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Offline: Planetary health—where next?

Horton, Richard

The Lancet , Volume 387 , Issue 10028 , 1602

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(16)30196-9

Excerpt: "2 years ago, we proposed an idea we called planetary health. Friends jokingly asked when we would be launching intergalactic health. I could see their point. We already had global health. Why planetary health? The globe and the planet—aren't they the same thing? Wait. I love museums. I especially enjoy meandering through rooms replete with ancient artefacts from long-lost civilisations. Seeing the small accoutrements of past lives—cups, vases, remnants of clothes, perfume bottles, jewellery—one is invited to imagine and recreate a past existence. Those communities were every bit as real as our own today. But they vanished, destroyed perhaps by cataclysmic war, natural catastrophe, inept leadership, or simply the slow erosion of a society unable to adapt to changing circumstances. It's hard not to think about our own contingency when one walks through these rooms of distant cultures. In a “manifesto” to address the sustainability of today's civilisations, we argued that planetary health stood for a broader attitude to health than we are usually given to consider in medicine."

Ethics is a particularly relevant if underreported topic of conversation at the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris. While technical disputes grab the lion’s share of attention, we should not forget the moral reasons we must address global warming – because of the substantial harm it does and will do to the human and nonhuman world.