![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.revistahcsm.coc.fiocruz.br\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/planetary-health.jpg\")
<\/a>The world-first Planetary Health Platform<\/a> was launched at the University of Sydney in 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n These notions describe drastic transformations in the relationship between society and nature that dramatically increased the role played by vectors (usually insects) and primary hosts (usually animals) in several epidemic outbreaks. These notions are also raised by health and environmental activists that believe that their goals are intertwined\u00a0in a new framework called Planetary Health.<\/p>\n Warwick Anderson and James Dunk are researchers of the history department at the University of Sydney.<\/p><\/div>\n Although historical investigations on this framework are few, the interview with\u00a0Warwick Anderson and James Dunk conducted by Marcos Cueto,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/b>(hereafter WA, JD and MC, respectively)<\/span>\u00a0explains how an historical perspective can enrich it and provide some key references.<\/span><\/p>\n We hope this interview will be useful to those historians of health and historians of the environment willing to join forces in their studies and to those historians interested in a broader framework for their research on the interaction of biology, politics and society.<\/p>\n MC: What is the history of \u2018planetary health\u2019? What attracted you to it?<\/strong><\/p>\n WA:<\/strong> In my experience, finding a new research project is always serendipitous. I\u2019d long been interested in the conceptual history of disease ecology, the effort of some elite infectious disease researchers in the twentieth century to make our understanding of epidemiology, of disease patterns, more realistic biologically, more complex. Since the influenza pandemic in 1918, a number of microbiologists around the world have drawn on evolutionary biology and, later, systems ecology, in order to explain the emergence and spread of novel pathogens. I\u2019ve been writing articles on this since the early 2000s, though the book seems to get deferred each year.<\/p>\n Anyhow, the University of Sydney, where I work, decided about five years ago to establish a planetary health platform and appointed Tony Capon (now at Monash University) as the world\u2019s first professor of planetary health. I had no idea what \u2018planetary health\u2019 meant, though it sounded impressive. At the time, jokes along the lines of, \u2018What next? galactic health?\u2019 had currency, of course. Well, Tony perceived some potential alliance between my interests in disease ecology and his mysterious research program, so he approached me, and Jamie, and suggested we convene a workshop on history and planetary health. As a result of the interdisciplinary meeting in 2017, I looked further into what turned out to be this new formulation of environmental health on a planetary scale. Most people seem to regard it as a mere supplement to global health, but it seems to me it\u2019s really more closely related to environmental health, just scaled up and framed more systemically. The term \u2018planetary health\u2019 emerged in the 1970s, mostly to refer to the health of the planet itself\u2014but by the 1990s, a number of politically engaged epidemiologists were using it to denote the effects of planetary environmental degradation and anthropogenic climate change on the health of human<\/em> populations. Commitments from the Lancet <\/em>and the Rockefeller Foundation, and later the Wellcome Trust, gave planetary health added exposure and force. It\u2019s very much a recent phenomenon, but with deep roots, gaining vitality mostly from 2014.<\/p>\n For me, what was particularly compelling about planetary health was its origins in systems ecology and post-World War II planetary thinking, including fears of nuclear apocalypse. Older medical geography had an influence too, but vastly scaled up.