Planetary healthpdf

Introduction

The concept of planetary health situates human health and disease within broader environmental and multi-species relations, reconceptualising healthcare beyond individuals or populations. It emphasises that human health is deeply entangled with more-than-human life and the planet. As an approach to health in the Anthropocene, it addresses contemporary crises caused by human activity, including climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, and rising social inequalities. However, planetary health is not just an analytical tool to examine human-environmental entanglements. It also functions as a normative framework for health and environmental justice and informs social movements and political agendas rooted in ecology, human rights, and feminism. Thereby it offers an ethical compass for transformative and justice-oriented action.

Anthropologists have engaged with planetary health to reimagine human health and healthcare. They do so by drawing on diverse perspectives, including those of Indigenous scholars and postcolonial theorists, and by developing an ethnographically informed perspective on health as deeply entangled with planetary relations. While planetary health is a recent focus in anthropology in general, medical anthropologists have long examined themes that resonate with planetary health, such as toxicity (Geissler and Prince 2020), the idea that human bodies are metabolisms that constantly absorb parts of the environment (Solomon 2016), and the idea that multispecies entanglements matter to health and healthcare (Nading 2025). For example, a metabolic perspective on diabetes reveals everyday exposures to pollutants, industrial chemicals, and social stressors and how they accumulate within bodies (Solomon 2016). In other contexts, the lens of slow violence and toxic exposure brings together disease, bodies, and colonial and capitalist relations (Hecht 2012, Murphy 2017).

This entry traces the adoption, adaptation, and critiques of planetary health across anthropological work. First, it outlines two conceptual lineages: One emerging from global health, the other from postcolonial theory. Second, it discusses key critiques of the planetary health paradigm, notably by Indigenous scholars. Third, it highlights three ways anthropologists apply planetary health to explore (a) wellbeing and chronic disease, (b) emerging global risks such as pandemics, and (c) concerns about a planet on the edge, threatening the foundations of life. These engagements show that planetary health involves both questions of scale and specific domains of inquiry. Finally, the entry reflects on the possibilities for planetary healthcare.

Conceptual lineages: Global health and postcolonial theory

Planetary health has emerged from two distinct lineages, one being global health and the other postcolonial theory. A commonly cited starting point in global health is the 2015 Planetary Health Commission, convened by the Rockefeller Foundation and The Lancet. The initiative launched planetary health as a new inter- and transdisciplinary field by addressing a central paradox: Human health has improved while the planet’s health has deteriorated, as gains in human health and development have relied on practices that degrade ecosystems, deplete resources, and accelerate climate change, posing risks to future wellbeing (Whitmee et al. 2015).

In framing the main problem this way, planetary health advocates argued that human and environmental health are inseparable. This was a considerable change from previous approaches, such as international public health, which thinks of human health primarily in terms of international public sector policies, and global health, which focused on the global connectedness of diseases, as much as the myriad of people, institutions, and technologies involved in spreading and containing it (Packard 2016).

Planetary health, in contrast, was closer to the One Health approach, developed in the early 2000s. The latter had already emphasised the interdependence of human, animal, and environmental health, particularly regarding zoonotic diseases and other public health risks. While both One Health and planetary health link human, animal, and environmental dynamics, One Health focuses primarily on biological continuity and disease transmission. Planetary health, on the other hand, expands beyond disease transmission to also address systemic environmental degradation, climate change, and socioeconomic inequality. One influential definition of planetary health defines it as ‘the health of human civilization and the state of the natural systems on which it depends’ (Whitmee et al. 2015, 1978). It promotes strategies for ‘safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene epoch: through sustainable development and the careful stewardship of natural systems’ (Whitmee et al. 2015, 1974). Planetary health also comes with a stronger moral heft than One Health, as the latter is ‘less about shared moral sentiment than sameness in biology, disease, and treatment across species and environments’ (Ticktin 2019, 10–1). In One Health’s more technocratic language of biological connections, ‘notions of shared suffering […] come to be spoken about in biological terms’ (Ticktin 2019, 142–3).

