Why I Chose Planetary Health as a “Frame”
As a physician and health sciences professor at UCLA (now retired and emeritus), when I was looking at framing environmental and health issues I found that there were two broad perspectives that interested me, Planetary Health and One Health.
Planetary Health and One Health overlap in their areas of study and expertise. One Health is particularly concerned with the interaction of humans and animals. It is very popular with veterinarians and at the World Health Organization, in part because of the interactions between animals and humans in agrarian economies globally. Planetary Health is concerned with how human health is impacted by environmental conditions. In practice this means air and water pollution, soil and fresh water misuse and degradation, the direct and indirect effects of climate change. I chose to center this website on planetary health. As I have on the home page, planetary health has been defined as “protecting nature to protect ourselves.”
We are, of course, not outside of nature!
Planetary Health does not necessarily mean the health of planetary systems, or life on Earth writ large, or even necessarily protecting specific species, although it does in many contexts. Clearly to practice planetary health requires not only knowledge of the direct threats to our health we are causing, but also the proper functioning of the biosphere we have and need to maintain. One example of many we can all too easily come up with is that if we lose a large group of pollinators, say bees, our food supply will be in dire straits. We may love bees as bees, and I do, but critically we need them for us to be able to feed ourselves.
Come for the beauty, the complexity, the joy of being in nature, but stay for the fact that we are nature and we are killing ourselves and all of those near and dear to us.
I think this perspective is most salient for me. I don’t worry about saving life per se. In fact, life on the planet is quite resilient and has survived incredibly devastating mass extinctions. The problem is that we might not be a species that survives.
The Earth, and life on Earth, is quite patient. A meteor got rid of the dinosaurs (except those that evolved into birds before the meteor hit), an incredibly successful group that thrived for about 180 million years. I do not find nature to be sentimental or attached to any particular biosphere or group of life forms. Life took a few million years to regroup after the meteor, evolution waved its magic wand, and here we are rather than triceratops. Well, we don’t have a few million years.
Lesser disruptions, like ice ages (as opposed to say, snowball Earth), or climate change from volcanism or changes in the solar cycle, can take centuries to millennia to adapt to. When our ancestors adapted to ice ages or warming periods, the populations were small and mobile and had the time and resources to make changes, to move and learn to hunt and gather new animals and plants, time and resources that we don’t have now.
So like the late, great comedian George Carlin said, I don’t consider myself to be working to save the planet per se. After all, the planet and life thereon can be better off without us, but I am hoping that together we can save a viable, thriving, just life for 8 billion people, and that we won’t be, in George Carlin’s words, “shaken off like fleas” due to our own greed and short-sightedness. Something worth working for.