<\/p>\n JD:<\/strong> When I first heard of planetary health, I thought it was an odd phrase, too. Was this about the health of the planet? What are the presenting symptoms, and what are the disease pathways they might point to? Aren\u2019t there better metaphors to describe the integrity of the earth\u2019s systems? I\u2019ve come to think that those who have pushed for the new approach, and the language they\u2019ve used to describe it, might not mind the ambiguity in the phrase. The words \u2018planetary health\u2019 create a conceptual slippage between the human and the planetary, and between notions of balance and stasis and well-being, which efficiently point to the goal of the new approach. That is to reconfigure human health in its planetary context \u2013\u00a0that is, embedded in biological or ecological reality, in close relationship with other species and with the biosphere itself.<\/p>\n As I\u2019ve worked further into the subject I\u2019ve been struck by the ambitious vision at the core of planetary health \u2013 a planetary, ecological vision of health \u2013\u00a0which I think distinguishes it from other recent movements in global health. It scales not only between the present and the deep evolutionary past, but between local phenomena (or symptoms) and planetary systems.<\/p>\n MC:<\/strong> Can you tell us more about the challenges of writing a history of planetary health?<\/p>\n WA:<\/strong> I\u2019ve concentrated so far on what I call the conceptual history of planetary health, providing a dispersed, worldwide intellectual genealogy for its current formation. In a sense, I want to trace the cultural history of ideas about environment and health at multiple sites over the past century or more. Not surprisingly, the challenge is to broaden the cast of thinkers about these issues beyond a recognisable coterie of white men. At least, in this case, the white men are often in locations beyond North America and Western Europe, but that doesn\u2019t excuse the supposed paucity of women and absence of Indigenous and non-white thinkers. It goes to show that planetary health, like conservation biology and disease ecology, are still largely well-meaning or restorative sciences of settler colonial societies. I think our main challenge is to decolonise these narratives, to recognise other agents and authors. They\u2019re present, no doubt, but we\u2019re not paying enough attention to them. But Jamie may have additional thoughts on this\u2026.<\/p>\n JD:<\/strong> I agree with Warwick.\u00a0Writing historically about planetary health is a project in planetary history, and it\u2019s always difficult to present a planetary history that is staged in only a few small areas of the planet. Still, the key historical interest is the developing consciousness of the planetary<\/em> environment of health and illness, and there is an important mid-twentieth century moment in which many in the more developed societies in the world began to worry that their sophisticated technology \u2013\u00a0including, but not limited to nuclear fission \u2013\u00a0was making both humans and the earth quite sick.<\/p>\n I was trained as a cultural historian at Sydney, and part of my training was to value, and to delve into, the particular. Historical narratives cannot tell every story at once, and certainly oughtn\u2019t try to. So, in this project we\u2019re looking to tell a story about Western biomedicine pivoting to ecological thinking, and, in a sense, returning to environmentalism. One challenge is to write in such a way that we don\u2019t let the unwieldy scale of the planetary framework \u2013 which inclines often into what Timothy Morton in 2013 called \u2018hyperobjects\u2019 \u2013 obscure the particular narratives of injustice and oppression which, as many have pointed out, have produced our current planetary predicament.<\/p>\n MC:<\/strong> Does planetary health history have anything to offer our understanding of the Covid-19 pandemic?<\/p>\n WA<\/strong>: I suppose that question was inevitable in these circumstances. The issue is addressed in the conclusion of Samuel Myers\u2019 and Howard Frumkin\u2019s recent Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves<\/em> (2020), to which Jamie and I contributed a historical chapter. As I see it, the fundamental problem is that viral diseases often emerge and spread because of environmental and societal disturbances, which provide new opportunities for microbial evolution and flourishing. This is the basic argument of disease ecology, though different mechanisms for disease emergence have been postulated during the past century, based on different ecological theories. Although we haven\u2019t worked out the details yet, I\u2019m sure that environmental degradation will be a factor in the emergence and enhanced transmission of SARS-CoV-2. But whether climate change itself is directly implicated is hard to know at this stage. I find it intriguing, though, that many of the behaviours that increase carbon emissions, such as intense urbanisation and international air travel, are the same as those promoting viral spread.