In its broad scope, planetary health builds on planetary thinking, including James Lovelock’s Earth System Science (ESS), which views Earth as a complex, self-regulating being (Chakrabarty 2019; Farman and Rottenburg 2019). Iconic photographs of Earth like Earthrise (1968), or Blue marble (1972), evoke a vision of a vulnerable planet. Moving beyond the population and nation-state focus of international and global health (Gaudillière et al. 2022), planetary health responds to this vision of vulnerability by using systems thinking to examine health-related intersections among diverse lifeforms. It expands a concern with human health horizontally to include more-than-human life and planetary forces, such as atmospheres, oceans, microbial and chemical flows, and climate imbalances (Horton and Lo 2015; Myers and Frumkin 2020). This perspective enables planetary health to study more productively the links between human health, ecological degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. While the term ‘the globe’ has more human-centric connotations, the term ‘the planet’ decentres humans and situates them in continuous interaction with other beings and planetary processes (see also Latour 2018).

Planetary health also expands the concern with human health temporally by studying long-term Earth-system processes and their ‘deep’ temporal entanglements with humans and the planet (Chakrabarty 2019; Farman and Rottenburg 2019). It links historical and geological time, revealing entanglements between capitalism, human histories, and the species-level history of ‘anthropos’ (Chakrabarty 2019). Thereby, it shows that human health ultimately depends on the stability of deep-time planetary cycles, such as a predictable climate system—when carbon emissions from past centuries alter atmospheric chemistry today, they can directly trigger modern health crises like shifting disease vectors or heat-induced mortality. When thinking in such long timeframes, nature is turned from a passive backdrop to an active force. At the same time, humans are seen to acquire geological agency by physically reshaping the planet’s strata and climate—for example, through the global deposition of microplastics or synthetic chemicals that will remain in the fossil record.

Planetary health’s broadened perspective speaks to scholars from across the medical and social sciences as well as the humanities, fostering a new inter- and transdisciplinary paradigm. It now encompasses research, education, and activism, supported by universities, NGOs, and research institutions such as The Environmental Humanities South (EHS) in South Africa^[1] or The Planetary Health Alliance; journals such as The Lancet Planetary Health; and academic programs such as at the Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. It highlights that humans have become a geological force and that anthropogenic changes threaten the health of humans and other species. Planetary health scholars and anthropologists also note that the crises of the Anthropocene are unevenly distributed: Those least responsible for environmental degradation often suffer its worst impacts.

The postcolonial theoretical lineage of planetary health specifically attends to these inequalities and to the uneven distribution of responsibility and harm. Postcolonial theory interrogates power and the marginalisation of subaltern voices, i.e. voices of populations that are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from dominant power structures and whose perspectives are systematically denied a voice in global discourses. It also exposes exclusions in dominant power and knowledge systems and re-values marginalised forms of knowledge (Gandhi 2019). Where the first lineage of planetary health emphasises totality and universalism—epitomised by the Blue marble (1972)—postcolonial scholars and a number of anthropologists highlight plurality, collective responsibility, and transformative practices. They critique the idea of a ‘hegemonic human’, which is often centred on a white, privileged subject, oriented toward accumulation and control, and which marginalises or exploits others (Wynter 2015).

A postcolonial perspective does not primarily think of ‘the planetary’ as a fixed, totalising scale, but as denoting a panoply of situated practices. For example, community health volunteers in urban Nicaragua manage dengue fever epidemics by altering the micro-environments of their neighbourhoods—scrubbing water barrels, managing household garbage, and tracking urban mosquito behavior (Nading 2014). In this and many other examples, health emerges through situated, collective practices, as well as multispecies interactions and long-term entanglements with Earth systems. Planetary harm is here not uniform but experienced as an array of everyday life situations and bodies.

Many anthropologists and postcolonial scholars hope that such a practice and multiplicity-oriented view of ‘the planetary’ can foster collaboration across difference (Spivak 1999, Gabrys 2018). It acknowledges that planetary-scale problems are unevenly experienced across different scales and re-interprets ‘the planetary’ as a marker of radical otherness—an opening to alternative epistemes and more just modes of inhabiting the world. Speaking of ‘the planetary’ may thus gesture to a multiplicity of epistemes and relations, foregrounding speculative approaches to care that could enable flourishing and more just ways of inhabiting the world rather than exploitation and destruction (Wynter 2015; Nading 2025; Ticktin 2019; see also Gabrys 2018). An example of this is the practice of community-led agroecology, which rejects chemical-heavy industrial farming in favor of food systems that mimic local ecosystems. Another example are Indigenous frameworks of relational sustainability—such as treating rivers and forests as kin with legal rights—that shift the focus from resource extraction to mutual care.

