Planetary Health: Capitalism, Ecology and Eco-Socialism

Abstract

Adopting a critical anthropology of health perspective, informed by political ecology, we examine planetary health in the era of late capitalism or neoliberalism. The shift to a planetary health thinking was driven by the growing awareness that not only are all human communities now multiply linked together by flows of commodities, ideas, people, and health-related influences from vectors to medicines, but that the health of human communities is multiply linked to the environment including other species within us (e.g. gut flora) and around us. Within the planetary health framework, we focus specifically on both emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growing impact of anthropogenic climate change on health. While poorer regions of the world need economic development, that is, access to basic resources and health care, much of the developed world and parts of the developing world are, in a sense, overdeveloped. Perhaps more than any other issue, the ecological crisis, which includes catastrophic climate change allows critical scholars to contemplate the contradictions of the capitalist world system, including its implications for health, and to ponder the creation of an alternative world system, namely eco-socialism. © 2023 The Center for Political Ecology.