Editors: Colin D Butler and Kerryn Higgs

Colin David Butler has been concerned about what is now called “global health” since 1985, when, prior to his last year at medical school, he spent a year studying and working in what was then still generally called the “Third World”.

 

His concerns about climate change date to 1989, when, while working a family doctor in Tasmania, Australia, he read the Lancet editorial “Health in the Greenhouse”. In the same year he co-founded BODHI Australia, one of the world’s first Buddhist inspired NGOs. BODHI still exists, struggling, with partners in India, to improve health and human rights.

 

In 1996, encouraged by the late Professor AJ (Tony) McMichael, Butler undertook further studies in public health, enabling him to collaborate closely with McMichael from 2002 until his death in 2014, including in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Butler was senior editor for McMichael's festschrift, a book called "Health of People, Places and Planet: Reflections Based on Tony McMichael’s Four Decades of Contribution to Epidemiological Understanding". This book is available, for free, at http://press.anu.edu.au/titles/health-of-people-places-and-planet/. Since 2018 Colin has been an Honorary Professor at the National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health at the Australian National University.

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In 2009 he was named “one of a hundred doctors for the planet”, by the French Environmental Health Association, and in 2018 he received the Tony McMichael public health ecology and environment award, from the Public Health Association of Australia. 

 

In 2014 Colin became the first Australian IPCC contributor to be arrested for climate disobedience.