In thinking about planetary health, some postcolonial scholars decide to focus on processes rather than established entities. They advance the concept of ‘becoming planetary’ (Gabrys 2018) and understand health and healthcare as constantly being in the making. For example, citizen scientists in South London have decided to monitor air pollution, relying on low-cost digital sensors as much as their lived experiences, bodily responses, and social relations. Based on this expansive set of sources, they can challenge official pollution accounts, which mostly rely on statistics, and they can form new social and scientific collectives. Their work shows that pollution is not a clearly predefined, overarching concept, but that it evolves, based on the constantly new and heterogenous ways of gathering pollution data. Our understanding of planetary health can thus be seen as an ongoing process of creative human subjects and evolving ways of learning and living together. This process-oriented view of planetary health gestures toward transforming environmental relations through justice-oriented forms of responsibility that may involve not just humans but other species (Gabrys 2020).

Anthropologists have drawn on both the global health and the postcolonial lineage of planetary health to foreground the relational, multispecies, and long-term dimensions of health and healthcare. They provide ethnographically grounded accounts of how planetary harm is lived and experienced, exploring ‘what the goings-on in individual bodies might tell us about planetary scale change’ (Nading 2025, 5). They also speculate about how planetary care might enable flourishing rather than exploitation (Ticktin 2019, 138). For example, Nading (2025) documents how the cellular degradation and kidney failure of agricultural laborers are not merely isolated medical pathologies, but the literal bodily inscription of global climate change and exploitative labour systems. That said, the idea of planetary health is not without its critiques, some of which will be examined in the next section.

Critiquing planetary health

In recent years, anthropologists and other scholars in the social sciences and humanities have critiqued dominant planetary health approaches, and in particular such approaches’ reliance on technoscientific data and the universalist assumptions underlying its research. Technoscientific critiques focus on the fact that large parts of planetary health scholarship depend heavily on data-driven methods. Data is used to trace the long-term consequences of human activity on ecological systems and to link planetary-scale crises—such as climate change and biodiversity loss—to human health. These approaches often prioritise computational modelling and quantification as tools for developing technocratic solutions. Typical empirical efforts include modelling associations between environmental and health outcomes, for example, linking pollution to diabetes (GBD 2019 Diabetes and Air Pollution Collaborators 2022); assessing climate-induced dietary shifts and their effects on the gut microbiome (Burkart et al. 2019); or examining air pollution’s influence on cardiovascular diseases (Wolf et al. 2021). A central example is the concept of ‘planetary boundaries’, which defines a safe operating space for humanity across nine biophysical systems. This concept relies extensively on modelling and metrics to determine thresholds for Earth system processes such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and biochemical flows (see Rockström et al. 2009).

Critics argue that this reliance on quantification reflects an overly technocratic or ‘scientistic’ orientation. While acknowledging its utility, they warn that overemphasis on seemingly neutral, universal indicators can constrain planetary health’s broader aims, such as fostering plurality, collective responsibility, and bringing about structural transformation (Farman and Rottenburg 2019). Quantitative framings of planetary health issues risk oversimplifying diverse cultural and ecological relations (Nading 2025) and reducing them to comparable metrics. Others argue that such framings perpetuate a legacy of colonialism and the notion that humans should control and engineer the planet—a mindset, some believe, that has driven the current ecological crises (Ferdinand 2022). Anthropologists have also highlighted that such approaches risk depoliticising responsibility and obscuring the unequal impacts of planetary pathologies (David et al. 2021; Farman and Rottenburg 2019).

Other scholars counter that such critiques can underestimate the political and analytical value of quantified data. Modelling and measurement are often essential for rendering planetary health visible and actionable (Lovell et al. 2022; Gabrys 2020; Knox 2020), as in the example of citizen air pollution monitoring in London mentioned above (Gabrys 2020). Many social science approaches to planetary health also depend on quantitative data. This recognition has led scholars to advocate for collaborations such as ‘friendship with scientists’, which encourages engaging with scientists on their own terms while respecting different scientific imaginaries (Fortun and Fortun 2005). The ‘anthropology of microbes’ extends this approach by exploring how anthropology can ‘act with science’ to address global health concerns (Benezra 2023). They study how scientists examine how food, the environment, and genes influence human gut microbiota, and how these microbes, in turn, impact human health. In this case, anthropologists co-design research with laboratory scientists, translating abstract biochemical data into lived realities by showing how structural factors—such as institutional racism, corporate food systems, and environmental toxicity—become biological in the gut microbiome (Benezra 2023). Similarly, social movements and citizen science, the involvement of non-scientists in data collection and knowledge production (Regeer, Klaassen and Broerse 2024), leverage insights produced from big data and modelling to make political claims and drive social mobilisation. Thus, while planetary health’s technocratic tendencies remain a central target of critique, many scholars simultaneously work with data and scientists to reimagine planetary health as a collaborative and transformative practice.

