Our house is on fire, but we must stay at home: Reflections on Earth Day and planetary health Planetary Health Alliance Follow Apr 22 · 11 min read

By: Max Zimberg, Planetary Health Alliance, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

50 years ago today, Earth Day was established out of rising public consciousness of the human health impacts of environmental destruction — from the polluting effects of petroleum, pesticides, and plastics, to the recognition of mass species extinction and the harmful health effects of toxic waste. It was out of love for all beings — for the health of our loved ones and the story of Love Canal — that Earth Day continued to gain momentum, marked by unprecedented unification of stakeholders, generations, political factions, and activists from all walks of life under a common call: our health depends on our environment.

Flash-forward to 2020 and Earth’s messages have never been more clear: not only are vaccines and ventilators our vital life-support systems, but so too are healthy forests, soil, water, and air. We are systematically destroying and transforming our biosphere, and these anthropogenic global environmental changes — including, but not limited to, climate change and incursions into wildlife habitat — are jeopardizing our health, the health of our loved ones, and all past, present, and future gains in global health: a prediction that is more tangible than ever as we collectively suffer the pandemic effects of human mistreatment of Nature and our fellow animals.

But COVID-19 is but one postcard from the planet: in just the last six months, fires have blazed from the Amazon to Australia, communities worldwide are experiencing prolonged periods of floods and droughts, unprecedented locust outbreaks currently plague East Africa, and massive hurricanes have ripped through islands and coastal cities. And these changes in the conditions of our environment ultimately impact every dimension of our health and well-being — from mental, physical and emotional health; to economic sovereignty, political stability, and community resilience.

It is hard to overstate the scale of human impacts across our planet’s natural systems. For example, to “feed the world,” we’ve converted over 40% of Earth’s land surface into croplands and pasture, and we continue to use over 70% of global freshwater for agriculture, over 80% of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. in animal agriculture, and to exploit over 90% of monitored fisheries at, or beyond, maximum sustainable limits. We have cut down roughly half the world’s temperate and tropical forests and dammed over 60% of the world’s rivers. And we are crowding out the rest of life on our planet — threatening our own lives — in pursuit of development and profits for few. In the words of biologist Barry Commoner at the inauguration of Earth Day in 1970: “This planet is threatened with destruction, and the humans who live in it, with death.”

So why haven’t we mobilized for planetary health like we have for this acute pandemic?

Earth Day as the foundation for planetary health

On this 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, the spread of COVID-19 and corollary halt to business-as-usual makes clear again — as it was in 1970 — the inextricable link between the health of humans and the health of our planet. We can no longer ignore that how we treat our planet and fellow cohabitants always comes back to affect us — sometimes in ways we wouldn’t expect, or with dynamics of complexity that our profit-driven systems aren’t built for. All too often, we separate environmental issues from those of health, equity, and justice; we separate Earth Day from 364 other days of disunity. But in the centuries-old words of Chief Seattle:

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”

And while all things connect — this fact alone is not a call-to-action. We need a new framework to understand the complex interconnections between human and environmental well-being and to tackle those links which are broken. We need a new interdisciplinary field to scientifically study and evidence these linkages and empower the next generation of leaders to pursue a path of solutions-oriented, systems-based education. We need to supplant our current vade mecum of competition, fragmentation, and replication with a new narrative of unity around a common vision for the future we wish to see.

As the branches of Earth Day have matured over the past 50 years into a beautiful tree canopy of events, organizations, and initiatives with a common mission of regeneration for a sustainable future, today we are called to come back to the roots of this holiday: to honor the Earth not as separate from ourselves, but as the very basis of life and livelihood itself. Akin to many traditional ecological worldviews from Indigenous people around the world, the term “planetary health” elegantly encapsulates the complex notion that we cannot separate the health of human beings from the health of the natural systems upon which we depend. Let Earth Day 2020 be remembered as the moment when the fight for our environment merged with our fight for well-being under the shared scaffolding of planetary health.

Planetary health is like “public health 2.0” in an age where our most pressing global challenges and burdens of disease stem from a splintered understanding of humanity’s interdependence with nature. By focusing on human health (like we do in medicine, public health, and other modalities of holistic healing) — while also expanding our understanding of humanity’s non-hierarchical relationship with Nature— planetary health taps into our innate human survival instinct, rather than relying on pure empathy to “save the polar bears.” This has sparked an international and interdisciplinary movement to completely redesign our social, political, cultural, economic, and technological systems to prioritize symbiotic health for both humans and the planet upon which we depend.

This is the “Great Transition”: a fundamental restructuring of embedded patterns of production, consumption, technology, and demography in a way that considers all externalities and aligns incentive structures to produce a “net positive to nature” and the Commons. This transition will require each and every one of us to rethink and transform nearly every aspect of how we do what we do, and when and why we do it — from how we produce, consume, distribute and waste things like food, manufactured goods and energy; to how we construct and live in cities and communities. We must redefine how we value and steward natural landscapes and resources, and even the stories we tell ourselves and our children about our place in the world, our relationship to Nature, and what it means to live a good life.

Nature-based learning

So what can we learn from Nature in this rare moment of retreat and reflection? Since the first Earth Day, we have witnessed a mushrooming of the modern environmental movement, alongside increased scientific understanding of climate change, biodiversity loss, global pollution, and other dynamics of anthropogenic global environmental change. We have made tremendous advancements by most traditional standards of global health — such as reduced global hunger, extreme poverty, literacy, and child mortality — and have welcomed unbelievable technological achievements that, in some ways, make our lives easier and more connected than ever before. But the economic, scientific, and technological developments that fueled these improvements have been at the expense of our environment and the health of all humans, our fellow animals, and future generations.

