Focusing Attention on Reciprocity Between Nature and Humans Can Be the Key to Reinvigorating Planetary Health

Abstract

In industrialized and urbanized societies, medical science focuses primarily on trauma and diseases, and most environmental work attempts to remediate natural and anthropogenic degradation. This essay raises the importance of shifting individual and societal attention to preventive and precautionary measures to maintain human and ecological health. It points to the growing body of research that nature (wilderness to green and blue space) is necessary for people's physical, mental, and emotional health. Such evidence should persuade the public and policymakers to proactively conserve ecosystems, reducing the need to rescue depleted species or repair and restore their degraded habitats.

This paper also describes the creative tension between the need for evidence-based research to demonstrate the health benefits of nature, which can lead to public health policies that make nature exposure widely accessible, and the need to ensure that nature is not viewed merely as a “service provider” from which humans can continue to extract health benefits. The author suggests that a drastic change is needed in the prevailing attitude of dominance over nature.

This essay concludes with a plea for focused attention on reciprocal healing of both nature and humans, which can occur only if our interaction with nature—be it wilderness, an urban park, or a garden—is sustained and respectful. The author suggests that the nature-and-health paradigm may be the game-changing strategy needed to sustain grassroots awareness for halting and hopefully reversing the trajectory of decline in planetary health.