A second central critique of planetary health targets its heavy reliance on universalist thinking, which assumes that scientific truths, ecological standards, or health solutions apply uniformly across all human populations and geographies, regardless of local contexts. Some anthropologists and critical Indigenous studies scholars argue that universalist frameworks of health privilege epistemologies and ontologies aligned with powerful, often hegemonic actors (Baquero et al. 2021; Ferdinand 2022). They call for recognising plural knowledge systems, especially Indigenous epistemologies that have long emphasised the agency and interdependence of the non-human and the non-living (Haraway 2008). These debates have reshaped anthropological approaches to the planetary. Rather than imposing pre-defined accounts, anthropologists attend to emic (i.e. locally situated) perspectives, examining how their interlocutors conceive and engage with the planetary in relation to health and wellbeing (Messeri 2016). For example, even the most literal ‘planetary’ scales—such as Mars—are not objective abstractions. Instead, Western scientists rely on deeply situated, earthly epistemes and colonial tropes of exploration to map and ‘place’ these other worlds, showing how even cosmic scales are culturally constructed (Messeri 2016).

By prioritising localised, place-based relations, Indigenous scholarship directly disrupts the universalist assumption that health can be measured by a single, standardised set of global biomedical metrics. Indigenous scholars also highlight idiosyncratic conceptions of wellbeing that may be relational or land-based and that challenge the individualistic and technocratic assumptions of mainstream planetary health (Redvers 2022). Maintaining land, culture, and sovereignty is central to Indigenous wellbeing and to sustainable stewardship—from this perspective, planetary health therefore also requires acknowledging cultural and land-based practices as integral to human and ecological wellbeing. For example, when a mining project pollutes a sacred river, a universalist framework might only measure the chemical toxicity of the water to evaluate health risks. In contrast, an Indigenous episteme views the degradation of the river as a structural injury to the community’s collective spiritual, physical, and ancestral health. That said, ignoring Indigenous cultural and land-based practices risks perpetuating planetary harm that is all too often rooted in structural racism, colonialism, and economic exploitation.

Such decolonial critiques have themselves been challenged for overly reinforcing a binary between scientific and Indigenous knowledge, nuancing a universal ‘anthropos’ on the one hand even while challenging the binaries between scientific and Indigenous epistemes (Redvers et al 2022). Some anthropologists literally theorise Indigenous approaches and ontologies alongside approaches from Science and Technology Studies, bridging the divide (Cadena and Blaser 2018).

In addition to Indigenous approaches, some anthropologists draw on relational approaches to planetary health (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). These include the Bruno Latour’s (2018) conceptualisation of Earth that he terms ‘Gaia’, an agentive actor requiring a politics grounded in planetary entanglements, where humans are no longer outside or above nature, but entangled with it. Like Indigenous approaches, these relational approaches foreground accountability and responsibility within human-Earth relations.

A planetary health approach that de-centres ‘anthropos’ as a universal human further raises questions about global human responsibility (Yusoff 2018). Critics argue that thinking of humanity’s impact on the world at large obscures the specific, historical forces driving planetary degradation, such as Western industrialism (Hecht 2018; Liboiron 2021), global capitalism (Moore 2015), and plantation economies (Clark 2018; Haraway 2015; Tsing 2015). These forces generate both environmental destruction and social injustice, disproportionately affecting communities historically subjected to colonial and postcolonial marginalisation. As a result, the groups of people that contribute least to ecological degradation experience its impacts most intensely (Hickel et al 2022, Singer et al 2022).

From this perspective, universalist planetary health discourses risk stabilising the capitalist order without addressing the structural inequalities that underly ecological harm (Livingston 2019). These debates have reshaped anthropological approaches to the planetary. Rather than imposed predefined accounts, anthropologists, as we show next, attend to emic perspectives, examining how their interlocutors conceive and engage with the planetary in relation to health and wellbeing (Messeri 2016).

Three approaches to planetary health in anthropology

Anthropologists have used planetary health as a lens to rethink various aspects of health, notably chronic disease, pandemic risk, and overall ecological demise and annihilation. As to chronic disease, anthropologists have insisted that it is shaped by wider ecological relations. The concept of ‘metabolism’ is central here because it captures how bodies continuously absorb, process, and respond to their environments. Rather than seeing non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as diabetes, as individual lifestyle problems, a metabolic perspective reveals how everyday exposures to pollutants, adulterated foods, industrial chemicals, and social stressors accumulate within bodies over time (Meier zu Biesen 2026; Solomon 2016).

