Gaia and the Anthropocene: The Ultimate Determinant of Health

Abstract

Gaia—the Earth, our home—must be understood as a living entity in its own right. As the ultimate determinant of our health, it is the ultimate setting for health promotion. The Earth provides us—and the myriad species with whom we share the Earth—a set of vitally important ecosystem goods and services: air, water, food, fuel, materials, waste detoxification and disposal, protection from UV radiation and a generally stable climate—at least for the past 11,000 years of the Holocene. These are the ecological determinants of our health, and they are even more fundamental to our health—and indeed to our very survival—than the social determinants of health, with which they interact.

But here on Earth, we humans have become a force of nature equal to or greater than natural forces, creating massive and rapid global ecological changes. This is resulting in a new geologic epoch—the Anthropocene—that is replacing the Holocene. These changes in turn are driven by the socio-cultural phenomenon of a globalized twenty-first-century industrial and post-industrial/digital age, with a focus on progress understood largely as growth in material and financial wealth. But human-driven global ecological changes, which are crossing planetary boundaries, threaten our health and the stability and perhaps even survival of our societies.