Surely we can learn resilience from the mycelium who spring up with full vigor after a storm — seemingly independently, but closely connected through deep and broad underground substrates — or adaptability from water, which is formless enough to flow through the most precarious of spaces, but with enough leverage, can be powerful enough to energize a city. We can observe unity in diversity from the ways in which varied flora, fauna, and biogeochemical and climatic cycles interact to create harmony within a single ecosystem, and from mycorrhizae the importance of moving from dynamics of domination to paradigms of partnership.

It is without doubt that we have many of the tools and solutions needed to shift the tide of the Anthropocene into the Symbiocene — from prioritizing plant-forward regenerative food systems, to renewable and nature-based decarbonization strategies, to raising up feminine, youth, and Indigenous leadership — but do we have the will? Can we ignite our reverence and awe for nature, respect for future generations, and innate drive for self-preservation?

Our house is still on fire

Our house is on fire, but we are forced to stay home — and not everyone has a home to shelter-in-place, forcing us to acknowledge the vast disparities in basic needs around the world. And yet, those who are sheltering away from their normal home will attest that “home” isn’t merely the physical space within which we are quarantined, but rather it’s the intangible culmination of safety and security, comfort and connection, refuge and relaxation, belonging and bliss. Home means a secure future, livability, and knowing your neighbors. And in this way, the notion of home can be extended to Mother Earth — calling us to befriend our local biodiversity as our neighbors, and to protect our bioregion as we would safeguard our individual home.

In fact, Earth is our only home. And we are far exceeding, or are in danger of exceeding, five of the nine planetary boundaries upon which our life depends— from biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus, to rapid genetic biodiversity loss and climate change. Analyzed another way, ignoring scientists’ warnings about the state of our planet and resultant existential risks is akin to ignoring the existence of COVID-19 and failing to follow physical distancing measures — and we’ve witnessed how early acceptance and action-planning has the power to flatten the curve of exponential hazard.

Except that in the case of our planetary health emergency, we would have no home to retreat to. Let that sink in again: Earth is our only home, and she too has tested positive for coronavirus. We must act fast, and act together.

May we take this time of forced isolation to reconnect with what “home” means to us; to pause the manmade metronome of the hustle-and-bustle; to acknowledge the pervasive fear, loneliness, and anxiety that has been plaguing our society long before COVID-19 quarantine; and to come together to envision what our world could look like once this entr’acte ends and the curtains ascend again.

Some things we may have realized while quarantining:

How messy or cluttered our space is;

The abundance or lack of time we actually have for self-care or creativity;

The ways in which we’re being called to show up for ourselves, our families, or take leadership in our community;

How resourceful we can be with what we already have;

The importance of basic needs over constant accumulation; and

The deep disconnection we feel from society and our loved ones, and how deeply healing it can be to actively forge such connection.

And all of these lessons apply to our relationship with Mother Earth:

She needs cleaning;

She needs your leadership, creativity, skill-building initiative;

She needs your time and commitment as the climate countdown-clock ticks on;

She already has all the resources she needs to sustain and heal;

She needs to be reconnected with, nurtured, and tended to; and

She and our fellow animals also feel the fear and confinement of habitat loss.

Home is where the start is

In Maurice Sendak’s famous children’s book, Where The Wild Things Are, protagonist Max’s nature-filled adventure begins when the walls of his bedroom “became the world all around.” Rather than waiting for “this all to be over,” consider using quarantine to expand the walls of your home, reconnect with the world around you, and expand your sense of place (you’ve probably already started doing this if the park you barely visited pre-COVID is now “basically your backyard”). How might this expanded conception of home change the way you take care of the land, animals, and community around you?

As you flâneur around your neighborhood, exploring each nook of your “home,” take note of where nature could be restored in your urban and suburban environment through the support of community initiatives, guerrilla gardening, or biomimetic urban design projects. Support your local farmers by joining a CSA (community supported agriculture) for freshly-delivered produce to pair with your bulk pantry staples — further reducing your need to grocery shop and lessening pressure on global food supply-chains. Take a free online class on climate change and health. Learn about the medicinal qualities of plants and herbs, which can boost immunity while supporting pollinators. Use this time to learn new food preservation or composting techniques — welcoming a microcolony of beneficial bacteria into your home and body via fermented foods — and keep closer inventory of your fridge and food consumption habits to reduce your household food waste, both during and post-quarantine (nearly half of all food produced in the U.S. goes to waste, about equally on the production and post-consumer sides)! Bring nature inside by planting a backyard or windowsill garden for the first time, or simply seed intentions to continue communing with nature more regularly than you did before the pandemic — back when productivity reigned supreme and there was little time to smell the coffee, let alone the flowers, during this eerily silent spring.

In the same way that COVID-19 compels us to examine the preexisting health conditions we or our loved ones may have; the structural inequities which underpin each person or group’s vulnerability to the virus; and the interconnected fragility of our systems, we must band together with our diverse passions and professions to conduct similar systems analyses in preparation for the next inevitable pandemic or natural disaster (it is not unlikely that the next wildfire or hurricane could overlap with this or the next pandemic). Concurrently, we must do all we can to mitigate and eradicate the conditions which led to this pandemic in the first place, and employ “suscalable” (sustainable, yet scalable) place-based knowledge to regenerate, bolster, and adapt both our natural and social systems for ultimate resiliency and absorption of externalities.

Echoing Greta one last time: our house is still on fire, and now that we’re forced to stay home, let us use the fire to reignite the founding narrative of Earth Day and promote planetary health into the 22nd century; to fuel ourselves with hope, creativity, and community; and to illuminate an accelerated path toward the Great Transition — alone, together.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Planetary Health Alliance or its members.