great acceleration is us.
In
Sentinels, Michael Dulaney takes readers from southern China to the Andes, from the Arctic to Australia, to tell the gripping stories of the people and animals at the forefront of this enormous change. Dulaney joins ecologists tracking flying foxes through Australia's eastern forests, and frog hunters netting endangered species on Indonesian mountains. Along the way, we meet lemmings that resist global warming, coastal seals with bird flu, and genetically engineered disease-proof pigs.
Combining vivid field reporting with natural history, these stories move beyond the fear of contagion to explore the beauty and resilience of life, and the human capacity to regenerate as much as to destroy. Urgent, moving, and deeply informed,
Sentinels is an essential reckoning with our intimate connection to nature, and a call to build a fairer world for all.
'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
'Journalist Dulaney debuts with an alarming examination of the accelerating spillover of infectious diseases from animals to humans ... This lucid and comprehensive investigation makes for a bracing warning.'
-Publishers Weekly
'Densely researched and packed with information both delightful and disturbing,
Sentinels isn't a grim tombstone-in-waiting outlining our failures past the point of no return. While it doesn't shy away from the real dangers present in our current economic, agricultural, environmental, carceral and housing systems and practices, it shines a light on the hidden pockets of conservation, research, and resistance battling extinction ... Compelling, concerning and ultimately hopeful,
Sentinels may be hard to look at sometimes, but we as a species no longer have the luxury of ignoring what it has to tell us.'
-Tamuz Ellazam, Readings