<\/p>\n JD<\/strong>: There\u2019s also more and more research on the mental health effects of the pandemic itself, and of the public health measures taken around the world to combat it. This is hardly surprising, but I think combined with increase in ecological discussions of health during the pandemic, the result may be that we have a more rounded conversation about the interdependence of human health, social systems, and earth systems. I imagine planetary health will have an important role in that conversation \u2013 and indeed I notice The Lancet <\/em>is calling for papers on this theme.<\/p>\n MC<\/strong>: You raise an interesting subject. Can we talk about a history of planetary mental<\/em> health? What would that be? What does it add to conventional histories of mental health?<\/p>\n JD<\/strong>: It seems generally acknowledged that mental health is a critical dimension of planetary health, and Susan Clayton has an excellent chapter on the subject in Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves<\/em>. And yet my impression is that most planetary health approaches seem to concentrate on physical health while noting that the increasing frequency and severity of \u2018natural\u2019 disasters, and the conflict and displacement generated by the disruption of earth systems, will register in a plethora of psychological symptoms. This is undoubtedly true, but I am interested in tracing a more thoroughgoing framework for mental health on a disrupted planet. My sense is that a truly planetary mental health will inevitably involve ecological logic \u2013\u00a0that psychological symptoms in a changing planetary environment involve disordered emotional and intellectual responses to planetary threats framed in ecological terms. So, I am interested in tracing the various ways in which ecology, psychology and psychiatry have intersected, in recent decades, registering new kinds of planetary consciousness and planetary peril.<\/p>\n One of the core aspects, of course, which goes back to your question, is the way that a planetary-scale view, and phenomena like ecological grief and anxiety, call for new consideration in mental health of the supposed, quite hard boundary between the human self and the non-human world. These phenomena suggest a more powerful affinity, even an identity, between species \u2013 perhaps a sort of psychological co-dependence. This line of enquiry indicates a significant shift in the history of mental health, as we explore visions of human well-being in what E. O. Wilson has called \u2018the age of loneliness\u2019.<\/p>\n \u00a0WA:<\/strong> I don\u2019t have much to add to what Jamie just said, except to point out the obvious\u2014obvious at least to any historian of medicine\u2014that perceived connections between environment and health, whether physical or mental health, have a long history in most healing traditions. But environmental determinism or modulation for almost two centuries was displaced and discounted in biomedicine. It never entirely disappeared, as I\u2019ve tried to show in twentieth-century histories of \u2018racial\u2019 acclimatisation, medical geography and disease ecology. The supposed relations between milieu and mentality proved particularly durable. Now new visions of environment and health are coming into view, on a different scale and with special urgency. I believe that as historians, and as moral beings, we have a duty to give critical attention to the emerging formation called planetary health.<\/p>\n References:<\/strong><\/p>\n ANDERSON, Warwick. \u201cNatural Histories of Infectious Disease: Ecological Vision in Twentieth-Century Biomedical Science.\u201d Osiris<\/em>, 19, 2004, pp. 39-61.<\/p>\n ANDERSON, Warwick. \u201cPostcolonial Ecologies of Parasite and Host: Making Parasitism Cosmopolitan.\u201d J. History of Biology<\/em>, 49, 2016, pp. 241-59.<\/p>\n ANDERSON, Warwick. \u201cNowhere to Run, Rabbit: The Cold-War Calculus of Disease Ecology.\u201d History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences<\/em>, 39, 2017, DOI 10.1007\/s40656-017-0140-7.<\/p>\n CLAYTON, Susan, \u201cMental Health on a Changing Planet.