Anthropologists stress the entanglements of diabetes and other NCDs with the slow violence of toxic exposure. Scholars studying these have pointed out that recent and ongoing world historic processes of capitalism, industrialisation and development, and the advent of petrochemical and nuclear technologies, have led to an accumulation of toxins. These have permanently and significantly altered the chemical composition of the planet and transformed our DNA (Inserm 2021; Liboiron 2021; Hecht 2012; Murphy 2006, 2017). In this inescapable ‘toxic world’, engagements with other humans and non-humans play out in longer and longer timescales (‘toxic temporalities’). For example, toxicants such as radioactive substances and heavy metals are traces of past industrial, colonial, or capitalist events or processes in bodies and ecologies. Similarly, toxicants accumulating over generations, transforming and triggering molecular changes, reach deeply into the future (Geissler and Prince 2020; Hecht 2018).

Here, the unpredictable effects on chronic health conditions are further amplified by interspecies interactions. Thinking about metabolisms thus becomes a way to trace how ‘toxic living’—produced through colonial histories, extractive economies, and environmental degradation—settles into biological processes. Reconceiving a disease such as diabetes as a pathology linked to planetary health highlights metabolic processes and planetary connectedness as a central driver of NCD risk. It also acknowledges the intergenerational effects of planetary harm.

Justice-oriented scholars link chronic disease not only to social, economic, and political factors but also to environmental violence and planetary injustice (Livingston 2012; Whyte 2016; Vaughan et al. 2021). Colonial legacies of labour and land exploitation, resource extraction, and extractive economic models (Murphy 2017; Nixon 2013) persist today through neoliberal policy regimes, environmental degradation, and the dominance of commercial interests, all of which continue to structure chronic disease vulnerabilities. For example, in Belize, diabetes is a medical condition and symbol of the country’s history of slavery, plantations, and violence, operating not only within bodies but also across generations. Industrial foods that replaced local diets disrupt body metabolisms, as does DDT spraying in plantations and plastics containing endocrine disruptors littering the coastline. Thus, diabetes is simultaneously linked to environmental damage, epigenetics, and metabolic memory. It reflects ongoing cycles of dispossession and enduring inequalities (Moran-Thomas 2019).

Anthropologists also use a planetary health lens to describe and explain new risks to humanity, such as pandemics. Pandemics are often caused by ‘zoonoses’, which are diseases that spill over from animals to humans (Keck and Lynteris 2018). While some pathogens spread through ‘vectors’ like mosquitoes or water, others circulate asymptomatically in animal hosts, such as tuberculosis in badgers, coronaviruses in bats, and influenza in waterfowl, before infecting humans. From a planetary health perspective, anthropologists describe zoonotic emergence not as isolated incidents but as outcomes of long-term entanglements among human, animal, and environmental systems. Traditional epidemiological notions of ‘contact’ are insufficient here; instead, ethnographic concepts like ‘proximity’, and ‘entanglement’ better capture the long-term relationships that shape pathways of disease emergence (Brown and Kelly 2014).

For example, the concept of ‘the politics of entanglement’—a material, temporal, and spatial framework—describes how urban Nicaraguans navigate dengue fever while remaining connected to their environment despite global health strategies that seek to isolate them (Nading 2014). While global health strategies try to isolate humans from mosquitoes, residents in the low-income city Ciudad Sandino are bound to their landscape through ‘incidental attachments and affinities, antagonisms and animosities’ (Nading 2014, 11). This is inherently political, as dengue fever control requires active engagement. For local communities, fighting the virus is a form of domestic labor—an extension of caring for the household, the neighbourhood, and the human and nonhuman beings within it. Foregrounding the ways in which humans, mosquitoes, and viruses are both separate and intertwined and how local environmental histories, politics, and household dynamics shape disease dynamics is essential for understanding human health today.

Such a perspective has become even more relevant in the context of Covid-19, which has been recognised as a quintessential planetary health crisis. Covid-19 was driven by a myriad of factors including laboratory security, animal trade, wet market regulation, and global travel patterns. That said, it was also shaped by several planetary health dynamics, including climate change, which shifted the geographical distribution of wild animals and drove them into closer proximity with human settlements, increasing the probability of viral spillover; agricultural intensification, which fragmented natural habitats, reduced biodiversity, and forced wildlife into dense, monocultural livestock environments that acted as viral amplifiers; and urbanisation and air pollution, which made people more susceptible to respiratory complications (Wallace 2020). The pandemic can thus be seen as a consequence of the degradation of planetary health, with broad implications across all domains of social life, and the methods and theory of anthropology showed how planetary damage and degradation has contributed to the emergence and spread of Covid-19.

