Planetary Health beyond Spaceship Earth
31 July @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
For more than ten years, concern about the impacts on human health of degradation of the earth’s life-support systems has been expressed in terms of ‘planetary health’. The current and future effects of climate change on health and well-being thus come under the rubric of planetary health. We realise now that the health of all species depends on ecosystem health, now scaled up to encompass the planet. But what ideas shaped this understanding of our dependence on the planet as a semi-closed feedback system? Many of the concepts of planetary health – including ‘life-support systems’, ‘safe operating systems,’ and even ‘planetary boundaries’ – derive from 1960s systems theories and cybernetics, as developed in the NASA space program. Planetary health is still largely confined by our sense of living on spaceship earth. How might we come to imagine planetary health otherwise, beyond the limits of a closed system?
