On planetary health: medicine, ecology, and ethics

The notion of planetary health considers human life and health in the context of biospheric processes. Humans are interconnected with all life on Earth through the evolution from a common ancestor and have developed within omnipresent symbioses with other organisms, and in interactions and nutrients exchanges within the biosphere. Situating human life within the ecological processes and interconnectedness of life on the planet necessitates an expanded perspective on health, and I explore four interpretative contexts: biomedical, biopsychosocial, environmental and ecological. Planetary health is nevertheless also an attempt to conceptualize recent technological interferences with planetary homeostatic processes, resulting in changes of hydrological and atmospheric processes. The expansion of industrial civilization has transformed land and ocean ecosystems, introducing new forms of toxicity and pollution, and destroyed habitats of other forms of life, resulting in diminishing abundance and diversity of life. This predicament has an indisputable ethical dimension, which I explore in my contribution. By grounding human condition as that of biological beings - who share vulnerability, finitude, and interdependence with other forms of life - as primary and central to ethical considerations, I focus on the notions of harm, responsibility, and justice, which reveal also the political dimension of human life. Bringing into dialogue the perspectives of environmental and indigenous ethics, I consider the meaning of ethical concepts such as dignity, personhood, and rights in the ecological context of life, and their implications for medicine. Based on ethical obligation to prevent harm, I argue for a legal transformation to defend the interests of life.