In studying pandemics, anthropologists have been keen to consider power dynamics, political economy, and knowledge production. To return to the example of Covid-19, they have noted the stark inequalities in people’s infection risks and access to healthcare, including access to vaccinations (Blume and Meier zu Biesen 2022; Kelly et al. 2022), both within societies as well as globally. Increasingly, critiques move beyond the mere allocation of resources to demand ‘restorative justice’ for historical exploitation. For example, this is evident in the United States, where disparate Covid-19 mortality rates among Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous populations directly reflect legacies of conquest, slavery, and systemic racism (Stein 2024). Globally, this structural inequality manifested as ‘vaccine apartheid’, driven by racialised capitalism. This has reinforced the need to address structural determinants, health justice, and the coloniality of knowledge production in the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic and within planetary health more broadly (Cousins et al. 2021).

Covid-19’s disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations and individuals with comorbidities has intensified syndemic discourse, which emphasises the interactions among health conditions, such as chronic metabolic illnesses with viral infections, within contexts of structural adversity, like syndemic racism, housing insecurity, and occupational exposure. Thinking about syndemics not only reveals how the social determinants of health contribute to the clustering of diseases and exacerbate health outcomes (Bulled and Singer 2024), but it also links these patterns within the contexts of ‘environmental violence’ in which they occur. This shows how uneven and disproportionate the harm is that anthropogenic environmental degradation inflicts on people (Marcantonio 2023).

Lastly, a planetary health lens reframes anthropological research on concerns regarding the viability of human life itself. This is reflected in studies on the shared worries, anxieties, and grief that people feel in response to a planet perceived as being on the edge of ecological demise and annihilation. In the midst of climate change, environmental degradation, and loss, new affective dispositions and mental pathologies such as climate or eco-anxiety, ecological grief, climate trauma, or ‘solastalgia’ (Albrecht 2019; Wardell 2020) have emerged. Ecological or planetary grief is a mental health response to ecological loss and can emanate from physical ecological loss, the loss of environmental knowledge and identity, and the anticipated loss of a future (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018). Planetary grief resembles solastalgia, i.e. the pain associated with the loss of place while people are still there, through environmental degradation and climate-related weather disasters, most acutely amongst systemically disadvantaged communities (Albrecht 2019). While grief or solastalgia links to the past, eco- or climate anxiety is a chronic fear oriented towards future ecological doom. Taken together, these approaches situate mental health as deeply entangled with wider ecological relations.

Anthropologists are exploring the growing significance of emotion and affect in this ‘age of planetary unraveling’ (Chao 2022, 555). Scholars have described this age as an epoch of mourning (Kelz and Knappe 2021), in which grief about loss on a damaged planet (Tsing 2017) ‘is a companion that will increasingly be with us [and it] needs to become an explicit part of our politics’ (Head 2016, 8). On a wounded planet, grief and mourning increasingly become part of what it means to inhabit damaged worlds and remake them. Drawing on Judith Butler’s works on the uneven allocation of grievable lives (Butler 2009), anthropologists expand ‘grievable lives’ beyond the human to include nonhuman life. This research spurs political questions of which and whose ecological losses count, how the grievable is unevenly distributed in planetary health, and how people seek to make their losses recognisable and grievable at a larger scale.

Moreover, in the context of mass extinction, multispecies dying is often accompanied by ‘multispecies mourning’ (van Dooren 2014). Crows, for example, respond to the death of others of their kind, showing signs of grief and mourning. Learning to mourn not just individual loss, but species extinction more generally may help to recognise humans’ interconnectedness with nonhumans and to create an ethics of concern and care (Cunsolo 2017, van Dooren 2014). By acknowledging the precariousness and vulnerability of nonhuman others, such scholarship also highlights the vulnerability of the human self (Stanescu 2012).

Anthropologists also link shared planetary grief to resistance, repair, and transformation. In a time of planetary unravelling, shared grief can become generative and transformative rather than paralysing. For example, environmental activism is increasingly driven by grief over ongoing or anticipated environmental damage and loss, even as activism becomes a mode of psychological, collective, and ecological repair. For the UK-originated Extinction Rebellion movement, grief and mourning for the loss of both nature and future are key emotional forces, both revealing of environmental destruction and mobilising the activism to do something about it (Seagrave 2023). This is particularly pertinent for Indigenous communities who have lost their land and forms of life.

