Planetary health and its fellow travellers: a struggle for justice and survival
Draft, for conference in Quito, Ecuador, September, 2026. (Keynote talk, 30 mins, to be given by Zoom, comments welcome).
Colin Butler
Humanity, Homo sapiens, is a bipedal primate that emerged in Africa, evolving through forces of both competition and co-operation, and has since spread to all continents, all oceans, and even into permanent orbit. Our species now rules over most other species, causing many extinctions. Technology has become increasingly powerful: fire, arrows, drones and inter-continental missiles. Messages once spread by drumming or by the lighting of pyres on hilltops have transformed to the internet. But these technological marvels have not been matched by a commensurate growth in wisdom.
Humans are hierarchical, but our species’ tendency to extreme inequality has periodically been checked, such as by political assassinations, the imprisonment of kings, and successful anti-colonisation struggles. I reached adulthood in the 1970s, a decade that Halfdan Mahler, then director general of the World Health Organization, called the “warm decade of social justice”. It was also the decade of the first global environmental conference, held in Sweden 20 years ahead of Rio’s “Earth summit”, itself a mega-meeting once hoped by optimists to be a positive turning point for the Earth system.
A near concurrence of events: growing human connectivity (e.g. the response to the “blue marble” photo of Earth), growing appreciation of the scale and longevity of environmental harm, and a sober understanding of global civilization’s vulnerability (following World War II and during the Cold War), inspired some writers to try to inform and to motivate the health community to add their voices to the movement for greater global environmental as well as social justice. Rachel Carson and René Dubos were followed by human ecologists, publishing in health journals from 1972. The term “planetary health” emerged, perhaps used for the first time by Jonas Salk in 1980, otherwise famous for his development of the first successful polio vaccine, which he refused to patent.
This talk (given over the internet) will sketch the history of planetary health and its near relatives: ecohealth and One Health. The hope of “health for all”, once championed by Halfdan Mahler, has vanished, replaced by naïve faith in market forces, colonialism, escapism and wishful thinking, illustrated for example by the hubris of the artificial intelligence promoter Sam Altman. Linking these issues is the colonization of the internet (especially social media) by entrepreneurs who abuse algorithms to deepen human divisions, to generate profits, to belittle and seek to undermine science, and to hide and suppress the poycrises’ underlying causes. Another is the compliance of big science and media, dependent on increasingly neoliberal funders for income and visibility.
As limits to growth become ever more stark – yet ever more hidden from public understanding because of self and imposed censorship (which also contaminate the dominant contemporary literature of planetary heath, ecohealth and One Health) I fear for the future. Somehow, we have to maintain sufficient morale to stay afloat, to “triage” the ecological resources that survive, and to join with others in the great struggle to reverse the trends that appear to be pushing civilization towards its demise.
