Interconnection within Nature

This Working Group focuses on the planetary health pillar of The Anthropocene and Health.

The group is currently working to expand the following initial statement, which summarises the pillar and its relationship with AMR, into a longer policy brief.

This Working Group is open to new members – please email CLIMAR.Network@exeter.ac.uk to join.

 

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Western, Judaeo-Christian traditions depict humans as having dominion over nature and thereby being apart from nature, whereas other (non-Western) traditions, including aboriginal or First Nations, often locate humans as an intrinsic part of nature. Human interaction with nature, which depicts humans as a part of nature, is a central perspective of the Planetary Health Framework. This eco-centric framework emphasises the need for humans to understand our role in nature as individuals and as a species, and was pre-dated by the work of the nineteenth-century British and American Conservationist and Preservationist Movements; e.g. the proto-environmentalism in the work of George Perkins Marsh – Man and Nature (1864) [1] – who argued that human actions were degrading the environment a century before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) [2] the late nineteenth-century development of ecology as a scientific field that investigated the interconnectedness of species and environments; and the ethical roots of Aldo Leopold’s ‘Land Ethic’ (1949) [3] depicting humans as part of a broader biotic community who should preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the ecosystem. These eco-centric framings are in sharp contrast to the widely adopted anthropocentric logic of the United Nations Brundtland Commission’s 1987 definition of sustainability, which is more interested in the sustainability of the environment for the benefit of future human generations, than in the sustainability of the planet for the benefit of all life, as well as for the planet itself. The Planetary Health Framework conceptualises ‘interconnection’ as an indicator for ‘mutualism, reciprocity, and symbiosis’ [4]. These interconnections can also be understood via the concept of adaptations. All living things and the planet are dynamically adapting to one another physically, socially, and evolutionarily. Thus, the genetic adaptations exhibited by microbes to antimicrobials for their survival are akin to the social adaptations humans must adopt for their survival to planetary climate change, which itself may be considered the planet’s adaptation to human activities. Hence, all forms of life on the planet, as well as the planet itself, are in a complex dance of adaptations to one another for survival. Thus, the concepts of adaptation and interconnection facilitate a framework that not only provides an understanding of the relationship between humans, the planet, and all life but can also help to identify the complex relationships between AMR and climate change.

References:

[1] Perkins Marsh, G. [1864] 2003. Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics, University of Washington Press.

[2] Carson, R. Silent Spring 2000 [1964] Penguin Classics

[3] Leopold, A. 1949. ‘Land Ethic’, in A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford University Press, New York.

[4] Guzman et al. 2021. The Planetary Health Education Framework. Planetary Health Alliance, 5, e253-5.