Climate Change Briefing Podcast Hosted By Nick Breeze - ClimateGenn
Aug 26, 2026 · 21 min · 7 segments
In this Climate Genn episode, I speak with author Michael Dulaney about his new book, *Sentinels: When Diseases Spread Between Animals and Humans*. Michael takes us on a journey to meet the animals…
Michael DulaneyGuest
Nick BreezeHost
Just to kick off, can you tell us what you mean in the title of the book by sentinels, especially in the context of disease spillover from animals to humans?
In scientific terms, a sentinel is an animal species that... signifies some environmental hazard or some sort of danger in some way.
People look to that animal for signals that there's something gone wrong in the environment.
But as I learned more about this topic and talked to scientists and read deeper into it, I came to see sentinels for all kinds of hazards we're facing in the climate crisis and for social and political reasons.
And so the book and the journalistic work, I think, touched on the classical definition of sentinels and also some of those more, I suppose, metaphorical ones or the ones that I personally came to consider sentinels.
Just to kick off, can you tell us what you mean in the title of the book by sentinels, especially in the context of disease spillover from animals to humans?
In scientific terms, a sentinel is an animal species that... signifies some environmental hazard or some sort of danger in some way.
People look to that animal for signals that there's something gone wrong in the environment.
But as I learned more about this topic and talked to scientists and read deeper into it, I came to see sentinels for all kinds of hazards we're facing in the climate crisis and for social and political reasons.
And so the book and the journalistic work, I think, touched on the classical definition of sentinels and also some of those more, I suppose, metaphorical ones or the ones that I personally came to consider sentinels.
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