by Wendy Johnson
North Atlantic Books
7/15/2025, paperback
SKU: 9798889842736
For fans of Braiding Sweetgrass, The Future We Choose, and The Blue Zones, a book about the effect our relationship to nature has on our well-being and health.
Our modern way of living is incompatible with our survival. Most of us intuitively know this truth, but almost everything in our society encourages us to ignore it. Dr. Wendy Johnson confronts this undeniable fact and breaks down how we think and act every day in ways that undermine our individual and collective well-being.
The antidotes to many of the causal factors of poor health--loneliness, industrial diets, systemic inequality, fear of death, profit-based healthcare--are relational, with each other and with the living earth. Through evidence from public health, sociology, anthropology, human ecology, and her experience as a family physician, Dr. Wendy Johnson will show you how:
- We must incorporate an "ecosystem" perspective into modern medicine
- What you ingest and where you live can reinforce or upset your body's delicate balance
- Eliminating one organism in an ecosystem can affect all the others
- Histories of trauma can be passed down for generations
- Rekindling our relationships to non-human life is essential to our well-being
- Being closer to death can release some of its power over us
- Actions of communities will be stronger and more lasting than any individual efforts
You will leave with a clear vision of what a new society might look like, methods to accomplish this transformation, and concrete examples of where it is being done successfully.
Reviews:
"Kinship Medicine is a wondrous journey through the systems of life, health, healing, and death from which we have become estranged, even in times when we think we know them all too well. As we build the communities we'll need to survive the climate crisis, it's good to know we'll be able to look to our side and see Wendy Johnson in the trenches, digging with us, and healing us when we blister." -- Raj Patel, coauthor of Inflamed
"If there's a word for the sickness that plagues our country, it's hyperindividualism--and happily, as this fine book makes clear, there's a cure: Connection. Relationship. Communion. Read this book--optimally in the company of others!" -- Bill McKibben, author of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon
"There could not be a more urgent need for Kinship Medicine. The book's central message--that collective human wellness is inextricably linked to the health of the fellow beings with whom we share the planet--is an important contribution to contemporary discourse on topics ranging from climate change to economic inequality. Dr. Johnson argues that we are inherently part of the ecosystems we inhabit, and that we cannot be healthy when those ecosystems are sick and suffering. To the extent that we damage our biome, we also harm ourselves. Wendy makes these arguments cogently, and from the unique perspective of an experienced physician, activist, and public health expert able to limn connections between our individual health and the global forces that shape it." -- Dr. Paul E. Farmer, cofounder of Partners In Health
About the Author:
Dr. Wendy Johnson is a family physician, public health professor, activist, and writer who has spent her life actively working for a world where everyone can live long lives in equitable communities. Her career includes stints scaling up HIV treatment in Mozambique, overseeing an urban public health department, and, most recently, directing a community clinic in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has a Master's in public health from Johns Hopkins and holds faculty appointments at the University of Washington and the University of New Mexico. Dr. Johnson has been a vocal activist on many progressive issues both locally and globally and is a two-time TEDx speaker.