A New Kind of Science
In April, I attended the Inaugural Planetary Health / Geohealth Annual Meeting, held at Harvard Medical School. I wanted to be there because, among other reasons, I wanted to be present at the christening of a new kind of science (with apologies to Stephen Wolfram) — the science of planetary health.
I write “christening” and not “birth” because the concept of planetary health has been brewing for a few years now. If I were going to point to a birth event, it would be the report of The Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission on planetary health, published 18 months ago. In that report, the Commission wrote:
Put simply, planetary health is the health of human civilisation and the state of the natural systems on which it depends.
When I explain the concept of planetary health to people, I use this example: If access to electricity improves human health (it does), it doesn’t necessarily follow that any form of electricity generation — including, say, coal-fired power plants — would be beneficial on net for overall human health when considering nth-order effects (it wouldn’t). We have reached the point at which we have to think about the health of humanity and the health of natural systems simultaneously.
Our future is inextricably linked to the natural systems upon which we rely, and the future of those natural systems inextricably linked to the decisions we make.
One of the first speakers at the conference was Howard Frumkin, former dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Washington. I had the chance to sit down with Howie briefly before his talk and chat a bit about planetary health and his take on it. “I feel,” I told him, “like it’s an atomic physics conference in 1920 and I’ve slipped in as an observer.” Howie deadpanned, “Well, then, you should prepared to be Bohr-ed.” I do love science humor.
Howie’s talk was titled “What is planetary health and why now?” It’s a brief, fast-paced, highly watchable introduction to the underlying concepts of planetary health:
In his talk, Howie refers to the work of Will Steffen, researcher at Stockholm University. In 2015, Steffen and his colleagues published a paper in The Anthropocene Review titled “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration”. In the paper, the authors updated a set of now-iconic graphs of socio-economic and Earth system trends, originally published in 2004, to include data through 2010. I wish everyone could see and understand these two graphs. First, the socio-economic trends:
Let’s call this the “good news” graph. Humanity is multiplying, becoming wealthier (and less impoverished), traveling and communicating more, investing more and in more places… it’s generally positive. Steffen and his colleagues could well have added another good news graph on human health, since so many indicators of health have improved so dramatically over the last century.
Now for the Earth system trends:
This is the “bad news” graph. All of our progress is coming at a cost. We’re flooding the atmosphere with pollutants, including greenhouse gases, which is raising the global surface temperature. We’re acidifying the oceans and depleting their fish stocks. We’re causing the greatest extinction event in history.
The explanation for this is simple, and it refers back to Barry Commoner’s “four laws of ecology”, also referenced in Howie’s talk. They are:
- Everything is connected to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.
- Everything must go somewhere. There is no “waste” in nature and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown.
- Nature knows best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, says Commoner, “likely to be detrimental to that system”
- There is no such thing as a free lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms.
(The more complex, academically rigorous version of this argument refers back to the concept of ecosystem services, but that’s a subject for another article.)
In other words, the majority of improvements we have made to the human condition over the last century have come at the expense of Earth’s natural systems. This is understandable; we didn’t fully understand what we were doing at the time. But we do now. And what this understanding tells us is that human health and the health of natural systems are inextricably linked. We are rapidly approaching — and have possibly surpassed, in some cases — critical thresholds past which natural systems can no longer simply absorb the damage we inflict upon them without consequence. If we continue to deplete natural systems to the point at which they fail us, we won’t be able to sustain the tremendous gains we have made in improving the lot of humanity.
