Eco-ethical care for people and the planet
Authors: Kenneth Daniel Winkel, Amy Hahs, Sara Barron, Terry Hartig
Journal: The Lancet (2024)

We join in Richard Horton's call to act on diminished student wellbeing and the health-care emergency that is latent within the broader definition of sustainability.1Horton R Offline: What have we done to medical students?.Lancet. 2024; 4031008Summary Full Text Full Text PDF Scopus (0) Google Scholar, 2Horton R Offline: It's about more than a climate emergency.Lancet. 2024; 4031122Summary Full Text Full Text PDF Scopus (1) Google Scholar The progressive destruction of nature, in part mediated by the impacts of health-care systems in high-income countries, reflects the dominant societal fixation on resource extraction, heedless of the limits of planetary—or student—capacities. The broader loss of culturally based relationships with the planet and consequent deconstruction of an ethos of intergenerational ecological custodianship is coincident with the centring of reductionist thinking (disembodiment) in medicine. We argue that this extractive and epistemically enclosed, rather than regenerative and ecologically relational, culture underlies the pathology afflicting the medical profession and the planet. Therefore, to effectively act, we need a more expansive, prosocial view of biodiversity that actively promotes both eco-ethical literacy and care that centres generative, nature-based solutions. In short, we must address the profound dissonance that blinds us to the more than human impacts of our anthropocentrism, even as we inhale incinerated ecosystems. As a group, across three continents we have been sowing the seeds of regenerative ways of caring for people and the planet. In Sweden, translational research in the Linnaean Botanical Gardens has combined skill-based and environment-based approaches to stress management for university students.3Lymeus F Mindfulness training supported by a restorative natural setting: integrating individual and environmental approaches to the management of adaptive resources (doctoral dissertation). Uppsala University, 2019https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1345479/FULLTEXT01.pdfDate accessed: May 9, 2024Google Scholar In Canada, we have developed and implemented a biophilic design framework for health-care centres.4Barron S Nitoslawski S Wolf KL Woo A Desautels E Sheppard SRJ Greening blocks: a conceptual typology of practical design interventions to integrate health and climate resilience co-benefits.Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2019; 164241Crossref Scopus (24) Google Scholar Finally, in Australia, we are promoting early, inclusive, and holistic One Health education5Villanueva-Cabezas JP Winkel KD Campbell PT Wiethoelter A Pfeiffer C One Health education should be early, inclusive, and holistic.Lancet Planet Health. 2022; 6: e188-e189Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (19) Google Scholar and are mapping new therapeutic pathways connecting biodiversity and health. Now is the time to embrace such transdisciplinary eco-explorations to give hope to our students, ourselves, and the living planet. We declare no competing interests. Offline: What have we done to medical students?"We are not cherished." Those words still outrage me 20 years on. I was part of a roadshow on medical professionalism touring universities in England to discuss Doctors in Society, a report from the Royal College of Physicians. Baroness Julia Cumberlege chaired the working party and I was her scribe. Our goal was to advance a new conception of medical professionalism, one based less on authority and more on partnership. We were passionate about what medicine was and what it could achieve—for patients and for society. Full-Text PDF