\u201d In MYERS, Samuel; FRUMKIN, Howard, eds. Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves<\/em>. Washington: Island Press, 2020, pp. 221-44.<\/p>\n DUNK, James; ANDERSON, Warwick. \u201cAssembling Planetary Health: Histories of the Future.\u201d In MYERS, Samuel; FRUMKIN, Howard, eds.\u00a0Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves.<\/em>\u00a0Washington: Island Press, 2020, pp. 17-35.<\/p>\n DUNK, James H.; JONES, David S.; CAPON, Anthony; ANDERSON, Warwick. \u201cHuman Health on an Ailing Planet\u2014Historical Perspectives on our Future.\u201d New England J. Medicine<\/em>, 381, 2019, pp. 778-82.<\/p>\n DUNK, James H.; JONES, David S., \u201cSounding the Alarm on Climate Change, 1989 and 2019.\u201d New England J. Medicine<\/em>, 382, 2020, pp. 205-7.<\/p>\n MORTON, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World<\/em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.<\/p>\n MYERS, Samuel; FRUMKIN, Howard, \u201cA Bright Future for Planetary Health.\u201d In MYERS, Samuel; FRUMKIN, Howard, eds. Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves<\/em>. Washington: Island Press, 2020, pp. 475-86.<\/p>\n WHITMEE, Sarah,\u00a0HAINES Andy,\u00a0BEYRER Chris, et al. \u201cSafeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch: Report of The Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission on Planetary Health.\u201d Lancet<\/em>, 386, 2015, pp. 1973-2028.<\/p>\n WILSON, Edward O., The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth<\/em>. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.<\/p>\n How to cite this article:<\/strong><\/p>\n ANDERSON, Warwick; DUNK, James; CUETO, Marcos. Planetary Health Histories:\u00a0Interview with Warwick Anderson and James Dunk.\u00a0In: Revista\u00a0Hist\u00f3ria, Ci\u00eancias, Sa\u00fade \u2013 Manguinhos<\/i>\u00a0(Blog).\u00a0Published on 3rd Nov. 2020. Available on\u00a0http:\/\/www.revistahcsm.coc. Related articles already published in HCS-Manguinhos:<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Silva, Sandro Dutra e. Cultura e meio ambiente: o interc\u00e2mbio biol\u00f3gico e o cultivo do arroz nas Am\u00e9ricas. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Dez 2019, vol.26, suppl.1, p.267-269.<\/p>\n Silva, Sandro Dutra e et al. O cerrado goiano na literatura de Bernardo \u00c9lis sob o olhar da hist\u00f3ria ambiental. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Jan 2017, vol.24, no.1, p.93-110<\/p>\n Fischer, Marta Luciane et al. Da \u00e9tica ambiental \u00e0 bio\u00e9tica ambiental: antecedentes, trajet\u00f3rias e perspectivas. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Abr 2017, vol.24, no.2.<\/p>\n Losada, Janaina Zito. Historiografia brasileira e meio ambiente: as contribui\u00e7\u00f5es de S\u00e9rgio Buarque de Holanda e o debate contempor\u00e2neo da hist\u00f3ria ambiental. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Set 2016, vol.23, no.3, p.653-668<\/p>\n Marinho, Pedro Eduardo Mesquita de Monteiro. Entre o saneamento e o meio ambiente: engenharia e pol\u00edtica no final do Imp\u00e9rio e na Primeira Rep\u00fablica. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Mar 2012, vol.19, no.1, p.340-342<\/p>\n Bernabeu-Mestre, Josep, Galiana-S\u00e1nchez, Mar\u00eda Eugenia and Monerris, Angela Cremades Environment and health with respect to a poverty-related disease: the epidemiology of trachoma in Spain, 1925-1941 . Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Dec 2013, vol.20, no.4, p.1605-1619<\/p>\n Soffiati, Arthur. Vozes esquecidas: a defesa do meio ambiente no Brasil dos s\u00e9culos XVIII e XIX. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Dez 2003, vol.10, no.3, p.1119-1125<\/p>\n P\u00e1dua, Jos\u00e9 Augusto. Biosfera, hist\u00f3ria e conjuntura na an\u00e1lise da quest\u00e3o amaz\u00f4nica. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Set 2000, vol.6, p.793-811<\/p>\n Anderson, Warwick, Cueto, Marcos and Santos, Ricardo Ventura Applying a southern solvent: an interview with Warwick Anderson<\/a>. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Dec 2016, vol.23, suppl.1.<\/p>\n Little mangrove<\/a>\u00a0– Warwick Anderson is a leading historian of science and race from Australia. See his testimony about HCS-Manguinhos and related articles:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.revistahcsm.coc.fiocruz.br\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/WarwickDunk.jpg\")