For example, ‘multi-species mourning’ has been documented amongst Indigenous Marind families in West Papua, who suffer the loss of their lands and the rupture of their relations with plants, animals, and the forest. It includes practices like weaving sago bags (handwoven bags to carry forest products, children, or animals and of central cultural importance among Marind) as a form of collective healing, creating songs in response to encounters with road-killed animals, or transplanting bamboo plants as land-reclaiming activities (Chao 2022). These practices of mourning and commemorating loss of lives and relations are also acts of resistance and a creative refusal in the face of capitalist planetary unmaking. Shared mourning not only reckons multispecies connections and Marinds’ entanglements with their landscape, but also constitutes a labour of care that recognises interspecies relationality and works towards transformation (Chao 2022). Taken together, this work shows how planetary and multispecies grief recognises the vulnerability of human and nonhuman others, acknowledges humans’ complicity in planetary damage and ecocide, and pushes us towards possibilities of reparative and transformative action.

Planetary healthcare

A planetary health outlook is particularly relevant in an era of escalating environmental and health crises. How can this perspective shape our responses to chronic health conditions, pandemics, and shared anxieties about planetary wellbeing? Planetary health not only opens new avenues for advocating for human and environmental wellbeing but also challenges us to think deeply about the complex entanglements between them. This outlook is particularly relevant now, as we grapple with global challenges that demand integrated, future-oriented solutions. Moving beyond the individual and population levels, what might planetary healthcare look like—both in speculative visions for the future and in the ethnographic realities of today? Anthropologists contribute significantly to this conversation at the intersection of care and the planetary, by illuminating ordinary, often overlooked, practices of planetary healthcare, particularly those from marginalised communities, offering critical insights into how care can be reimagined as planetary. For example, Indigenous and oppressed caste farmers in rural Rajasthan manipulate air, clouds, or dust to care for bodies afflicted with tuberculosis (McDowell 2024). The daily labour of informal waste pickers (catadores) in Brazil demonstrates how they perform essential planetary healthcare by manually diverting tons of urban waste from fragile ecosystems (Millar 2018).

Extending beyond a human-centred ethics of care and addressing collectives of humans and more-than-humans, planetary healthcare focuses on sustaining the wellbeing of all life forms (Kehr 2020; Ticktin 2019; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). It asks what acts of care and repair may enhance, rather than restrict, life’s vitality and the wellbeing of future generations and future versions of the planet. These acts of care and repair aim not only to prevent illness but to create (environmental) conditions for life to thrive. For example, in addition to treating respiratory diseases in air-polluted cities, cities may engage in planting urban forests, restoring wetlands, and improving public transport.

Planetary healthcare is both a potentiality and a reality. Some have stressed the significance of planetary care for thinking and living in more-than-human worlds, and conceptualise planetary care as at once an affective state, a form of practice, and an ethico-political obligation in an interdependent world (Puig de Bellacasa 2017). In doing so, planetary care becomes a way of transformative thinking, politics, and practice (Ticktin 2019). Planetary health ‘joins humans and nonhumans into new collectives which are both produced and governed by new forms of care’ that aims at the ‘flourishing of life rather than its exploitation and destruction’ (Ticktin 2019, 138, 145). Planetary care also grows out of a relational and interdependent understanding of life and vitality. It might involve, for example, linking molecular damage to compensation or restitution, attributing legal personhood to rivers or glaciers, or recognising the entangled nature of humans and landscapes (Ticktin 2019). Thereby it could ‘produce more capacious collectivities, which could better address injustices and inequalities by expanding, or redirecting, the subjects and objects of attention’ (Ticktin 2019, 154).

Anthropologists also explore planetary health care as an ethnographic reality. For example, the above-mentioned explorations of ‘atmospheric care’ for tuberculosis in rural Rajasthan, India, show how practices like fanning air, attending to illness-causing clouds, or seeking healing forest atmospheres address respiratory issues beyond bedside care (McDowell 2024). This reveals the need to create the atmospheric conditions—environmental, social, and infrastructural—for tuberculosis care. Similarly, planetary healthcare can heal individual bodies by fostering relationships among people, plants, and soil. In this vein, plant-based healing in Tanzania links human, plant, and soil flourishing (Langwick 2018).

