Planetary Health beyond Spaceship Earth

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?

About the speaker: Warwick Anderson is Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Discipline of Anthropology and the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney. He was formerly an ARC Laureate Fellow in the History Department at Sydney. Additionally, he is an honorary professor in the Centre for Health Equity (which he founded) in the School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. A co-conspirator in postcolonial studies of science, he has written extensively on science, race, and colonialism; medicine and white masculinity; kuru, cannibalism, and sorcerer scientists; and autoimmunity and tolerance of self. His current research is focused on disease ecology and planetary health. In 2023, he was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science, in recognition of lifetime achievement in science and technology studies.