March 2022: Planetary Health

Article: Harmony on Earth

by Hamsa Ganapathi

MS Candidate in Agriculture, Food, and Environment – Tufts University

Have you ever wondered how the lights you turn on affect the communities that live next to a power plant?

Maybe you have thought about burning forests to create land for agriculture causes respiratory diseases. If you have, then you have already started thinking about planetary health!

This month’s article is all about Planetary Health, an emerging interdisciplinary field of research that seeks to understand how the immense amount of change that we as humans have imposed on the earth is affecting not only the health of the planet, but also all people.

Scientists in this field have studied what is termed the Anthropocene, a distinctive period that started in the mid-1900s in which “The Great Acceleration” of human growth increased the impact of human beings on the Earth at a rate much faster than any other point in recorded history. This period has allowed human beings to contribute to the very problems that make our entire population less healthy.

Growing food is a great example of the implications of planetary health. In many parts of the world, growing food means clearing land for agriculture. Forests and peatlands may be cleared by burning, which causes smoke and haze and reduces ecosystem services, or all the benefits humans get from a healthy Earth system. In the short run, we might get some new farmland. But in the long run, the human population experiences respiratory problems from the haze, such as worsened asthma and COPD. In fact, during a haze event in Indonesia in 2015, the haze was so bad that poor air quality caused premature deaths of children and created conditions that residents could not safely leave their homes without wearing masks. Burning further causes climate change from carbon dioxide released into the air from destroyed ecosystems. Climate change in turn has many negative health effects on humans, including heat waves that increase heat-related deaths and more frequent natural disasters that displace so many communities.

Addressing planetary health means changing how we interact with the Earth.

The best way to do that is to change how much we demand from the Earth’s resources. For example, using reusable shopping bags and produce bags reduces how much plastic and paper we use. Turning off lights when they are not in use also reduces the amount of fossil fuels burned to power our houses (and reduces our electricity bills!). But most importantly, we need to rethink our relationship to the Earth by reducing our negative impacts on our planet everyday and using our power to preserve our one and only home.

“In the end, achieving planetary health will require a renaissance in how we define our place in the world. A new narrative will reject the one streaming into our homes—that happiness comes from relentlessly acquiring more things—and embrace what we know: that what truly makes us happy is time spent with those we love, connection to place and community, feeling connected to something greater than ourselves, taking care of each other.”
Sam Myers, Planetary Health Alliance

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