In some cases, planetary healthcare can also become a form of ‘intimate’ political activism. Thus, among those affected by toxic exposure in Chile’s polluted landscapes, life-enabling care practices include tending to plants and trees as sensors of industrial harm (Tironi 2018). Small interventions, like cleaning plants of toxic dust, ‘create conditions for flourishing of life in a devastated landscape’, lifeforms that are deeply entangled with their own. These are subtle therapeutic actions of repairing, healing, and soothing of fragile worlds. These subtle repairs allow ‘marginalized people to interrupt, even if minimally, the trajectory of industrial harm, articulate a space of ethical potentiality that has proven crucial for counteracting damage’ in worlds where ‘harm is incremental, chronic and inseparable from life itself’ (Tironi 2018, 451).

Healthcare conceptualised as planetary also encompasses different knowledge practices, which may themselves be a form of healthcare. Such knowledge practices include ‘the art of noticing’ (Tsing 2010) and attending to multispecies communities, where human health is entangled with others (see also Haraway 2008). They also include big data and computational methods that make entanglements visible and actionable, allowing us to think like a planet (c.f. Knox 2020). Anthropologists contribute to this knowledge as care by designing and curating digital platforms like The asthma files (Fortun et al. 2014), which make complex phenomena, such asthma, pollution, and environmental violence behind asthma, knowable across disciplines. These databases help fragmented research subjects emerge, often beyond the scope of pre-existing knowledge (see also Duclos and Criado 2020).

This is not to say that all planetary healthcare is inherently altruistic or life-affirming. It can also be violent, such as when species conservation may involve violence against individuals (van Dooren 2014), and in cases like the avian influenza outbreak in Hong Kong, when the government killed all local poultry to protect humans, prioritising social order over animal life (Keck 2013). Attention to planetary health highlights such violence, to depict the tough choices and frequently implicit hierarchies that shape the planetary co-existence of multiple species.

Conclusion

A planetary health lens calls for reimagining health and healthcare. It serves both as an analytic tool and as an applied ethical and political framework. Planetary health draws on two intellectual lineages: Global health and postcolonial theory. While global health brings an ethnographic sensibility to the entanglements between human and environmental wellbeing, postcolonial theory emphasises shared responsibility and the epistemic and ontological multiplicity of the planetary, challenging the totalising vision of the globe. The tension between these two approaches is evident, for example, in the paradox of data, as part of which anthropologists critique data reductionism while simultaneously recognising data’s importance in linking planetary processes to human health.

While anthropologists may not necessarily use the term ‘planetary health’, many have long applied a planetary health lens to explore the entangled wellbeing of humans, more-than-humans, and ecosystems. Focusing on this entanglement leads anthropologists to consider the metabolic aspects of life, planetary entanglements in epidemics, and broader states of planetary distress. The resulting scholarship and activism is marked by a tension between a totalising vision of entangled conditions of life on the one hand, and a pluriversal understanding of the planetary that foregrounds situatedness, multiplicity, practice, embodiment, and the everyday experiences through which planetary health is lived. It shows that planetary health may not just be an all-encompassing condition but ‘an ongoing, messy, and paradoxically very local process’ (Nading 2025, 8).

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Note on contributors

Claudia Lang is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Health at Maastricht University. She also leads the DFG project, “Environ-mental health: Experience, ethics, and poiesis of ecological grief amid wounded environments in India” at the University of Leipzig. Her research focuses on mental health, digitization, ecological distress, planetary health, and traditional medicine, primarily in India. Claudia is author of Depression in Kerala: Ayurveda and mental health care in the 21st century (2018, Routledge) and a co-author of Global health for all: Knowledge, politics, and practices (2022, Rutgers), and of The movement for global mental health: Critical views from South and Southeast Asia (2021, Amsterdam University Press). 

Claudia Lang, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Health, Care and Public Health Research Institute, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University, the Netherlands. claudia.lang@maastrichtuniversity.nl. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9940-4245

Caroline Meier zu Biesen is an Assistant Professor of Transdisciplinary Global Health at the Athena Institute, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Using transdisciplinary methods and grounded in the anthropology and sociology of science, she explores care and ecological challenges in the context of global epidemics (HIV/AIDS, malaria, NCDs) and neglected, often gendered, diseases such as endometriosis. A growing focus of her research is the contextualization of human–environment relations within the broader framework of capitalist-driven economic growth, anthropogenic climate and environmental crises, and their associated health effects. Her work centers on developing inclusive, context-responsive, pluralistic, and ecologically attuned health interventions on a planetary scale.

Caroline Meier zu Biesen, Assistant Professor of Transdisciplinary Global health, Athena Institute, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. c.meierzubiesen@vu.nl.