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Biodiversity is a cornerstone of human health and well-being. However, while evidence of the contributions of nature to human health is rapidly building, understanding of how biodiversity relates to human health remains limited in important respects. In particular, we need a better grasp on the range of pathways through which biodiversity can influence human health, including those that run through psychological and social processes as well as through biochemical and biophysical processes. Building on evidence from across the natural, social and health sciences, we present a conceptual framework organising the pathways linking biodiversity to human health. Four domains of pathways—both beneficial as well as harmful—link biodiversity with human health: (i) reducing harm (e.g. provision of medicines, decreasing exposure to air and noise pollution); (ii) restoring capacities (e.g. attention restoration and stress reduction); (iii) building capacities (e.g. promoting physical activity, transcendental experiences), and (iv) causing harm (e.g. dangerous wildlife, zoonotic diseases or allergens). We discuss how to test components of the biodiversity-health framework with analytical approaches and existing datasets. In a world with accelerating declines in biodiversity, profound land-use change, and an increase in non-communicable and zoonotic diseases globally, greater understanding of these pathways can reinforce biodiversity conservation as a strategy for the promotion of health for both people and nature. We conclude by identifying research avenues and recommendations for policy and practice to foster biodiversity-focused public health actions.

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Since its rise in the mid-nineteenth century, crime fiction has been highly responsive to developments in science and technology, including forensics, photography, telecommunications and computing. The quintessential detective figure has, to paraphrase Stephen Knight, been invested with authority to wield new technologies and new ways of knowing the social order, in order to contain deviancy and assuage social anxiety. In the long history of crime fiction, threats to the social order have necessarily changed, and so too have the powers and responsibilities of detectives. Sensitive to the shifting nature of capitalism and the state system, writers of detective fiction have also responded to new forms of political and social organisation, and to demands for representation emerging in postcolonial and post-industrial contexts. Now, in an era of widescale environmental crisis, the detective's reassuring and restorative functions must, once again, be reconsidered. This special edition of Green Letters offers ecocritical readings of crime narratives, and also reflections on ecocritical theory and environmental philosophy informed by detective fiction. The authors take up Patrick Murphy's suggestion that ecocritics should study 'nature-oriented mystery novels. .. in order to understand the degree to which environmental consciousness and nature awareness has permeated popular and commercial fiction' (Murphy 2009, p. 119). However, they also demonstrate that crime fiction is not only a benchmark of how effectively a specialist knowledge has been popularised. Crime fiction is a form of specialist knowledge in its own right, with its own distinct contributions to make to cultural understandings of human-nature relations and environmental crisis. Within ecocriticism, the figure of the detective is richly suggestive. Whether as a singular or collective agency, the detective has been constructed as a figure capable of perceiving systematicity and apprehending totality. Emerging from the crowded conditions of the nineteenth century metropolis, canonical figures like Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes perform an epistemological function: transforming the chaotic multiplicity of the city into a series of links in a chain, leading back to a verifiable 'truth'. But in the face of their overwhelming responsibilities, the detective figure has often become distributed, collective, cyborg, even liquid. In postmodern crime narratives, such as the Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) franchise, the detective function is fragmented into a team of specialist investigators equipped with military grade, nascent and often fictional technologies, capable of penetrating the mysteries of the most obtuse crime scenes. The 'detective', now a composite figure, has access to and is implicated in a globalised network of surveillance, data gathering and analysis. Literary detectives, of course, have not only guarded against social deviance, but have held multiple positions and narrative functions. We have the detective as villain; as accomplice; as disrupti...

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